Word.

A friend turned me on to The Believer magazine, which is now my bus and train reading. In the February issue, there’s a fascinating series of essays by transgender author T Cooper on different aspects of his transformation from female to male: unsent letters he wrote to his parents explaining his decision, personality changes he has gone through since his transformation, elements of womanhood that one would think he’d understand considering his past but doesn’t. But one essay, on the subject of his frustration at the “slip-ups” people still make regarding his gender such as accidentally referring to him as a “she,” suggests his frustration at not having his identity acknowledged and respected has surpassed his empathy for human error. It’s ironically the one closed-minded part of an otherwise illuminating, and entertaining, treatise.

Cooper argues,

“…say you have a good friend you’ve known for years. You used to go out to bars with this guy, snort drugs, hook up with strippers, and then wake up and do it all over again. If this guy is now 5 years sober and happily married with 2.5 perfect children, you probably wouldn’t call him up every day and ask him to score some coke and go whoring with you…It’s not the world he lives in, even if you still think or still wish he did. Maybe it never was to him, it never quite fit, and he had to go through all that to get to the happy rainbow place he is today.

Or, say you always played basketball with a buddy; that’s all you did together…But then your buddy is in a gruesome Staten Island Ferry accident, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down, exiled permanently to a wheelchair. Would you forevermore go up to him, see him sitting there, and then be like, ‘Yo, you wanna go down to the corner and play some pickup? Oops! I didn’t mean to say that! Sorry, it’s just so hard to get used to!’

No, it’s fucking not…..it makes me feel like shit when people refer to me as she. It doesn’t matter if it’s with the best of intentions, or whether it’s obvious to those in earshot that I’m male, and nothing’s technically been lost, that there’s clearly been a mistake. Or even if they are talking about the past.’

(quoting his wife) ’How would I feel if I were called sir while I was out on a date, wearing a dress and heels and cherry lipstick? How abnegating it would be to have the world decide, no matter how many signals you give, that you are something you are not.’

Of course, his frustration is understandable, and so is his pain. But I’m not sure his impatience with people who slip-up, and his dismissal of them as somehow lazy or dismissive themselves, is fair. It got me thinking about how I “group” people in my mind, what the most basic thing about them I remember and associate with them is. What are the characteristics that, no matter how the signals they deliberately send change over time, identify them to me?

This analogy might not immediately be apparent, but the essay reminded me of the way I think of words: how I group them, how I remember them, how they affect me. Sometimes when I’m trying and failing to remember a word that is “on the tip of my tongue,” the closest attributes of the word itself that I can remember might be the number of syllables, or the rhythm of it, or perhaps whether it was Germanic, Latin or Greek in origin. If I remember speaking it aloud to myself, randomly throwing in a few rough breathing marks for fun and imitating a recording I once listened to of The Iliad recited in a dialect believed to be similar to Old Ionic, I know the word was Greek. If I recall intentionally mispronouncing it in an Italian accent, I’ll know it is from Latin. If it sounds sexy or romantic, I’ll know it’s Frenchified Latin. If it’s phlegmy and uncouth, it must be German.

But more palpable than my memories of the attributes of the word itself, are my memories of how I felt when I first encountered the word. I can remember whether I was happy or sad, in love, depressed, feeling accomplished and smug, or put-upon and useless. I can remember if I was eating at the moment, and if so, whether it was sweet or savory, and how I felt as I was eating, if I was just grazing or eating until I was full, or ate too much and felt sick. Or maybe I was just having a coffee and felt the acid tenderize my stomach as I first read or heard that word.

That’s another thing I can remember even if I can’t remember the word itself: I know if I heard the word on TV or read it in a book. If it was from the television I can remember whether it was on a news or commentary show or in a movie or serial. If it was news and commentary, I can remember if I agreed with the person who used the word, and if it was a serial, whether I had a crush on the character who used it. If it was in a book, I can remember if it was fiction or non-fiction, and if fiction, which voice spoke the word aloud in my mind’s ear: if the narrator was female, regardless of the cultural origin of the book, it was my own, as I pride myself on being good with dialects. If male, the voice belonged to Jeremy Irons, naturally. If it was non-fiction I can remember whether it was British or American, or a translation. I can remember if I learned the word in conversation, and whether that conversation was in America or Europe, and if in America, on what coast, and if on the west coast, whether it was with a friend from high school, the theatre, or the opera, and if in New York, at Saks or some other job, over drinks or lunch or shouted at a noisy party. I can remember my status relative to the person who used the word, if it was a boss or a teacher, or a colleague, or a nuisance—did I feel intimidated, worried, delighted, or annoyed when I heard this word? Do I associate the word with satisfaction (words I learn while happy) or frustration (words I learn while trying to distract myself from unhappiness)? I can remember that, if not the word.

The clues are ghosts, and ghosts of ghosts, not of the thing itself, but of who I was at the moment of reception. It’s why, whenever I hear or read the word “assuage” I recall myself, if ever so faintly, as an 18 year old crushing on a teacher, or why “parameter” triggers a surge of disdain: I remember my father, in our Oldsmobile some time in the ‘80’s, complaining about the clichés of the day, the trendy words he was so tired of hearing, such as people droning on about the “parameters” of something when they just wanted a fancy word for “limit.” “Diminute” makes me think of London, Shakespeare, a Kensal Rise flat filled with books and art, good friends, Turkish rugs, grass and red wine. This is because, having heard my teacher Ben use the word several times in class, I asked him one night at his home, where I spent my best English evenings, why he didn’t just say “diminish” (the answer is that “diminish” is a reflexive verb, and “diminute,” an obscure active one, or less obscure adjective). With “pervasive” I’m back in Santa Fe on a warm dry autumn night under a sky the color of rust, reading my classmate Chris’s freshmen biology essay, astonished at the brilliant 16 year-old’s ability to interpret the sodden innards of our dissected cat, and wondering if I’d ever be able to hold my own with such scholars. The sentence itself wasn’t too spectacular, something about how the arterial system of the cat was “not quite pervasive,” but I recall that mix of admiration and apprehension perfectly, for it revisits me every time I use, hear, or read that word. “Abstruse” places me back as a breathless stagehand over ten years ago, working a production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (in which the word appears), always over-sugared, over-caffeinated, and hungry from eating dinner too early before the marathon play. The fricative “s” escapes the plosive “b,” breaks the tab “t” and gushes out through “ru” and suddenly the coca-cola is spumy in my empty stomach, its sugars caustic on my teeth.

These peripheral experiences that I recall with every word, or instead of the word, if it eludes me, only mean that more than the literal or technical definition of a word, I remember how I felt at my initial encounter with it.

I’ve realized, however, that out of all this mnemonic detritus my experience attaches to a word the most basic thing I project onto it is gender. I can remember if it was a male or female who spoke it or wrote it when I noticed it. If it was a man, I remember which category I had placed him in: guide and mentor, friend and equal, romantic interest, romantic interest and friend and equal, romantic interest and mentor, or pest. If the speaker of the word was female, I remember if she was a mentor, a friend and equal, or if I felt threatened by her or confident that I threatened her, or if she was a friend I felt threatened by or towards whom I was careful not to act threateningly. But ridding the word of my collateral experience, it remains, to me, male or female. “Atavistic,” “frisson,” and “palimpsest” are all male, because I encountered them reading Martin Amis, A. A. Gill, and Will Self respectively. Female words are “Effulgence” (Wharton), “tautology” (another great Gill, my former classmate Karina), and “limn” (Fuck You, Michiko Kakutani). “Droll” is female (mother) and “subsume” is male (Michael Schneider). “Judicious” is female, and “histrionic” is male. The gender I associate with a word has only to do with the gender of the person from whom I first learned the word, however long ago, regardless of the actual definition, etymology, connotations, or the gender, if any, with which the word is usually associated. “Histrionic” is a word I usually hear used, justly or unjustly, in connection to femaleness (or to me specifically, totally without basis). But my first hit of it came from a male drama teacher, so male it stays.

Of course I’m not really talking about words, I’m talking about myself, and the associations I make that make no sense of anything but my own experience. However disparate my experience is from the truth about something, it provides a deeper meaning for me than the objective truth about that thing. And gender, somehow, is the most basic element of that experience. I wonder if it is so for other people as well. If I’m alone in a room, and my back is turned to the door and someone else walks in, I can tell if that person is a man or woman. And it’s not from some obvious “signal” like the sound of high heels on floorboard or the smell of perfume. It’s visceral and I can’t justify with evidence, but I’m almost always right.

Cooper analogizes the slip-ups people make regarding his gender with a slip-up no sane or sensitive person would make in two hypothetical examples, of the whoring buddy now settled and the basketball partner now paralyzed. But the activities one enjoys with a person, however regularly, and for however long, are not nearly as identifying as that person’s gender. The two examples Cooper uses are a false equivalency because it is much more natural to dissociate a person from the hobbies you shared with them than it is to suddenly start thinking of them in a whole different gender. Yes, one should acknowledge dresses and cherry lipstick as signals of how a person prefers to be regarded, but in the moment of a “slip-up,” one is guided by something deeper than the part of one’s brain that acknowledges and interprets signals, before that part of the brain can catch the mistake and correct it. I had a friend while living in Europe, a male who had made the transition to female long before I ever knew her. She did not tell me of the change she had made at all. I heard about it from a mutual friend but didn’t think much of it, since I’m from San Francisco and don’t find such stories to be too exotic. I would have known anyway, as her past maleness was unmistakable--again, not because of any signal I can put words to—I’ve known women who were taller, broader-shouldered, slimmer-hipped, deeper-voiced, had more, er, manly facial features, and wore less makeup on them. No, there was just something “male” about her, and, months into our friendship I slipped up once while ordering in a restaurant and referred to her as a “he.” I was mortified, of course, and hope I did not make her feel like shit, as T Cooper describes such gaffs as affecting him. But I also can’t quite agree that this slip-up is on the level of accidentally inviting a man in a wheelchair to play basketball. Hobbies and the accidents we suffer do not occupy space in the same atavistic chamber of our psyches as gender. I can understand “how abnegating it would be to have the world decide that you are something you are not” but a slip-up is not a decision, and cannot be resented in the same way.

Cooper and other people who have undergone gender transformation say they did it to honor what they know to be the truth about themselves. “…to be trans is to feel the truth so acutely you can’t fake it. It is to be so consumed with the truth of who you are that you are willing to risk everything to inhabit it.” But it is unreasonable to expect the world you live in not only to acknowledge that truth (that is indeed reasonable) but feel that truth as acutely, as unmistakably as you do, and to be offended when the signals you labor to exhibit are no match for what millions of years have hardwired into us. I read a study recently that told me I am likely to behave more protectively of myself around men when I am ovulating than when I am in the less fertile phase of my cycle; I will avoid sketchy areas, I will dress less provocatively, I will subconsciously regard men as potential rapists and try not to act as if I’m “asking for it,” in a biological mechanism designed to cope with my greater attractiveness during that time. My body wants to be impregnated and so subtly enhances the signals of my fertility, but it also wants to minimize the chances of the “wrong” male taking advantage (i.e. it wants a baby-daddy and not a rapist). Of course this is offensive. As a level-headed woman I prefer to think that I gauge my safety from situation to situation rationally, based on observations and crime statistics and the like. I also resent the implication that the hormones sloshing around in me will soak my deductive powers so thoroughly that on some primordial level I think any dweeb on the street is a threat to me in my fecundity. Who knows if the study itself will stick, but it says something about people and gender. Our reactions to maleness and femaleness are beyond what our conscious selves can grasp. It is what makes people like T Cooper know, in their deepest selves, what they are, despite all the contrary signals with which nature has assembled them. But it is also why (I suspect) it is unlikely that trans people will ever feel understood and acknowledged as totally as they understand and acknowledge the truth about themselves, whatever level of enlightenment our culture achieves. Not everyone ascribes a gender to words as I do (but, ahem, many cultures do), but everyone comprehends and reacts to gender, in ways that may be partly societal, but primarily evolutionary. Millions of years have taught us to recognize and react to gender. It is asking a lot of people that they not only reject, but forget.

Stupid Magazines

I was recently invited to submit some work to a new luxury magazine. That’s right—a magazine celebrating wealth, leisure, and conspicuous consumption. The editor sent me a list of possible topics including an examination of whether one should buy, part own, or lease private air travel, a spread on the custom interiors of the yachts of the world’s super-rich, and profiles on “Russian billionaires and their money: How they earned it and what they spend it on.” These are the one-off features for the first edition, and will be added to the regular stories on the current most attractive countries for basing off-shore businesses and the world’s poshest postcodes. The commissioning editor assembled and sent out these story ideas whose every tagline ends with, “when money is no object,” in the week Washington Mutual was devoured whole by JP Morgan Chase, a large hunk of London’s City was spontaneously laid off, the country of Iceland collapsed, and the US Congress was sweating over a preposterous bailout plan it would shortly reject, add another $180B to in special interest money, and finally pass in despair.

The story ideas were accompanied by a long-winded and dissembling paragraph on the humble scale of the magazine’s editorial budget and that therefore, Vivo, the world’s newest international luxury magazine, with headquarters in London and Dubai, unfortunately could not pay its writers. However, writers who brought with them contacts who proved lucrative would, at some future point when presumably the rag would have become the nouveau riche’s favorite monthly guide to untrammeled money-flinging, be “rewarded.” This, however, was not to say that we would be encouraged to “sell” anything. Except, of course, our fondness for social justice and our dignity.

This is obviously a laughable and outrageous example of the everyday iniquities served to people with talents other than capitalist pig-doggery. That a magazine glorifying new and unchallenged wealth is not able to, or willing to, offer its contributors even the usual niggardly compensation accorded freelance writers just makes it all the more eminently bloggable. Oh, the irony! Even an American can see it!

But actually, my guess is that most magazines not owned by Conde Nast operate by the same financial model. To an extent, it’s understandable. Writers want to be published and are often willing to work for little or no money, as long as they get a by-line, especially when they are starting out. I was. Contributor compensation is one thing a publisher can scrimp on, unlike the immovable costs of printing and throwing launch parties. Sometimes, however, one has to ask whether the magazine is betraying its own raison d’etre by paying little or nothing to the brains and labor behind it.

Take my old glossy, New York Moves Magazine. It looked like an upscale operation. It was printed on high-quality, thick paper, its office was in a hip loft space in Tribeca, and it threw regular parties in various venues of middling swankiness (though these might have been “rented” with advertising space). The only people I knew of to be on a proper payroll were the managing editor and the art director, both of whom were clearly paupers. Long-term readers of my blog will recall that my relationship with New York Moves came to an end when it surfaced to both the publisher, Moonah, and me that the editor, Richard, had been paying me twice the rate Moonah had allocated. In my fight to retain the salary, I had several arguments with Richard, the gist of which was basically,

Me: “I’m worth that much and more. Put some pants on and stand up for me!”

Richard: “I know you are but we simply don’t have the money and Moonah, who wears my pants, will never agree to it. ”

I never took the argument to what I now see as the next logical step:

“Why, then, should you bother to maintain this crummy magazine at all?”

If this seems an odd response to the modus operandi of this and countless other enterprises—theatres, art spaces, literary journals—consider that the “concept” of this magazine is supposedly a celebration of female empowerment. The subline is “Fashion and Lifestyle for the New York Career Woman.” They even dedicate an issue every year to New York’s “power women,” successful career women who would probably never dream of giving their time away. In his mission statement, Richard says, “I wanted to create a magazine for smart women that treated them like the sentient beings they are.” The magazine sets itself up as an arbiter of the ever-advancing status of womanhood. So how can it claim in good faith that female empowerment is its main interest when it expects women--and its staff is mostly female--to work for pennies or for free? What is more empowering than to be able to feed yourself and pay your rent through hard work and painstakingly-developed talent? Or, perhaps this is clearer: How discouraging is it to not be able to feed yourself or pay your rent despite your hard work and painstakingly developed talents? So many womens' magazines purport to be created with the same concept in mind—the empowerment, the advancement, the celebration of all things female—and, so many of them work on a similarly sigh-inducing budget. New York Moves and all its indistinguishable sisters preach empowerment but offer their own staffs only the opportunity to be used. The operation is hypocritical at its core.

Then there's the implied insult to the readership, and not only that of cynically selling an idea they do not uphold in practice. I wonder how all the upwardly mobile, educated, ambitious career women who read these magazines would feel if they knew they were being lectured on new-wave feminism by 20 year-old interns doing work experience for their B.A.'s at the New School? Likewise, how would Donald Trump feel knowing that the “pimp my yacht” feature he’s reading in Vivo was written by some part-time coat-check boy who’s only ever seen a yacht on Dynasty? Some of the writing that makes it to print makes me wonder if people ever feel insulted that magazine publishers, or editors, assume they are not discerning enough to recognize bad writing or weak thinking. It's not unheard of for good writers, even ones with some experience of the world, to be willing to write (or edit, or design, etc.) for free or little money, but a lot of the time in magazine publishing, people work at the level their skills merit. Face it, when people get really good at what they do, they start to expect to get paid for it. Most exceptions to the rule occur for the opposite scenario: the mystifying ability of people with paltry talents to land plum gigs at otherwise reputable publications (Independent, I’m looking at you and your sex columnist!) Apart from the occasional exception, the reader gets what the magazine pays for.

Maybe this is an overly-idealistic expectation, but no matter how noble the convictions and progressive the message a project has, if it is unable to function without violating those convictions and that message, then the project is a fraud and should be quit. When Oedipus realizes that he has lived his life mired in the horrors he sought to escape, he doesn’t rationalize the disaster. He doesn’t say, “Well it’s not ideal; of course I really wish things could be different, but on the bright side, if I hadn’t married my mother and killed my father I wouldn’t be where I am today, so I might as well just carry on.” No, he stabs his eyes out. These magazines, on the other hand, are run by people so arrogant as to believe their vanity projects more important than the ideologies which supposedly form the foundation of those projects. Instead of, er, stabbing their eyes out, they rationalize their hypocrisy and carry on. At New York Moves and its like, where they pretend to support Women’s Advancement while denying their own women this most basic tool for advancement, or at Vivo, the magazine dedicated to other people’s money, the survival of the magazine itself justifies the negligence of its philosophy, its content, and its creators.

All of my adult life I’ve been asked to work for free. My education was enormously expensive, and it taught me to do things that I fight and fail to use in even a humbly gainful way. The only steady and above-board (and still pathetic) money I’ve ever been able to make has been in jobs I didn’t need to graduate from middle school to perform. I’ve never had much patience for the common attitude that if I wanted to ensure that I could make a living I should have gotten a ‘proper’ degree and then a ‘proper’ job. It’s akin to saying that art and ideas are not important and that sensible people don’t bother with them, and if they do, they shouldn’t expect any better than to live out their lives as paupers. I think we can and should expect better. Putting the guilt on those pursuing traditionally risky vocations is just letting the people who exploit them off the hook. For every writer, or actor, or artist, or designer (and the list goes on) willing to “give it away” there are many others who can’t get a paid job as a result. No one at the helm of an enterprise will conduct it with integrity unless he is compelled to do so. And no one, not the apathetic consumers, not the opportunistic employers, and not the breathless interns or workers resigned to hobbyism, is providing that necessary compulsion.

I can’t think of an ending sentence. Maybe I should get an intern. Any takers?

Newsflash: Women can be Funny, too!

I try not to get too worked up over stupid stuff I read in the papers….I’m sorry; I shouldn’t lie right at the outset like that. I read the papers specifically to feed my anger. Maybe I’m afraid my bile will get bored if it doesn’t have something to roil and churn over, or that I won’t have anything to brood about when my bedtime bong hit wears off and I wake up at five in the morning. Some things really gripe my ass, including many articles I’ve read recently in The Times, The Independent, and several other publications from which I’d expect greater breadth of comprehension.

BIG NEWS: There are funny women in the world! Actually, the news seems to be about just how funny we can be, because anything more than a middling talent for comedy in a woman is a shock. Even more shocking is the fact that some of today’s comediennes are pretty, as well as funny. Adding to the collective gasp at the display of more than one attribute at a time in a woman--and discussing the trend as something women are finally allowed to inhabit rather than considering that the trend might be one newly foisted on us--is Caitlin Moran, writing in The Times, “It's not like back in the 20th century, when women could be either funny but essentially unf***able - Joan Rivers, Roseanne Barr, Bette Midler, Lily Tomlin, Jo Brand - or f***able but condemned to a lifetime of speaking other people's lines - Lucille Ball, Phyllis Diller, Carole Lombard…” Moran cites Sarah Silverman’s and Tina Fey’s recent appearances on the cover of Maxim and Marie Claire respectively as evidence that finally, this heretofore unseen species of female has emerged, one who possesses a talent only men are supposed to have but who didn’t develop it to compensate for her mediocre looks. As is often the case when the media starts discussing “revelations” of this sort, the only real revelation is in yet another example of the disconnect between reality and what the media says is reality. Ask everyone you know whether they have a female friend or relative who is both attractive and funny. I bet every one of them, bored with your question’s inanity, will say yes.
Actually, maybe the real revelation here is the one not being discussed. Maybe, in comedy, as in so many other professions now, it is no longer enough to be talented; the ones who are getting ahead are the ones like Silverman and Fey, who have looks and talent. If Roseanne were starting out today, I doubt she would gain the success she did twenty years ago, because it seems that more and more, talent unaccompanied by good looks will not suffice to help a woman achieve the success of her more “fuckable” competitors. Why, after all, put a fat funny woman on TV when finally there are skinny funny women we can put on instead? The 20th century, to which Moran glibly refers as to a stone age of outmoded unenlightenment, at least spared some of its talents the pressure to be beautiful. And now in our so-modern renaissance of equality and empowerment, we talk about those days when the merely talented could achieve success as dark and unevolved, compared to now, when, unless Maxim wants you in your panties on its cover, you just aren’t “it.” In any case, the successful contemporary comedienne left unmentioned in this and every other article I’ve read on the subject, is Kathy Griffin, who I would argue is as funny if not funnier than the two titanesses making the headlines. Griffin has famously undergone numerous cosmetic surgeries in an attempt, I assume, to validate her talent with the requisite fuckability.

It’s happening in other fields as well. Soprano Deborah Voigt was fired from the Royal Opera four years ago because she couldn’t fit into the cocktail dress designed for its production of Ariadne auf Naxos. Because of her great fame (developed over twenty years of singing in the best international houses, all that time being, by the way, enormously fat), it looked at the time like a first incidence of its sort in an art form known for the great heft of many of its stars. However, young singers new to the profession now will tell you that they not only have to keep the weight off, but they usually dress for auditions in dresses or skirts which show their legs at least up to the knee. They know that they will be considered for parts based as much on their sex appeal as on their vocal artistry. No wonder; I’ve attended a handful of opera productions in London in the past two years and have seen singers in leading roles wearing bikini’s, miniskirts, and merry widows with fishnets. I haven’t heard a lot of unforgettable voices, but I suppose that’s not what one goes to the opera for anymore. Voigt underwent gastric bypass surgery, lost a significant amount of her bulk and returned to the London stage in the same production earlier this year. It’s hard to think of that as a triumph for anyone but the people who fired her in the first place, people who assume their audience wants singers to look like Gwyneth Paltrow, and who, in making decisions like these, are cultivating a new audience who is now learning to judge an artist as much, if not more, by her fuckability as by her art.

And of course there are many examples of this in other arenas as well. A friend of mine argues, “Can you imagine Ella Fitzgerald doing a music video today?… She’d be kicked off the set, and we’d never hear her voice.” I wonder if Zadie Smith would have attained the level of success she enjoys now, if she didn’t possess a formidable beauty in addition to her formidable talent. It’s difficult to tell, since her looks are so often remarked upon alongside praise for her work. Would anyone ever take Anne Coulter seriously in any capacity—publish her silly diatribes or put her on chat shows so she could insult Jews and berate 9-11 widows, if she didn’t have long blonde hair and wear skirts up to her gigi?

To quote Sarah Silverman, “What the cock is that shit?”

No one says, “That Bill Maher is so funny and smart! Too bad about his nose.” Nobody suggests that it’s surprising or somehow novel for a respected journalist like Anderson Cooper to also be a hottie. Nobody in the public sphere discussed the fuckability of George Carlin. People just aren’t as obsessed with mens’ looks as with womens.’ It’s understood and has been for centuries that a man’s worth lies in how well he does his job, not how he looks while he does it. That and how much money he makes. But that’s a different rant altogether.

And so we have journalists writing about this fake new movement, the advent of the funny beautiful woman. Along with this fake movement is the more real movement of the funny successful woman. Much has been made of Tina Fey’s status as the first female head writer on Saturday Night Live. While this says something about the changing status of women in comedy, it doesn’t say everything: left unsaid is the hypocrisy revealed in the Saturday Night Live modus operandi. SNL offers political and cultural satire from a liberal and progressive perspective. For 33 years it’s used humor to reveal and criticize inequality, intolerance, and other ills (in addition to equally relevant fare like “Landshark” and “Massive Headwound Harry”). What does it say about the show and its progressiveness that until Fey assumed the role of first female head writer there, 24 years after the show’s inception, the creative staff had been a notorious “old boys club”? I do not intend to diminute Fey’s success or her struggle to achieve it, but rather to highlight the peculiar backwardness of a cultural institution (as SNL has been called) which, as late as 1999, could still have been referred to as an “old boy’s club.”

It’s not so much that women are evolving. It’s that the worlds in which we work to make a living and a name for ourselves are small-minded and full of fear. It’s that these worlds have a long way to go before they can consider our talents, successes, and failures without embarrassing themselves and us. People act surprised when we display more than one talent at a time, or have bothered to cultivate any talents when we could have just coasted on our looks. Respected and successful thinkers like Christopher Hitchens can write essays about why women aren’t funny based on the fact that we have wombs and are innately prissy, and supports his theory by claiming that when we are funny we’re usually “hefty, dykey, or Jewish,” and still get published in Vanity Fair. People with influence can talk about something you and I and everyone we know already knew as if it’s some cultural break-through, and then pat themselves on the back for recognizing it and being progressive enough to acknowledge it as a good thing.

What the cock, indeed.

Pensées Françaises

Sarko and Carla visited L’Angleterre last week and of course images of the odd couple took up more space in the UK’s newspapers than reports of Zimbabwean election-rigging, Hilary-slamming, and new revelations of the brain cancer-mobile phones link put together. Actually, the rags showed only a few token pictures of Sarko in his platforms, and devoted most space to “Carlamania”: Carla in the seven outfits she wore during her two-day visit, Carla kissing the prime minister, Carla offering her dainty hand to the prince’s puckered lips, Carla tucking her dainty ankles under her chair on the cover of The Independent, Carla apparently having spent much effort not to out-glam the traditionally sub-chic wives of English politicians. Carla curtsying like a shy schoolgirl to the queen.

It is the last pose I mentioned, or rather the exaltation of praise from the mags on her impeccable manners and proper respect for British protocol with that picture as the exemplary image, qui me derange.

Why should the wife of the President of the Republic of France curtsy to the Queen of England? I’ve asked several Britons this, and most of them, in an attempt, I assume, to avoid a discussion of the modern relevance of feudal custom, said that the curtsy is foremost a gesture of respect for the great age of the hardy monarch. However, I know that this is la merde de la vache, parce que if 40 year-old Carla Bruni were meeting another head of state—say the US had an 85 year old female president (Ayez l’imagination!)—she would not curtsy. She would accept the aged figurehead’s offered hand for a business-like shake, perhaps dip her head a bit. She would not bend at the knees, she would not diminute her super model frame in a gesture of subordinance, however brief, to the leader of a foreign nation. It is not the queen’s age, but her status, which requires one to symbolically demonstrate the recognition of that status in one’s physicality.

But first of all, why should status transfer between the citizenries of different nations? Elizabeth II is not Carla Bruni’s queen. I’m not suggesting the French first lady should have spit on the ground before the English throne, but why should she be required to perform the same obeisance as would a subject to that throne?

Secondly, as ridiculous as this might sound, considering Elizabeth II had already been referring to herself in the royal “we” for over a decade before the Bruni was born, as well as that half a year ago Bruni was no more connected to politics than well, your average aging model-turned-pop singer, but as wife of the president of the republic of France, she’s technically, if not historically or in the affections of the public, equal in rank to the queen. One could argue that this isn’t so since she is the wife of, but is not herself, the head of the French government, but then neither is the queen the head of British government—the prime minister is. Nobody curtsies to Gordon Brown.

Is it all so simple as that she was visiting the queen on British soil and was therefore obliged to act according to British custom? I’m trying to imagine the queen visiting the French leader and his new wife on Rue St. Honoré, and I just can’t imagine her submitting her royal form to any attitudes of deference. And in that case, would Bruni once again curtsy in the same way I did when I was about to perform the twinkly-toes dance in ballet class when I was five? It just seems so undignified.

Any thoughts?

The Latest Rejected Article!

Yup, and this time for reasons I might delineate in a wrathful expose shortly, fired from my job!! For those of you who didn't know, for the last year, I've been a paid editor (and unpaid writer) for New York Moves magazine. The brief version goes something like: publisher Mamoonah finds out that chief editor Richard is paying me twice as much as she expects her skilled employees to be paid (that is, pittance or nothing), insists that my pay be slashed in half, I decline to work at the new truncated rate, am replaced with two twenty year-old interns out of Harvard (who allow such literary abuses to appear in print as "comprised of," "who's" where "whose" is required, nostalgic references to Sex and the City in nearly every article in every issue, and phrases which manage to be overwrought, out of place, and cliched, like "down that road lies madness...."). During my latest trip to the city, after receiving no responses to several emails and phone calls I make concerning $500 I am owed, as well as my hope to negotiate an agreeable payscale and continue my work there, I appear at the office to discuss it in person and am ushered back out into the corridor (interns all a-gawk) by chief editor Richard and lectured on the necessity for me to "get real," informed that I have made a nuisance of myself, the magazine no longer wants my contributions and would I please leave the building.
This is an article I had written at the behest of chief Richard on the subject of truth; he wanted something profound, like why truth is good and lies are bad (perhaps this was motivated by the fact that he had been lying to Moonah for several months about how much money he was paying me). Since I haven't blogged much recently, I'll post this for you to read while I contemplate why everything I'm involved in ends in flames.

How tenuous are the bases of our day-to-day interactions with our fellow men and women. How dependent we are upon these strangers for the management of the dross of our daily lives. We trust the butcher to be honest about the freshness of his meat. We trust our doctors to give honest diagnoses of our ailments, and not condemn us to unnecessary surgeries. We trust reviewers to give objective assessments of the movies we see, not based on any financial or personal entanglements they might have with the studios or artists. Of course, to trust blindly is naïve, and if one investigates any one of these relationships beyond the surface, one is likely to find betrayals of varying degrees of seriousness. The butcher wants to get rid of his aging beef and will probably extend its shelf life by a day or two in his claims of its newness. Most doctors in our country get paid extra per surgery, and thus have reason to err on the side of slicing into one whenever possible. It is common knowledge that a reviewer’s published opinions will often understandably coincide with the business interests of the publication for which he works. How much advertising does Warner Bro.’s buy in the Times?

Life would be significantly simpler and less stressful if honesty could be taken for granted in our interactions with strangers. The unfortunate fact is that because those interactions usually take the form of financial transactions, we are constantly assuming the pose of either one who profits by the other party, or one by whom the other party profits. It makes sense that widespread dishonesty would stem from this commercialism, and the only thing keeping us from plummeting further into treachery is whatever innate honesty people possess individually, or even collectively, that is, how much value our society places on honesty, even if only in lip service easily drowned out by the din of lies told in the name of the “bottom line.” In our impersonal relationships, based only on the assumption of honesty, the lack of that honesty causes the greater anxiety and majority of problems.

But what of our personal relationships, the basis of which is not the assumption of honesty but the assumption of love? These are not constructed around the exchange of goods and collection of profit, but around the mutual affection and wish for the well-being of the other. The accepted reckoning is that in such relationships, honesty is still the best policy most of the time. However, if it is a given that the basis of a relationship is love (this is of course an examination of forms, not of individual real-life cases, each of which is no doubt riddled with exceptions, qualifiers, and contradictions), then one can also assume that any lie told is told in the name of love and well-wishing, rather than profit and exploitation. The name for this is of course the “white lie,” and many deny its validity regardless of the motive. The white lie, detractors say, encourages people to cling to comforting but hollow notions about themselves, and they are wise who face those harsh truths and find comfort by some other way than self-delusion. When your wife asks if her butt looks big in these jeans, and indeed it does, is she not better off knowing it?

A friend of mine, let’s call him Ellis Richardson, and I are locked in a long-standing stalemate in our debate on the virtues of lying. His conviction is that every lie we tell, “white” or no, holds us back as people and as a society: we must endure the harshness of the truth (for the unmitigated truth is indeed a harsh thing) in order to come out healthier, happier, and freer: it is good for your wife to know her butt size to scale. My stance is that the truth can be too destructive when wielded indiscriminately; it is a tricky thing to unite candor and tact, and it takes some thick skin to be made happy and free by the clumsy imposition of some terrifying accuracy. I have, until now, avoided examining this topic too closely for fear of being persuaded by “Ellis” towards his blanket condemnation of any and all forms of lying, as this would discredit the staggering number of lies I’ve told in my life and prevent me from ever being able to lie with any integrity again.

But perhaps there is a compromise in the differentiation between the motives behind lies told for profit and those told out of affection. That Zorbas the Greek desires the dying Madame Hortense is a “white lie,” but her belief in the lie and their lovemaking give her a brief but truthfully-felt bit of happiness before her death. How much kinder is Zorbas’s lie than the cruel frankness of the old women who keep their perverse vigil at her bed, not bothering to conceal their intention to plunder her small home the moment she expires! It is Zorbas’s generous and affectionate nature, his greater engagement with love and pleasure than with ambition and profit, which make him trustworthy even in his dishonesty.

It is accepted wisdom that the person you love is the one person with whom you can be completely honest, but I would contend that rather, the person you love is the only person with whom you can be dishonest, as it is (or as long as it is) from a position of genuine goodwill. When you are loved by someone you can trust that if he lies it is because he believes that the lie is not only kinder but actually better for you than the truth. Whether the lie is ever better in fact seems to me no less reliable than that truth is always better, is always kinder, is beauty. One who knows you knows when your illusions are harmless or even healthy, and when they perpetuate destructive or delusive behavior, and if he loves you will feed or destroy those illusions accordingly. It is not for his own profit but that of his beloved, that the one who loves, lies.

In Defense of Sloth

Since I haven't posted for a while, here's another article from New York Moves's Christmas/Seven deadly sins issue (the one to which I contributed "In Defense of Vanity" and "Blinded by the Light," linked below. Thank you, Odious, for the inspiration for my thesis; you know what I'm talking about.

No other city in the world is quite as unforgiving towards sloth as New York. The expense alone overwhelms anyone who doesn’t exert a near superhuman effort to break into and succeed in our job market, the most overcrowded and competitive in America. The glut of cultural offerings shames people who might otherwise content themselves with Monday night football and the occasional Cineplex outing into becoming reluctant but regular patrons of the arts: it’s simply too embarrassing to admit that one hasn’t seen the Bodies exhibit, or that one missed The History Boys or that one still hasn’t visited the new MOMA. Thousands of restaurants featuring the cuisine of hundreds of different cultures encourage the frequent dining-out customary to New Yorkers, many of whom return home after sixteen-hour days to snatch too few hours of sleep before waking at dawn to start the frenzied day all over again.

Yet within each New Yorker is a “Secret Sloth” as my driven friend Aggie named hers, who would rather call in sick and spend the day sitting on the couch watching sitcom reruns and slurping Cup O’Noodles. The fact is, work is stressful and takes up a lot of time, and most people who are making enough money to live in the city are doing it in high-pressure jobs that don’t necessarily offer any creative satisfaction but leave one too exhausted to pursue other interests with any gusto. The city’s recreational offerings also have a cultural and historical gravitas that discourages regarding them as recreational at all. In any other city one can simply take a walk in the park. In New York, however, Central Park carries with its very name the countless remembered scenes from film and literature, which crowd in upon one’s consciousness while one’s merely strolling along its perimeter. One almost feels an obligation to match one’s scarf to the autumn leaves. And under-accomplished if one fails to meet the love of one’s life while sitting on the bank of the duck pond pensively tossing breadcrumbs into the water. A day at the beach requires an hour-long train ride and once you get there, you have to search the shore for empty patches where you can bury your wallet, and then hope your feet miss the shards of bottle glass strewn in the sand as you wind your way through the screaming children towards the water. In New York, even leisure is never lazy.

Why bother with any of it when you could just sit around? I for one grow weary by the mere process of deciding how to best take advantage of this magnificent city. The opportunities for enrichment terrify me. I am exhausted by the possibilities. The very idea of how meaningful a Saturday afternoon can be makes me want to crawl back into bed and only move to change the channel from Nickelodeon to TV land. Are other New Yorkers leading productive, culturally rich and satisfying lives? Should I feel ashamed that this is what I really want? Does Gray’s Papaya deliver?

I have a friend who describes sloth as the only vice which is its own reward. The other vices drag other people, other things into the picture. They require effort. Greed links the wish for an immoderate amount of something to the pursuit and acquisition of the same. Gluttony requires the material of indulgence. Lust culminates (the luster hopes) in the physical act driven by, but not itself, lust. Wrath involves a world of associated passions, and its extremity can be quite taxing. Sloth just is. One is slothful to be slothful, that’s it. Nothing but sloth is needed, and nothing but sloth results. Sloth owes its existence only to the will to be slothful, the wish to do nothing rather than something. It’s a powerful temptation, and a self-perpetuating one once tasted. It is a particularly dangerous temptation in a city like New York, and the only one of the “seven deadly sins,” as they are so dramatically named, that New York by nature does not encourage. It is hard to walk down the street any day here without contending with lust, gluttony, envy,…. temptations towards each of these are plastered on every billboard, walking their dogs in the park, safe behind shiny glass at Bergdorf’s, wafting through the morning air outside Balthazar’s bakery...wrath emerges swiftly enough when hailing a cab at Columbus Circle on a Friday night. New York was made for sins like these. The city, however, has very little patience for anything less than a super-heightened level of activity from its inhabitants, and thus sloth is the only one of the deadly sins which is out of place here. When one gives in to sloth, one “drops out” of New York and its ethos in a very real way. Practically, one can’t survive here without the energy to succeed and the willingness to exercise it. Culturally, the city is wasted on one who’d rather lie in bed than partake of the thousands of world-class offerings.

And yet, that “Secret Sloth” within each of us—dare I assert that every New Yorker has one? Am I the only who finds the constant pressure to “do stuff” oppressive and pushy? My bed is soft and warm, and my TV has so many channels, and Cup O’Noodles is really quite good; it recently introduced an excellent white cheddar flavor. Even as someone brought up to work hard and drawn to New York by that superior and prolific cultural life for which it is famous, the task of getting out of bed and living life to the fullest is a hard sell.

Sloth, by nature, is a very anti-New York sin.

New Year's Blogolution

I was asked to write an article on the nature of change (or something, I don't really pay attention) for the January double issue, which has now turned into the hulking January-February-March triple issue, of New York Moves Magazine. I originally felt it best and most appropriate to write one of those "the problem with you lot..."-type pieces and keep myself out of it, but then my editor suggested that it would be more convincing if I at least pretended to use myself as an example, which I did, in part. This is for anyone wondering about the inaccuracies of my life story as told hereafter.


“How few the days are that hold the mind in place; like four or five hooks holding up a tapestry. Especially the day you know you’ve stopped becoming, the day you know you merely are. What ought to be moves far away; what is comes close.” -Arthur Miller, After the Fall

Much commentary has been devoted to the infamous New Year’s Resolution and its hurried evanescence in the weeks following the New Year. Its inherent, doomed optimism is the stuff of sad jokes and wan regrets, yet every year, people resolve again to lose that weight, to quit smoking, to save more money,… as if they haven’t made these promises to themselves every previous year, and broken them through neglect, lack of discipline, or plain unwillingness. I’d wager most peoples’ New Year’s Eve resolutions didn’t survive their New Year’s Day hangover, let alone the ensuing weeks that have brought us to the threshold of spring. We are accustomed to breaking the promises we make to ourselves, and it is almost touching to see how innocently we go on making those promises, not just every New Year, but every new day.

But is our eagerness to make these abortive resolutions a sign of hope or self-delusion? As a country we descended from people who were willing to drop everything and sail thousands of miles into unknown and dangerous territory in order to pursue a lifestyle they dreamed would be better than the one they were stuck in, and we pride ourselves in our touted “ingenuity.” Change is an integral part of our makeup, and probably the makeup of any healthy human being, but what does it say about us that we seem to be constantly on the hunt for newer, better, and often unrealistic versions of ourselves, only to abandon the hunt with such ease most of the time? We spend thousands of dollars every year on fad diets we know must fail. Most of us can’t afford a new wardrobe every season but strain our credit limits chasing this tantalizing image of our chic new selves, hoping (and knowing full well it is an empty hope) that by “bettering” our appearance, so will our social, professional, and romantic lives be bettered too. We spend years in psychotherapy, only to find that, though we’ve “learned” a lot about ourselves and our atavistic compulsions, our ability or even willingness to change those habits somehow never caught up. Whose bookshelf isn’t crowded with half-read self-help books?

This isn’t to say that people don’t or shouldn’t change at all; New York is indeed the place to find people who have made real and lasting changes to their lives and themselves. But it seems that change—real change, not the kind bidden in a drunken vow made at 12:01 on New Year’s morning--can only happen a few times, those “four or five hooks holding up the tapestry” of one’s life. And it also seems that those few true changes only really happen, conversely, when we rid our minds of unrealistic pipe dreams and face up to our situation, and the changes that are indeed possible to make in that situation.

Some years ago, on another coast and after receiving yet another rejection letter for a story of which I was rather proud (the sort of defeat which always reminded me of my other disappointments: financial dependence, empty love life, facing a lifetime of obscurity, the usual), I came to realize that, by my own standards, and I’m sure, those of anyone with any sense of reality, I was a failure. But in that moment of crying into my pillow, it occurred to me that I had been in the same position, crying for basically the same reasons, more times than I could bear to count. And I also realized that the reason I hadn’t made any drastic changes to my life in any aspect was because for the past few years I had fooled myself into believing that if I made little changes, the bigger gains I dreamed of would magically come to me. My love life would fix itself in time if I just “improved” myself: I read constantly to sharpen my intellect, I worked out often, even did ballet, to stay in superior shape, I developed an eye for vintage fashions and always dressed elegantly. My career would blossom if I refined my skills and made myself into a great writer—some important commissioning editor or agent was bound to glimpse one of my stories or be charmed by my pitch letter and want to represent me. Basically, the changes I was making to my lifestyle were too timid to have any real impact because I was convinced that my real life—my destiny! was somewhere in the future, and it was my task to endure the nowhere life I was in and prepare for the coming miracle by making twee adjustments to my fundamentally defective modus operandi. I would not admit to myself that the paltry life I was enduring those years was indeed my life, my real life, and that unsatisfied, flailing girl, the real me.

I won’t go into the details of what happened after my revelation, but hope it suffices to say that I have experienced real change, several of them, even, since then, my move to New York being the primary one, and catalyst to all the others. And I think these changes were only made possible the moment I let go the cozy platitude that I was becoming, and embraced the ghastly truth that I was.

We are obsessed with becoming, and perhaps this has to do with our youth-fixation (for when we are young it is our duty to devote ourselves to becoming) or maybe it is the epic pressure of the American Dream which bullies people into disdaining their lot for a more dazzling one. Whatever the cause, it seems the constant encouragement to chase an idea of how much better, happier, more perfect one could be, provides a convenient and ever-renewable distraction from recognizing, and making peace with, who one is to begin with. Your first day of maturity is not your 21st birthday, or the first day of your job, or the day you first make love, but “the day you know you merely are.” Vital to change is the recognition that your real life, your real self, is not some perfected being waiting in the distant future for you to grow into them, but who you are right now, shortcomings, discontents and all.

Blinded by the Light

I didn't choose that title for another of my articles in the Christmas issue of New York Moves magazine, but that's what they named it. Several editorial changes were made, to which I objected noisily, but I included the piece in unmutated form here:

Both the faithful and the cynical complain a lot around the holidays. The faithful, that commercialism has debased the original spiritual purpose of Christmas, and the cynical, that we continue to pay lip service to this debased spiritual purpose. I for one have grown bored with both sides as hopelessly unfamiliar with human nature, objecting as though it’s news that we gravitate toward the material rather than the spiritual, and then try to make ourselves feel less crass by attaching a lot of Hallmark platitudes to our materialism. Of course we do.

My complaint is more specific, involving the reason I believe the spiritual aspects of Christmas, or, really, the trappings of any religion, are ignored so easily in the first place. From a literary point of view the stories of the world’s religions are some of the most astonishing ever imagined: in them are heroes and antagonists, obstacles, magic (for that’s really what a “miracle” is, isn’t it?), and distinctive moral themes from which one may learn how to live. To take Christianity in particular, in addition to the blockbuster spectacles of the Old Testament, the New Testament features the peculiar story of a tri-partite god who arranges for his son/self to take human form through virgin birth, and preach to those who’d listen a new and, at the time, completely innovative ideology. He foresees (and if one takes the “Judas Texts” into account, hand-picks and instructs his traitor), and sets into motion his own gory death whereby, through some mystical magic, the sins of mankind are purged. In this moment of his assuming the world’s evils, the earth darkens as god, the father, cannot look on such impurity, and in his dying moments god, the son, cries out at his abandonment. He then rises from the tomb and, before ascending to heaven, promises to return “in the blink of an eye.” Thus is man saved from his mortality.

This story shouldn’t leave me cold.

The problem for me is that this story has been told to me in so many dumbed-down forms over the years, starting the first day of kindergarten at a ghetto Baptist school in San Francisco, it has become part of the mere noise of my past, like the Sesame Street theme song or the emergency siren test that blasted through the city every Tuesday at noon. Every Monday and Wednesday morning at my elementary school, we convened in the chapel to listen to a sermon given not by an ordained minister, but by one of our teachers or the school’s pious headmaster. These often involved badly-painted placards illustrating some de-sexed episode from the Old Testament, or a bloodless version of the story of Golgotha. These were followed by their imploring us to “accept Jesus into our hearts” so that we may receive “salvation.” Imagine what this could mean to a seven year old. I actually envisioned a tiny Jesus, complete with curly hair, beard, white robes, and melancholy face, grasping onto nearby arteries while curled into one of the cramped chambers of my heart, blood sloshing about his sandals, his head bumping against the wall as it pumped. I worried he’d stumble out when I played on the swings. “Accept Jesus into your heart” was such a regular theme that I really can’t remember any of the other specifics of this brainwashing, but I do remember shyly asking my parents before they put me to bed one night if they would “accept Jesus into their hearts” so that they could go to heaven, and then, perceiving a lack of seriousness in their response, worrying all night over the fate of their souls in the afterlife. Which of course made me think on the possibility of their deaths. Which made me even more miserable.

For what was all this propaganda? How could they fail to see that an unripe mind cannot but reduce this majestic doctrine to absurdity?

More importantly, how could they fail to see that the doctrine would not only be lost on us at that age, but that our over-exposure to it would numb us against any power it might have had once we were mentally and spiritually ready for it later?

In A Return to Modesty, Wendy Shalit argues against the trend to teach sex-ed at a younger and younger age (which is purportedly done in an effort to beat the long arm of the sex-focused media to the punch), claiming that to introduce the details of the subject to a mind before the interest in it has arisen naturally has a warping, rather than educative, effect. Having learned the specifics myself long before I stopped believing in “coodies,” I’m inclined to agree with Shalit. I’d argue the same principle applies to religion.

At my school, as at any parochial school which includes religious inculcation as part of its agenda, we were fed some very grand and complex ideas, but before we had reached an age, or a state of mind-readiness, when it would have been possible for us to perceive the grandeur or even to perceive the complexity of those ideas (hence my imagined travel-sized Jesus). These ideas became “old hat” long before it ever occurred to us to ask what it really means that god died on a cross, or that this is in fact a supernaturally outrageous and heavy concept that should baffle, terrify, shock, and excite us. By exposing and over-exposing us to concepts unsuited in every way to our lack of maturity, they robbed us of the opportunity to be baffled, terrified, shocked, or excited by them then or later. The insult to injury is that their one concession to our unreadiness was in the anemic, baby-talk dilutions of these concepts they fed us. Not the Confessions of St. Augustine, but the Jesus is my Homie rap, undid me as a believer.


I’ll never forgive my elementary school for having wasted hours of my life filling my head with meaningless platitudes when I never did get a good grasp on long division. Or for the nights I spent crying into my pillow, envisioning my heathen parents unsaved and in flames. I am tired of the faithful and the cynical, and all their whining about the desecration of Christmas. These complainers seem to think that the thing that has been desecrated is the holiday itself, and our cheerful desecration of it, a symptom of some cultural disease which only surfaces, herpes-like, once a year. The truth is, few of us could ever even dream of appreciating the sacredness of the ritual or the mystery of Christ’s story at all. It is our own minds that have been desecrated, befouled from infancy with the stale rhetoric of people more interested in turning us into congregation drones than in helping us cultivate what innate religiosity--indeed—true spirituality, we may possess. I suspect the natural spirituality of a human being is a delicate and ephemeral thing, easily killed by over-feeding or careless handling. My own was beaten numb; actually, it was bored to death. It is no surprise to me that at Christmastime we shop and eat and drink ourselves senseless, when for so many of us, the story of Christ occupies the same mental space as the tooth fairy, and the word of god is a bubble-gum jingle.

In Defense of Vanity

I know, I know, I've been a bad, bad blogger, but I have a good excuse, which is that I've been spending all my time studying the art of classical acting and the thea-tah. Instead of dutifully keeping the world abreast of the ordinary horrors of my existence, I've been reading plays, scanning verse, enunciating, combatting a new and uncharacteristic stage-fright, and breathing in and out. The only thing other than course-related work I've done in the past few months has been writing for the magazine I've mentioned on this site before. So, now that some of the issues of New York Moves to which I've contributed have hit the press, I can replicate them for a geographically broader audience..... here's one:

There’s a story from my babyhood that I often ask my mom to repeat, partly because it’s so damn cute, but mostly because it’s about me, and I like hearing stories starring me. She says that whenever I cried, she’d hold me, and I would angle myself to face the large antique mirror that hung on the door in our kitchen and then just watch my reflection as I cried. She’d have to hold me up in front of the glass for a good twenty minutes while I sniffled and sobbed until I started kicking her in the chest, which meant I was finished and now hungry. If I was in another room at the time of an upset, she’d pick me up, and I would twist and strain in her arms as she held me, and instead of the usual uninhibited wailing, my sobs had a hesitant, questioning quality--my perceptive mother would then carry me to my favorite spot in the kitchen where I’d finally let it all out “on camera.”

Even today I can’t resist checking myself out whenever I’m distraught. My face flushes so that my eyes look greener, my lips get red and puffy, the tears make my eyelashes all shiny and they stick together like a doll’s. But even better is how very soulful I look when I’m upset. I take advantage of my heightened state and perform Meryl Streep’s famous speech from Sophie’s Choice where she admits her father was an abusive Nazi abettor: I pretend the mirror is the window of Stingo’s Flatbush apartment, stare out into the imaginary Brooklyn dusk, cock my left brow, let a single tear roll down my cheek, and whisper, “…he said, ‘Zozia, your intelligence eez pulp………pulp!!...’” Or I pretend that JFK, Jr. and I are sitting in a coffeeshop in the Village and he’s breaking up with me because of insurmountable class differences or he can’t handle my Slavic temperament or maybe Caroline feels threatened by my libertine tendencies, and he’s really a homebody at heart after all. Tomorrow all the beauty of my pathos will be plastered across the Daily News and the Post. Single women all over New York will discuss the tragedy over cosmo’s after work, and the men will shake their heads and wonder how John-John could have let someone like me get away.

Yes, I spend a lot of time in front of the mirror. And not just crying, but toning, moisturizing, concealing, highlighting, powdering, SPF-ing, eyelash-combing, eyebrow-smoothing, and practicing smiles of varying degrees of toothiness. I’m currently trying to cultivate the ability to blush on command, very tricky indeed. I have spent thousands of dollars (in my lifetime, not like last week or anything) on hair removal, exercise classes, facials, not to mention clothing to accentuate all my favorite body parts. All to achieve that “I just rolled out of bed looking like this” look. Or better, that “I was born out of a giant seashell, locks a-flowing and heralded by naked baby angels” look.

I actually went to school with someone who laid legitimate claim to the natural Venus look: her name was Rafaella (how apt), and she had long blonde hair that curled and shone even though she washed it with pine tar soap. She never wore makeup and didn’t need to, as her skin was clear and her cheeks and lips naturally pink. No matter how little sleep she got, she never had dark circles under her eyes. She never bothered shaving, but why would she, with legs sprinkled with a soft down, invisible except when sparkling golden in the sun. I never saw her exercise, yet her legs were those of a dancer, without the duck-like turn-out. She never wore a bra, explaining that her C-cups were too small to need one (a thousand times, damn her). The ace up my sleeve is that since she’s too much of a hippie to moisturize or use sunscreen, the harsh New Mexico sun will dry her up like a yellow raisin by the time she’s 35. Hoorah!

Rafi was indeed the campus Venus, sort of a paradigm for unfussy hotness. Something bothered me, though, when people spoke of her, and despite the case I just made for my own monstrous and complicated vanity, it wasn’t quite competitiveness or jealousy, although I will understand if my reader thinks I’m a lying liar. When people discussed the Hotness of Queen Rafi, what they focused on almost more than her hotness itself was her seeming obliviousness to it: more than her actual beauty, it was her utter lack of vanity about it that most impressed people. “She’s so gorgeous, and she doesn’t even know it…” I couldn’t put words to it at the time, but it was peoples’ admiration of Rafi’s unawareness of her assets that offended and troubled me.

This is how people spoke of Audrey Hepburn and Brigitte Bardot, and is usually part of the hype over any starlet newly minted by the studios and the magazines. Even Vogue, that juggernaut of our collective obsession with the superficial, in a recent spread on Keira Knightly, cites couture giantess Vera Wang as gushing “…to be so beautiful and yet to be so unaware of it I find incredibly modern.” Please, Vera, tell us more about modernity.

There are two reasons not to praise someone for lacking vanity.

We live in a world which makes an unprecedented racket about physical beauty and places all sorts of debilitating pressure on people, and especially on women, to conform to evermore minutely finicky and widely unrealistic standards of physical perfection. It is unfair and hypocritical to expect a woman to be oblivious to, let alone unworried by, her physical assets or defects. How sick and self-destructive is it for us to uphold morals in direct conflict with our own self-generated ethos?

Secondly, it is backward and sexist to praise a woman for lack of awareness of any kind. In our society, beauty is power. A woman aware of her beauty, whether god-given or self-cultivated, is actually aware of a weapon in her arsenal that, if she’s smart about it, she can employ to her advantage. Someone (it’s usually a man) who praises a woman for her obliviousness to this very powerful asset is actually admitting his relief that the woman is wasting a tool she could use to gain the upper hand (with him) or to get ahead in our image obsessed society. Praising lack of vanity, like praising innocence, is praising the inability to function fully in this world.

For this embargo on vanity to be anything but bogus and oppressive, our society must either shift its monomaniacal obsession with physical attractiveness or allow for a less exclusionary definition of beauty, And until I see leg hair, ass fat, and crow’s feet on the cover of Vogue (which in the new world will be a women’s literary-political-theological journal), I’m not buying it.

Another Rejected Article!

My magazine editor recently offered me the "Rant" section of the issue, basically free rein to, well, rant, on anything I choose. I wrote an article that he handed back to me, declining to publish it. Our conversation went thus:

Editor: There is no place in this magazine for something so narrow-minded, ill-informed, wrong-headed, depressing and depressive, untruthful--

Me: Why not?!?!

Editor: Prissy--

Me: Prissy only if you look at the world through pervert-colored glasses!!

Editor: Your readers will dismiss you as a frigid, frustrated suburban biddy--

Me: I'm OK with that!!

Editor: That is not what this magazine is about.

Me: BOLLOCKS IT'S NOT!!

Editor: Bollocks it is.

Me: (mo'ded silence)

Editor: (grins nefariouosly)


It reminded me a little of my conversations with the director at my old theatre:


Director: Larissa, I can't cast you in (name of play)--

Me: Why the hell not?!

Director:--because you're too/not enough (adjective) for the role of (proper name). Don't worry; there will be parts that suit your (noun) more (adverb). (Proper name)'s audition was more/less (adjective) and she (verb)'s more (adverb) for the part.

Me: Like hell she is/does!!

Director: Don't argue with me.

Me: (mo'ded weeping)

Director: (glowers nefariously)


Anyway, here I can publish the article in all its prissy glory. In your face, Conde Nast!
(or whoever owns the magazine)

I had an acquaintance for a while whom I didn’t know well, but who seemed worth getting to know—he had pretty red hair and was taller than I (which always grabs my attention-I don’t know why more men don’t try it), and had a relaxed arrogance that I should probably learn to read as a warning sign but haven’t yet. I was curious about him and pleased when he approached me at a recent party in the Village. But when he spoke, his intentions were so unappetizingly clear—so impersonally sex-driven –that out of abashment and instinctive non-whoriness I mentally aborted those embryonic “maybe” thoughts I had harbored for him and felt my loins frosting over as I waited for the barrage of come-ons to end. So unworried was he that his baldfaced bluntness was inappropriate, unappealing, or even downright repulsive to any woman who wasn’t a slipshod floozy, that when I declined, instead of rethinking his tactic and hazarding a different one, he demanded that I explain why I wasn’t interested. As flummoxed as I was at hearing that a one night stand with the likes of him or bloody-anyone should fill my heart with giddy joy or whatever, the second shock of being challenged to justify myself left me stunned. I should have slapped him, and only later did I realize how unfortunate it really was that I hadn’t slapped him, because there was a deeper insult I hadn’t articulated to myself in the moment: He not only thought I was the kind of person (slipshod floozy) who would respond to such crassness, but he felt he could say it to my face. Maybe the way I describe this incident makes the boy sound like some displaced macho freak from a David Mamet play, but I’d wager that his “strategy,” if you can call something so un-thought out and artless a strategy, is not so unusual. Every woman my age I know has endured similar interactions; I wouldn’t be surprised if a good number of girls a decade younger than I had as well. Now, men don’t make a habit of repeating maneuvers that don’t work for them, so I’ll venture that as depressing as it is to acknowledge it, many women fall for this lunkheaded vulgarity.

As a contrast, I’ll offer a short anecdote about my father: In the years following the second world war, he was laid up with TB at the veteran’s hospital in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Though not a misanthropist, he remained somewhat aloof from the other patients, whom he considered to be graceless Yankees. Instead of joining the other men in their regular entertainments: gambling, spitting, and harassing the nurses, he amused himself by resuming a practice his mother had taught him: tatting (a method of needlework used to create lace designs on the edges of fabric). This is not a skill most men learn these days, but in his time, and in the South, it was common for a mother to teach her son the same homemaking skills she taught her daughters. In any case, the nurses were disarmed by my father’s gentlemanly manners and impressed with his artistry, and soon started bringing him their knickers to be embellished. He’d get a plain pair of panties and return them trimmed with pink daisies. The other men, who at first had snickered at his practice of this womanish art, now realized that they had been outdone; for all their gropings and lunkheaded overtures, it was my father whose bed was perpetually flanked by a bevy of squealing, giggling nurses waving their silken underthings in delight. Southern charm had triumphed over Northern boorishness.

I began this article intending to extol the second manner of wooing I described, the artful over the obtuse, but then I realized that this would be akin to saying I want a man who will trick me out of my panties, and decided to reconsider. I am inclined to appreciate the gentleness of my father’s manner, not to mention the implied understanding that a woman must be too intelligent and classy to succumb to blunt propositioning (an understanding clearly lacked by that boy I should have slapped). And it angers me that there are so many men who need to be slapped, and so few women who will slap them. After all, the proper response to being objectified, underrated, and insulted is not to sleep with the offender (which must happen often enough to make it worth men’s while to continue to act this way), but to slap him down, yes?

But on second thought I see that it’s no better to surrender to the charming, artful, and subtle, than to the crude, brazen, and heavy-handed. Behind them both is the same coarse pragmatism that should be recognized for what it is: not a genuine interest in the woman as a human being and individual, but rather an undiscriminating quest for poon, however elegantly dressed. My artful father was not a lecher, but he could have been, and a very successful one. I suspect that the artless boy I regret not slapping is also a successful lecher.

Now my question is: Why is it that, whatever the current and local trends are for seducing women, whether they involve straightforwardness or dissembling, women can be counted on to respond positively to them? Who cares if a few hardheaded icequeens like me won’t stand for it? Men seduce on the principle of carpet-bombing: throw enough missiles and you’re bound to hit something. As I said before, enough women must respond to these techniques to give men reason to continue employing them. They sleep with men who have not given any convincing indication that they love or respect them, and then whine that the men they’re sleeping with don’t love or respect them. What else, besides shoes, was Sex and the City about?

Perhaps I am just more frustrated than my peers at the atmosphere between the sexes, which to me appears cluttered with miscarried intentions and run-down hopes. But even I am not entirely pessimistic. Something must work; people do fall in love and enjoy satisfying relationships, even if such sweet tales are spectacularly upstaged by epics of failure and regret. But regardless of how a romance turns out in the end, there are ways of approaching a woman initially which don’t insult her intelligence or outrage her class. I believe a woman can always tell, though she may be awash in denial about it, when a man is merely putting his boner on hold until he can come up with that perfect line which is the “Open Sesame” of her pants, and when he is speaking to her because he genuinely finds her interesting and might want her company for activities other than boning. It is to keep the terrible debilitating loneliness at bay that she will hold onto her denial even when her instinct tells her she’s being scammed. In Tennessee Williams’s brutal play Orpheus Descending, fallen belle Carol Cutrere explains why she sleeps with man after man despite the physical danger to her frame, too slight to survive childbearing, too slight even to endure the weight of a man without agony: ”The act of lovemaking is almost unbearably painful, and yet of course, I do bear it, because to not be alone, even for a few moments, is worth the pain and the danger.” Even a hardheaded icequeen (my editor adds, “prissy auto-didact”) can understand this choice, this lethal need to forget, however briefly, how alone we actually are. To silence that inner howling for intimacy we will go with the boorish propositioner or the eloquent playboy--will knowingly accept the ersatz for want of the genuine.…and as the howls rise up again, we feel ourselves turning into the bitter cynics we never believed we could be.

Or perhaps not. As much heartache as is out there, perhaps…….the devices one sex uses to get closer to the other aren’t really to blame, are rather just that, devices, not the substance of the problem. I guess it didn’t do me any more harm to be subjected to the artless boy’s blunt invitation than it did those nurses to loan their underwear to my skillful father. Such villainies seem rather twee compared to the disaster of a full-fledged, authentic love falling apart, the hopes of two vested people destroyed, which truly is the frightening thing.

My Rejected Article

So some of you know that I'm writing for a trendy New York glossy these days (well, if it were more popular, it would be "trendy;" at this stage it's merely aspiring to trendiness). They have commissioned several articles from me (well, if I were getting paid it would be "commission;" at this stage it's merely orders I obey), one of which was this one I've posted. My managing editor asked me to write a treatise on the ugliness and outdatedness of shoulder pads for the March issue (yes, it's a political science review). So I did, and for reasons not revealed to me, my article did not make the cut. This didn't hurt my feelings too badly, as so far I've been rejected thrice by the New Yorker and roundly ignored by the Times, and with such giants on my resume of failure I've come to excuse the rejections of humbler enterprises as "slavery to fashion." But you can read it for free. Bon Appetit!

Once in a while when I was in college my friend Araminta and I needed to assuage our blues with a trip off-campus. Rarely did this involve much planning ahead or even a token glance in the mirror before we got into her long-suffering Volvo and drove to Denny’s. In fact, we usually just set out in whatever sorry rags we had been studying in; sometimes sweats, sometimes PJ’s, sometimes whatever faded t-shirt and long john’s we had worn to class every day that week. While neither of us was a vision of glamour on these occasions, I noticed that she had a distinct advantage which saved her from utter frumpiness. For a moment I considered that it might be the two cup sizes she had on me, but then it occurred to me that the world is over-run with giant-busted women, and very few of them have that “je ne sais quoi” elegance that Araminta had in her bedraggled paisley jammies. What was it?

I realized then that it was her mannishly square shoulders which made even her most casual and untailored garments seem chic and complete. Such shoulders, in their broadness, accentuated the smallness of the waist, provided a frame for the bust, and minimized the width of the hips (a woman built like this rarely has to worry whether her “butt looks big”—what could possibly look big next to those shoulders?). Surprisingly, this broadness across the back that I described as “mannish” emphasized the femininity of her figure, and she didn’t have to do any “dressing up” to look, well, dressed up.
This realization made me wonder why I seem to be the only woman who mourns the loss of the shoulder pad in womens’ fashion today. Why would women have ever given up something so flattering and, forgive what I’m about to say, aesthetically empowering?

I should explain. The shoulder pad entered womens’ fashion in the 1940’s as a variation on the soldier’s uniform. The country was largely supportive of the war effort and naturally, fashion reflected this. It also helped that Adrian dressed his muse, the popular film star Joan Crawford, in suits with padded shoulders, and also that rations on various fabrics restricted designers from indulging in the usual flourishes to add excitement to their designs: full skirts, puffy sleeves, etc. They suddenly had to be very economical in their creations, and the sleek, sparse suit padded and squared off at the shoulders proved an appropriate, and elegant, solution. Women’s social role shifted as well; she entered the workplace, taking over many of the jobs usually occupied by men who were now abroad, and the authoritative look afforded her by this simple adjustment to the cut of her clothes fit her new image perfectly. She didn’t look like a man, but she did look powerful, in a way only men had previously been able to appear.

Then the war ended, and with it not only the rations on fabric, but the need for women in the workforce; in fact, a massive campaign was launched to drag women back into the home to free up those jobs for the returning G.I.’s. After enjoying a taste of a fairly independent life outside the home, women were now maneuvered back into their formerly sequestered lives (a problematic trend astutely, famously, documented by Betty Freidan in The Feminine Mystique). Not surprisingly, fashion took full advantage of the lift on rations and came out with skirts embellished with extra yards of fabric. Fashion also relaxed its wartime strategy of militarizing the female image. The ‘soldier’ look was yesterday and the new look was far softer and less structured, except in the infamously pointed brassieres popular in the fifties. This look was somehow, in the never-humble opinion of this amateur social scientist,…so obedient. Poodle skirts, skinny-heeled slingbacks, and good girl peter pan collars: the only body parts to enjoy special emphasis were the good ol’ mammaries (just in time for the baby boom! Co-inky-dink?). The shoulders, which in the forties had been enhanced to the effect of suggesting strength, professionalism, and an authority at least superficially on par with that of the male, were now allowed their natural weak slope, their former emphasis now dropped several inches south.

Jump ahead to the 1980’s: women once again storm the workforce, not due to any national crisis, but simply because it is the next step in the progression towards equality with men, initiated by the women’s lib movement. As newcomers to the corporate world, women do what they can to fit in, the pervasive mentality being that women have to prove they belong in this traditionally masculine domain. Women’s office clothes now mimic the man’s suit: though the bottom half is a skirt with pumps (because we couldn’t go so far as to let women actually be comfortable in slacks and flat shoes and even, god forbid, unshaved legs) the top half is a smart blazer with, again, shoulder pads. These shoulder pads, however, are an exaggerated version of those of WWII. The new shoulder pad doesn’t merely level and extend the shoulder a centimeter or two; it often takes the shape of a curve, which creates small humps at either shoulder, achieving that “linebacker” look bemoaned by reactionaries to the trend,--or it extends so far out that the wearer has to turn sideways to enter doorways. Perhaps this is a manifestation of “80’s excess,” or perhaps designers just don’t want to be caught repeating a trend that had been made popular by someone else four decades previous, so they revamp it in this mutant state. In any case, the look lasts for about as long as it seems necessary for women to masculinize their image, which is not much longer than the first decade of their corporate life.

Since then, women have felt more at home in the business world and thus entitled to dress as women rather than as masculinized females. The shoulder pad has been shrugged off. Will it come back? Most likely if it does, it will be for purely aesthetic reasons, as there are so many fewer arenas left in which appearing manlier could benefit a woman; she has her own identity now, and that identity has been, at least in theory, validated by her society. The author, if you haven’t guessed already, mourns the shoulder pad’s absence in popular fashion, also for purely aesthetic reasons, but does not foresee its return any time soon. Why? There are two reasons for her pessimism. One of them is that fashion has basically fallen off the deep end in its escalating pursuit of skankiness. The questions now seem to be, “how much of my pubic hair do I need to wax off in order to wear these extra-low-rider jeans?” and, “does the bra strap peeking out of my tank top match the thong peeking out of my pants?” In other words, the whole ideology behind today’s fashion appears to be “how to be sexy (in that “Sexiness for Boneheads” way taught by MTV)” rather than “how to look good.” Coco Chanel once said that the proper goal for a woman when she dresses herself should not be to look rich, but to look elegant. There is a sorry lack of such subtlety in today’s trends. Sexiness is defined by what seems like a checklist of the obvious. Tits showing? Check. Ass showing? Check. Gams showing? Double check. Midriff exposed? Check. The sexiness of a woman in a tailored and, yes, padded, dress or blazer (think Lauren Bacall in To Have and To Have Not, think Kate Hepburn in Philadelphia Story, think Evita) is too complicated to make the cut in today’s world where Paris Hilton is an style icon and rap-video hootchies herald the newest accessories your fourteen-year old will be begging you to buy her. A padded garment emphasizes a body part that is not distinctly sexual, and thus has very little hope of gaining popularity until a massive shift takes place in the collective psychology of our society.

The other reason I don’t think the shoulder pad will come back any time soon is because women simply don’t know what looks good on them. So many of us don’t realize that it is preferable to look like a linebacker than like an overgrown cheerleader. If women knew what looked good on them, these fashions would have died far sooner:
1) Jeans with large areas, usually thighs and/or buttocks, bleached out (“Do these make my ass look fat?” You bet.).
2) Shoes designed to suggest the head of a duck-billed platypus: the turned-up toe and the heel extended behind the ankle make one’s foot look two sizes larger. No good!
3) Baby-T’s: even if you do have washboard abs, is it really appropriate to have your stomache showing oustide of the gym or a beach on St. Bart’s? And for the rest of us, why abuse your pooch by making it bulge over the top of your jeans? Not attractive!
4) Pink eyeshadow: Why buy over-priced eye cream if you’re then going to wear makeup that makes you look like you’ve been crying and that’s why your eyes are puffy (and yes, pink eyeshadow makes your eyes look puffy!).
5) The Jennifer Aniston ‘do: Sorry ladies, those two years back in the ‘90’s when you all were whipping your stylists into a frenzy over that ill-begotten coiffure? Bad idea! It made your head look big, it hid your face, and it emphasized the lines on your neck (and you who had such lines were too old to be imitating 20-something sitcom stars. For shame!).
6) The ruffled mini: and sorry, Paris, the only woman with the legs for this skirt is my three-year-old niece. Give it back!
7) I already mentioned this but it bears reinforcement: Consider this, ladies, would Jackie Kennedy have worn an exposed thong?

These are just a few of the objectionable trends of recent years. Perhaps I should start a “Top 100” list.