Stuff White People Like: the Book

Within the last week, it occurred to me that there's a cultural phenomenon that totally passed over my consciousness within the last few months. I quickly rectified this by reading just about every entry on the absolutely brilliant blog, Stuff White People Like--a hysterical anthropological analysis of current liberal yuppie, monied culture. I highly recommend it. And yes, there are some features of this culture to which my friends and I aspire.

That said, I think it is absolutely hysterical and a little ironic that there will be a Stuff White People Like: The Book, brought to you by RandomHouse--otherwise known as The Man itself.

Seriously, when you think of the consolidation of the media, there are about 5 big publishing houses (RandomHouse, HarperCollins, Penguin Putnam Trade, Doubleday and LittleBrown) publishing the majority of the "bestsellers." It's a bit ridiculous.

Nevertheless, congratulations, Christian Landers. I hope you enjoy your moment in the cultural sun.

Pearl-girls and Trans-boys--a twist on convention?

Here's an interesting article from the NY Times's Magazine on transmen (a new phrase for me)--that is, a transgender person transition from female to male. It's a good article, and an interesting discussion about transmen on women's college campuses.

It's interesting that they published this particular article (my impression is that it is a segment of a longer work-in-progress) because it is in fact couched in terms of an update on the battle of the sexes. The subject of the article is Rey, a transmen who decided to go to Bernard, still Columbia's sister college, and switched to Columbia after a week. While the author nicely dissects the problems of a transmale or gender-queer person in a specifically gendered space, it is problematic that she relies on friction between men and women and in order to do so, she reinforces gender stereotypes.

Bernard College, where Rey matriculated for a week before transferring to Columbia College, is "one of the last girls-with-pearls bastions;" indeed "the women on campus seemed to Rey to be socially conservative and archly feminine." (Sounds like a certain green-and-pink-festooned college I know.) Bernard doesn't have a culture of accepting more than one version of femaleness--the pearls and Cup and enormous-white-wedding-to-the-perfect-boy-that-Daddy-pays-for kind. (Do they use "Daddy" in New York?). This is a very self-protecting culture. It is alienating to not conform and sometimes deathly (but frequently painful) to.

The author never referred to Rey using a female pronoun nor by his given name (at his request to protect his family). When discussing Rey as a thirteen year old, the author says that he was bat-mitzvahed and became a woman. (Not having met Rey, I likely would have used she at 13 and he at 18. It gives a clearer impression of the person we are discussing and illustrates more clearly the impact of the change.). In addition to being gendered male through pronouns, Rey is portrayed as a typical young man with typical boy living habits. He's messy and sloppy. He and his girlfriend Melissa discuss living together, but she's nervous--he's so messy. Never cleans up well after himself.

In this portrayal of the couple, the author reinforces gender stereotypes. Melissa is a typical female would-be nag, and Rey the sloppy male who just doesn't care how things look enough to clean them. This little difference between Melissa, gendered female, and Rey, gendered male, is emblematic of the author's treatment of the relations between the genders in the larger piece.

Rey's sojourn at the women's college, his acceptance by traditional feminine community, lasts for a week until he leaves for a community with a more accepting view of gender. The battle of the sexes is engaged, and woman--a sanctimonious version of femininity represented by the community of archly female women at Bernard--defeats man, represented by Rey who, while trans-, is always gendered male. The woman wins the day by being particularly rigid and cruel. The author reinforces gender stereotypes that portray women negatively and in doing so, she does the one thing that Rey rejects--puts his gender identity in a box.

Don't they focus group these things before they air them?

I hadn't planned on commenting on politics so quickly. Or doing that bloggy thing where I just point to something that's interesting for the edification of everyone else. But I am.

This focus group display is interesting. It shows that the Clinton "3 AM Ad" interests those who like her already, turns off the people who are supporting her opponent and turns off those who aren't decided.

It's kind of like those "Parents, it's never to early to talk to your kids about drugs." It makes parents feel happy-gooey-like-they're-doing-something, and it makes kids listen to their parents less and be more likely to start smoking. Except that Phillip Morris meant to do that.

Yes, Ms. Allen, how *can* some women be so dumb?

I too must put in my own two cents about Charlotte Allen's op-ed for the Washington Post.

It is undeniable that Allen assumes that men are automatically superior, and that what is not male is therefore bad. Aristotle alluded to that. Augustine said it. Luther said it very loudly. There are a great number of women and men who have proven this premise false, and a great number of feminists of both sexes who have argued against it more eloquently than I ever can, so I shall leave it to them.

What has caused the controversy is that a) from a technical aspect, this is a poorly written and defended argument, and b) the Post defended itself against the controversy by saying "Geez, it was satire. Didn't you get the joke?"

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I was on my way to a back-handed defense of Ms. Allen--"the problem isn't so much that she is anti-women as it's that she's a bad satirist." Perhaps she was sending up satire and is way more po-mo ("a mental rave") than the rest of us.

This is unlikely. I was going to reparse the piece for my own and my readers' enjoyment, but when I looked at it a second time, there is not much there that is not woman-hating or relying on pretty shoddy statistics. I'm not an alchemist.

What we have is a woman- (and therefore self-) hating columnist, and an editor who didn't bother to read the piece before creating negative publicity for his editorial page.

How hard can it be?

I have decided to write this blog not as a way to share information and encourage discussion within my own community and in the world around me, but in fact as a monument to myself. I don’t feel like I have enough unfettered opportunities to share the workings of my mind with the world.

So I expect that I’ll post here commentary about whatever’s going on in the news (and by “news” I mean that I pretty regularly read the NYTimes.com, listen to NPR and watch The Daily Show), and I’ll comment on or analyze what I think I see. I’m taking microecon right now (a.k.a. Capitalism 101), so a good deal of sarcasm might come from that. Books I like (and don't...). Music and movies, same. Politics. Grad school rejection letters. Really bad interviews.

With this disclaimer, should you actually read this blog, I encourage you to offer as well-thought-out and constructive comments as I have put into my posts.