_Random Family_

I've mentioned _Random Family_ by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc a few times in other posts, but it came to mind again today as I was reading a couple of NYT articles (about which more later).

_Random Family_ follows two women in the poorest part of the Bronx for about 20 years. It covers the people who circle in and out of their lives, their children, their mothers (not so much their fathers; fathers aren't a big part of this world), their doomed and floundering affairs with doomed and floundering men. It's clear-sighted about the weaknesses in their characters and the poor choices that they make, and they make a bunch of poor choices.

The first time I read the book, I was in a pretty uncharitable frame of mind, because when you spend all day every day dealing with people like this in some of their worst moments (i.e., after they get deservedly locked up for doing bad things -- and it's to LeBlanc's credit that she makes it clear these people get deservedly locked up for doing bad things; ain't no "but he's really innocent!" excuse-making here), it's hard to look at these lives of repeated bad decisions (and they are all lives of repeated bad decisions) and not want to yell "WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU, WHY YOU KEEP DOING THIS."

But the second time through (and in no small part due to Peter's prodding for me to pay more attention to the surrounding factors), it became pretty clear why they kept making terrible decisions: because there weren't any good decisions that these people could make. There's only "bad" and "worse."

The people in _Random Family_ are just people. They each have some gifts: one woman is uncommonly beautiful and spirited; another is warm and open-hearted and devoted to her family. But the environment in which they live does not allow them to make good use of those gifts, and it takes advantage of their weaknesses relentlessly. It punishes them viciously for every misstep, offers them no way out, and ensures that any small mistake keeps them locked down in poverty for life.

The beautiful woman never has the chance to parlay her looks into a trophy marriage or modeling career. Her world doesn't include the kind of people who could make that happen for her, and (due to terrible role models and perverse societal incentives) she doesn't have the skills to sustain a lasting relationship anyway. The one rich man she meets (who immediately snatches her up, because she's the kind of girl you snatch up) is a violent, abusive drug dealer who eventually gets locked up and takes her down with him. But there never was a better prince that this Cinderella could have picked.

The kindhearted woman never has the chance to build a close and loving family, although it's clear that in other circumstances she would have been one of those cozy lovey-dovey homemakers whose Pinterest makes you want to stab things. Instead, the family she actually has -- a temperamental and drug-abusing mom, various unreliable boy-men, and children she can't afford or care for -- drag her down into self-mutilating madness and keep her trapped forever, because she loves them too much to ever say "no" and cut them dead.

Her sister does, and though the sister's only a minor character in the book, she's still pretty instructive. The sister is the closest possible thing to an ice-cold Ayn Randian golem of self-interest, and she barely makes it to the ranks of the struggling working poor, and it takes a tremendous psychological toll on both her and her husband to get that far. People are not meant to live in a way that turns loving social relationships into liabilities. People are not meant to choose between affection and survival. If you have to make that choice constantly for years, it eats your soul. And even then, even if you have the wherewithal to make that trade, lack of skills and schooling will ensure you only make it to the next-up rank of the exploited.

The one flaw in _Random Family_ is that it doesn't really talk about the schools available in this setting. You have to read Jonathan Kozol's _Savage Inequalities_ or a comparable exploration of underfunded (and de facto segregated) schools to get that important part of the picture. In _Random Family_, people just drop out of school casually and it seems like a total bonehead move (WHY YOU DON'T TAKE THE AVAILABLE ROAD OUT); it's only when you see how dire the available schools are, and how illusory their promise of escape-through-education actually is, that you realize "oh, that's not a way out after all." There's no reason to stay in school when the school offers you nothing useful.

Anyway, I thought about this all again when I was reading the latest Edsall thing on "What Does It Take to Climb Up the Ladder?" and, as a companion piece, this profile on three Kansas kids weighing their college choices.

And I've been thinking about it in connection with all those pieces talking about the "diseases of despair" (Case and Deaton have a new set of findings out; surprise!, less-educated white people are dying even more than they thought previously) and the hollowing of poor white communities by opiate addiction and family dysfunction, and how the pathologies of the urban inner city are moving out to those communities.

I have considerably less sympathy for the plight of heroin-addicted suburban people, mostly because they're still one generation removed from middle-class stability and are therefore at a point where it's still fair to talk about "character" and "personal responsibility" as factors here. If you grew up in a stable, loving household and you had the opportunity to go to school in a meaningful way and not everybody in your personal universe was a dead end of dysfunction your whole entire life, yeah, in my view that choice kind of is on you. You had better options. You just didn't pick them.

But the fact remains that these people's kids won't have that choice. These people's kids are going to grow up in a universe that in some respects looks more like the one in _Random Family_ than the one their parents had. Not totally -- they'll still have some advantages and some escape routes that wouldn't be available to people in the Bronx in 1992 -- but close enough that it's a similar conversation.

What that conversation needs to be, I think, is how you offer ladders up and out. How do you make good choices feasible? Because "character" and "personal responsibility" stop being adequate answers as soon as we start talking about children born into homes that won't teach those things and communities that won't reward them. "Character" and "personal responsibility" aren't answers that can save anybody in _Random Family._ Increasingly, they're not going to save the opiate-addicted ruins of the formerly middle-class.

It's a good book. I recommend reading it if you want a clear and honest picture of people often subject to stereotype as lazy welfare grifters. The fact is, they're often frustrating to read about and they do make a bunch of terrible decisions -- but it's useful to question what decisions they could possibly make that would be better, and whether it's truly reasonable to expect kids (because they're usually kids when they make the first big mistake that crimps all future options) to do better, and what We As A Society might do to improve things.

I also think it's pretty key to understanding how somebody like me can simultaneously be a Big Government Liberal and spend all day hitting people with sticks for doing bad things. Those two things aren't really in conflict, but you might need to read something like _Random Family_ to see why.

"Speak English"

The old woman remembered a swan she had bought many years ago in Shanghai for a foolish sum. This bird, boasted the market vendor, was once a duck that stretched its neck in hopes of becoming a goose, and now look! -- it is too beautiful to eat.

Then the woman and the swan sailed across an ocean many thousands of li wide, stretching their necks toward America. On her journey she cooed to the swan: "In America I will have a daughter just like me. But over there nobody will say her worth is measured by the loudness of her husband's belch. Over there nobody will look down on her, because I will make her speak only perfect American English. And over there she will always be too full to swallow any sorrow! She will know my meaning, because I will give her this swan -- a creature that became more than was hoped for."

But when she arrived in the new country, the immigration officials pulled her swan away from her, leavning the woman fluttering her arms and with only one swan feather for a memory. And then she had to fill out so many forms she forgot why she had come and what she had left behind.

Now the woman was old. And she had a daughter who grew up speaking only English and swallowing more Coca-Cola than sorrow. For a long time now the woman had wanted to give her daughter the single swan feather and tell her, "This feather may look worthless, but it comes from afar and carries with it all my good intentions." And she waited, year after year, for the day she could tell her daughter this in perfect American English.

-- Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club.

I have read that prologue more times than I can count, more times than I can remember, and it always makes me cry.

When people tell immigrants to "speak English, like real Americans" -- or any variation of that same small and ugly sentiment -- what I hear in their words is the fear of the ignorant. I hear a deep and defensive ignorance, a fear of admitting that ignorance, a fear that would crush newcomers more worldly and knowledgeable into the same cramped little horizons so that no one might stand taller or see more than they do.

I hear people who know very little and recognize, somewhere deep, that they know very little, and who are afraid to let others know more. Who have only one language, and fear the not understanding that comes with confronting the limits of one's own knowledge, and whose answer is not to try to learn more, but to take that learning away from others.

I feel this because they took that language and that learning away from me. I should have grown up bilingual. I should have grown up speaking Korean as easily as I do English, learning words and rhythm with the ease that comes only from hearing those words and feeling those rhythms while you're too young to understand anything but the sound.

But I didn't, because my mother, like so many immigrants, came here and was told that anything other than perfect American English was less than. Less than worthy. Less than really, truly American.

So she didn't teach it to me. Didn't risk a daughter who might have some kind of an accent, however slight, and come out sounding different to match looking different (which was hard enough, at times, because of course the same ignorance that prioritizes "talking American" also prioritizes "looking American" and defines that with the same crippled and crippling racism). And so I lost a knowledge that should have been my birthright before I was old enough to comprehend. I lost stories and histories that can't be told in another language without losing their essence, because ideas take on the shape of words and forcing them into other forms must, always, alter their meaning.

And my mother remains self-conscious, some forty years after coming to this country, that her own English is not perfect American English. Which is the other side of the cruelty, of course: that it imposes the shame of inadequacy on people who have done far more to accommodate themselves to a strange and alien culture than the people mouthing this idiocy can ever understand.

Nobody wants to struggle with language. Nobody wants to be limited in understanding the world they occupy. When I was ten years old my parents put me in a German school in Germany. I didn't speak German. I didn't speak much at all, actually, for the three years I was in that school, because while my classmates were unfailingly kind and encouraging, and Germany at that time period and in that social class had nothing like the grotesque chauvinism of "speak English," it is still unpleasant to be a bumbling foreigner who mangles syntax and enunciation and can't understand the simplest things. It is embarrassing. Breaking through that barrier requires a courage that few people possess, and that I certainly didn't have at that age. I likely wouldn't have it now.

But of course that's the point. The point of telling people to "speak English" is not, actually, to encourage them to speak English. It's to tell them "shut up, you aren't wanted here." It's to say "you don't belong, leave, go away." It is to denigrate their efforts as never good enough, their accents as badges of shameful difference, their children as somehow un-American if they know too much.

And it's to say "I have only this one language (barely), and I'm conscious of the deficiency (barely), and I do not wish to be reminded that someone else -- someone of a different color -- might know more. I do not wish to be made self-conscious of my ignorance. So I will take away the knowledge that you have, make you embarrassed about passing it down to your descendants, and do my utmost to ensure that your future generations remain as stupid as mine."

That is what that is. It is the perpetuation of ignorance because of inadequacy. It is the use of shame as a cudgel to separate others from their heritage and knowledge.

It is stupidity wielded as an imperative, and it deserves scorn.

Stories of Your Life and Others

(with apologies to Ted Chiang)

One of the things I've been wrestling with since last year's election is the problem of empathy, and of understanding, and of how to bridge the gap between lives.

I don't mean political views, although I think that exposure to other perspectives and personalities tends to get you there anyway. I mean lives.

There's been a lot of talk about how people live in self-segregated silos now, and don't talk to people on other sides of the political divide(s); there's talk about how exposure to diversity tends to reduce fear and divisiveness because people come to understand that We're All Human; there's plenty of earnest soul-searching about what each of us might do in answer to these challenges.

I think part of the answer must come in the form of each of us considering, and offering, some openness about our selves.

Who are you? Why are you? What are the things you wonder about in your idle moments? What are your little curiosities and whims? Hopes, fears? What are the textures and rhythms of your days, the things you see, the things you smell, the voices that you hear? What are the memories you carry each morning, the ones you wish you could bury, the ones you wish you could hold closer? The friends you wish you knew better, the passing strangers who pique your interest?

What are the stories of your life? The ones you'd tell about yourself, and the ones that others might tell in your passing?

I ask these questions because I'm curious. If you are reading this -- a stranger on the internet, a member of my own immediate family -- then I am genuinely curious what the answers are for you.

Who are you? Why are you? What is a story of your life? Not the story, because there's never only one. But a story.

Pick one out. Tell it. A small one, if you like, as brief as a haiku. Or a great one about an earthquake that shook your foundations. Whatever you like, whenever you like, as opaquely or transparently as you like.

But tell it honestly, or as close to honestly as any of us ever really can. Allow for uncertainty, for imperfection, for humanity and mistake. Avoid platitudes and easy endings and the just-add-water formulaic sentiments that come packaged in words that aren't your own. Tell your story. Open a window into a world that is deeply familiar to you, but unlikely to be known to others.

Because that's the value of the exercise. If we want to know each other better (and I think that we do, some of us), then we have to be willing to reveal something of our selves to the world. We have to share those stories for others to hear.

And they have to be real, not airbrushed clean of flaw. Which can be scary: you open yourself to the judgment of the world, and also to its indifference. You expose yourself for what you are: a person, an imperfect creature fumbling through an imperfect life. You confront the limitations of your skills as a writer and a thinker (or at least I do, constantly).

But it's the only way to learn, and the only way to help others learn what your life is like. Perhaps the only way to answer questions that you might not have considered in such bare terms.

These things are worth knowing. For yourself, for the world, and for those close to you. I don't think it's any accident that Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote Between the World and Me as a letter to his son; I think that's a useful way to sharpen your focus as to what matters and what you wish to say. I wish my own parents would write letters of their lives to me. Perhaps someday they will.

I can hope. And I can encourage you, as I would encourage them, to write such letters of your own life. Put them on the internet for all the world to learn, and put them aside for your children or parents or unknown strangers to read someday in the future, quietly, when they look back on these days and want to know who you were.

What were the stories of your life? Who were you? Why?

Wine Reviews

In this occasional feature I am going to post my on-and-off wine reviews.

I don't drink wine. I don't know the first thing about wine. The topic of Wine has always loomed before me as a dense and impenetrable thicket of fancy jargon and improbable descriptions and forbidding price tags. Nothing about it seemed the least bit inviting, and so I stuck with cocktails, which (to me) taste better, feel more approachable, and will get you drunk much faster with way fewer calories.

But for the manuscript that I'm currently supposed to be working on (this being the as-yet-nonexistent romance project), I'm going to finally have to get over myself and learn a little bit about wine, if only enough to write characters who also don't know very much but have occasionally tasted a glass or two.

So here are some of the things I've tried, and what I thought each time.


Chateau de Montfort Demi-Sec Vouvray (2015): a "young, bright, green-gold" lightly sweet white wine from the Loire Valley, made with chenin blanc grapes.

Tastes like a springtime full of promise in someone else's life. This person probably owns a bonnet and a basket full of flowers. I wouldn't be surprised if Disney animals sing in her footsteps. She is definitely blonde.


Warre's Warrior Finest Reserve Port (2015): a "classic, elegant, ruby-red" port*.

I don't actually like George Orwell's 1984 very much; in my opinion Orwell is a great essayist but not a great novelist, and that book in particular is, IMO, overrated as hell. The one part of 1984 I *do* like is when Winston finally gets his first taste of wine and, based on having read descriptions in books, he thinks it's going to be sweet and luscious "like blackberry jam" and in fact it is HORRIBLE and he can't believe the disappointment.

That is also how I feel about wine.

Anyway, had Winston tried Warre's Warrior port instead of whatever he actually did drink, he probably would have been a lot less disappointed, because this here is a candy-coated powerhouse slammer of a wine. It is sweet and luscious and also it will bionic elbow smash your face straight into the ground after a few cups.

I'm a fan.

(* -- fn: apparently Warre's is the oldest mark of port in the world, having been in business since 1670. I did not know this when I bought it, since I blind buy all my picks for this project; my selection process was more or less "well it's not $5 but it's also not $150, cool, let's go with it.")


Antoine Moueix La Fleur Renaissance Sauternes (2013): a "yellow-gold dessert wine with notes of apricot and honey." 70% semillon, 30% sauvignon.

Have you ever dug around in the very back of your pantry and found a can of tomatoes that expired three years ago, but you're desperate and hungry RIGHT NOW and you figure canned goods are okay for basically forever, so you go ahead and pop the can and use it to make something anyway? And it has that really weird acid-y metallic aftertaste that makes you realize, too late, that you just made a terrible life decision?

I think of that as Zombie Apocalypse Aftertaste, in honor of all the zombie videogames where people are forever scrounging precious precious 20-year-old cans of tomato sauce and beans. All their food probably tastes that way. They probably think it's awesome.

La Fleur Renaissance Sauternes tastes that way too. It's fine until you get to the aftertaste and then it's all "woah wiat waht."

I dunno if this was a bum bottle or a bum year or a bum brand (could be any of those things, this bottle was $15 but other years of La Fleur go for > $40), but it was Not Good.

Appropriate for toasting your survival in the zombie apocalypse, otherwise I'd say give it a pass.


Bersano Brachetto d'Acqui (non-vintage, like it explicitly says NON-VINTAGE on the listing because they want to be real clear that this is a wine that doesn't get a number): a "sweet, frothy, sparkling wine inflected with strawberries and rosewater."

Straddles the line between red and rose. In the glass it's red, but spiritually it's cotton-candy pink, so I'm gonna call it a rose and y'all can correct me if that's wrong. (It is not wrong.)

This is a really fun wine, which is not at all the same thing as saying it's a *good* wine, because it is not. It's a powderpuff pink wine in a powderpuff pink cashmere sweater and powderpuff pink marabou heels, and if you tried to subject her to a serious analysis she would demand you stop this car RIGHT NOW, I'M GETTING OUT, because clearly you'd be making fun of her in the most mean-spirited way.

There is nothing serious about this wine. It's lightweight and low-alcohol and fizzy and pretty perfect for a summer night out grilling, because if you don't want to roast marshmallows with the kids then you can have a glass of this stuff instead and it'll be pretty much the same thing.

I think I'm going to write a wide-eyed naive minor character into this manuscript solely so that I can have her mistake a Brachetto sparkly for Champagne. Seems like a reasonable mistake to make at 17, whether you're having your first drink in 1933 or 2017. This is what Champagne *should* be, at least when you're 17.


Barao de Vilar Porto (2011): a "hugely dense wine with immense ripe black fruit and dusty tannins."

I was pretty excited for this one because it was a moderately expensive port (at $70, the second-priciest wine I've bought for this project) and got a rating of 96/100 from Wine Enthusiast magazine, which means it's "top rated" so I was all like "sweet, this one's gonna be AWESOME" and I put it aside to crack open after my Third Circuit argument.

you can see where this is headed

This was my biggest disappointment thus far. It is worse than the Zombie Apocalypse bottom-shelf Sauternes, which I actually bought with the full and deliberate knowledge that it was going to be a bottom-shelf dud. This one I expected to be good, and it probably [i]is[/i] good (I dunno, I'll ask some of my friends who actually know things for second opinions), but it is not good to me personally.

Let me rewind here: So way back when, a long long time ago, I used to be in the Conservative Party in college (yeah yeah I know). This was partly because I thought it would be an interesting sociological experiment (WHO EVEN ARE THESE PEOPLE) and partly because I had the hots for this one guy who I'm pretty sure was slightly afraid of me, which of course only made me vastly more into him.

So anyway I was the only non-white person in the Conservative Party and they had all these amazingly hilarious meetings and club rituals that are exactly what you're probably imagining they are (if you're imagining a bunch of dopey 19-year-olds hanging out in Mory's Temple Bar wearing velvet-trimmed smoking jackets and slippers while puffing on cigars and drinking bizarre concoctions out of a double-handled silver chalice then yep, bingo, you've nailed it).

And there was this one dude who was the absolute living embodiment of the Unfortunate Facial Hair Libertarian and he looooved to drink port and bloviate on his political beliefs and hit on girls (whom he clearly expected to be impressed by the first two things), and he was not good at any of those things, and also even as a dopey 19-year-old it was evident to me that libertarians were possibly the most willfully clueless political alignment you could be.

I was not a big fan of that dude. I was also not a big fan of the port he liked to ask girls to sample.

Unfortunately for the version of me that exists some fifteen years later, it turns out that guy had terrible taste in politics but pretty good taste in port (both of which I will attribute to his parents, because he had nothing developed of his own), and Barao de Vilar Porto (2011) is a straight sensory flashback to me trying to fend off a 19-year-old legacy admission with bad facial hair in the sample room of a Connecticut cigar bar.

PASS.

Melania, Nude Modeling, and Misogyny

Yesterday I put up a Facebook post that said this:

I deeply dislike the line of criticism that argues that Melania isn't "classy" because she took some nudie pics as a model.

The Birth of Venus is a nudie pic. The Venus de Milo is a nudie sculpture. Marilyn Monroe was the first-ever Playboy centerfold. Those are all pretty classy things! (Also, I will fight you if you want to argue about Marilyn.)

There are other criticisms one can make of Melania (although, frankly, I'm not a huge fan of those, either), but the nude modeling one particularly annoys me because hey guys, we're supposed to be the enlightened feminist body-positive side out here, and that there is some straight-up misogynist prudery.

Defining "classy" as something that exists in opposition to art or photography or (gasp!) the female body is, in my opinion, not great. I'm not surprised when the right does it; that's what they do. I am, however, pretty disappointed whenever I see it from the crew that's supposed to be about smashing the patriarchy. Because that right there? That is holding patriarchy up high.

Not too surprisingly, it turned out to be a pretty hot-button topic that got a bunch of comments and some spirited discussion. DJT and the people around him are a topic about which lots of people feel strongly; the tangled knot of sex/nudity/decency is another topic about which lots of people feel strongly. For the most part, I felt the discussion was thoughtful, insightful, and as measured as any quasi-political discussion can reasonably be these days, although a few times I had to clarify that my intention was not to defend Melania as a person (my purpose with this discussion was and is to use her as an interesting and challenging prism through which to approach, question, and examine these ideas, not to defend her life choices or hold her up as a figure of admiration), and as with any fast-paced conversation on the internet, a few of the finer points probably got lost in the avalanche all around.

But, again, for the most part I thought it was a good and useful discussion, especially given that the original post was semi-flippant and not too obviously a springboard for a serious examination of these issues. I think that the intersections between modesty and frankness, "decency" and how its varied interpretations intersect with feminism, celebration vs. exploitation of female sexuality, etc., are not discussed often or candidly enough for many people to have clearly separated out why they feel as they do, what they think the salient differences really are between art and porn, moral and immoral, "classy" and degraded/-ing, and so on. Almost everyone has strong feelings about at least some of the issues tangled up in that ball, but few people have really taken the time to figure out why.

And since DJT and his coterie are very public figures, we're all familiar with them and all have at least a basic idea of where the conversation might begin. Accordingly, the current First Lady provides (in my opinion) a valuable opportunity to discuss some of these ideas.

Anyway, things trucked along for a while and then one particular comment thread took a turn that just happened to hit on a lot of the reasons that I made the original post in the first place (namely, my belief that stigmatizing women's sexuality has a lot of negative ripple effects for a lot of people [mostly, although not exclusively, women] throughout society, and that for this reason it is advisable for us all to consider carefully what we wish to criticize in this sphere and why).

I'm indebted to this commenter, because when I saw this comment I wanted to go "YES! THAT'S IT! THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT I WAS TRYING TO PUSH BACK AGAINST HERE." But I didn't, because it was around 4 am at that point and I was pretty brain-blasted after a long day at work and I had to take the dogs out. So, instead, I filed it away to write a blog post about later, and now here we are.

Here's the comment that struck me so hard (lightly edited to remove the first and last sentence and insert some paragraph breaks, otherwise reproduced as originally posted):

You can't have it both ways. You can't drive down the street without seeing young girls in shorts up the crack of their ass, boobs hanging out and 4 lbs of makeup. You have music calling them bitches and whores. Magazines that pray upon their opinions about their appearance. We have young girls getting pregnant that are 12 years old and others giving blow jobs. Our society sexualize women from the day they enter the world. 

Most of us would prefer to be valued for character, our heart, our mind. We rant and rave because we are paid less, our ideas and intellect aren't valued. We don't want to be just sex objects. We don't want that to be what young girls learn or how they see themselves. On the other hand you have women like Melania who help teach those young girls exactly what is important. If you are sexy enough, pretty enough, crafty enough, and know how to use your body then men will want you. And if men want you they will take care of you. You can try but you can't separate Melania from that message. 

We all know how this works. We've all had the doe-eyed, big boobed nitwit at the office. Melania isn't some free spirit forward thinking feminist. She's got the oldest game in the book. Sex sells and as long as there is testosterone it always will.

What strikes me most immediately here is how strongly and (in my reading, although I might well be mistaken) unconsciously the argument grants the continued and unchallenged existence of male supremacy in this world, and therefore proceeds to the conclusion that the "correct" course for women is, presumably (and, again, in my reading) to desexualize themselves. I want to argue against that, but I also want to take a moment to pick apart what I think are the essential underpinnings of this worldview.

The "young girls" who put themselves on display are described in terms that portray them as both victims (prematurely sexualized, manipulated into adopting roles and postures they don't fully understand and whose consequences they cannot appreciate) and sirens (painted and underdressed "with boobs hanging out"). The possibility that they might simply be experimenting with and play-acting at adult roles (as preteens and adolescents are wont to do, and as is necessary for eventual adulthood), as innocently and safely as a girl trying out her mother's high heels and lipstick in her own bedroom, doesn't seem to exist in this scenario. Instead, the outcome that's contemplated is that 12-year-olds will get pregnant and give blowjobs. Wear revealing clothing --> turn into a slut, get knocked up.

Curiously, men are absent and yet ever-present in this scenario. Music calls these girls "bitches and whores." Magazines prey on their insecurities. Our society sexualizes girls from inappropriately young ages. But the fact that (predatory) men do have to be involved somewhere for pregnancies and blowjobs is never called out. The focus is not on them, but on the girls for inappropriately expressing their sexuality. Implicitly, the girls are condemned for not doing enough to protect themselves, or for playing with fire and getting burned, but the fact that the "fire" in this scenario has its own moral agency is not contemplated or questioned. It just is, an elemental and eternal fact of the universe, a natural hazard against which girls have to be prepared to defend themselves (by reining in their own displays and presenting an appropriate demureness, but not by challenging the men around them).

The next two paragraphs exhibit similar assumptions. If women present themselves as sexy, that is the reason they're paid less, their ideas are devalued, their worth reduced to sexual appeal. The danger is other women -- and, specifically, other women's sexuality -- not the men evaluating them. The possibility that (predatory) men might not be the arbiters of a woman's worth, or might choose to evaluate their employees fairly -- maybe your boss is a woman! maybe he's a guy who's just a decent person! -- is not entertained. The world is presented as a zero-sum game in which scheming beauties (who are simultaneously empty-headed, "big-boobed nitwits") win by manipulating men at the expense of the plainer but more skilled.

(As a footnote, this also sets up a no-win scenario for pretty women. If a woman happens to be "doe-eyed" and "big-boobed" but is also serious and skilled, where does she fall? Does she, like Emma Watson, become an illustration of the proposition that "our culture cannot handle a woman who is both sexual AND serious"?)

In my reading, then, that comment exhibits a deeply misogynistic worldview. Which is not to say that it's entirely inaccurate in its observations. Girls do get sexually exploited at disturbingly young ages, and there are workplaces that still run on a Helen Gurley Brown-esque, early-'60s model of overt sexual favoritism. Not many (and certainly not any with a half-competent HR department), but they exist.

But, by and large, we recognize these things as unacceptable, and we recognize that the crux of the problem does not lie with the women. I was sexually assaulted on a public bus when I was 10; it wasn't because I was made up or dressed alluringly (I was an extremely plain child, I'd even say "grubby"), but because a random middle-aged dude on a public bus was a pervert. There are workplaces that place more emphasis on women's appearances than their job skills, but generally we recognize that the problem isn't with the short-skirted secretary but her boss.

And -- this is where we circle back to my original post and original point -- I think the best curative to these toxic scenarios is not to condemn the women or tell them to repress their sexuality, but to help them explore and understand themselves without stigma or shame, and also to place condemnation where it accurately belongs: not on a 12-year-old girl experimenting with makeup and clothes, but on the man who thinks it's acceptable to put his penis down her throat. Not on women who were born with big breasts or like to wear false eyelashes, but on the people (men and women) who think that appearance gives them license to devalue those women's ideas and intellect.

My belief is that openness and frankness and tearing away the shame is both kinder and more effective social policy. Broadly speaking, it empowers women, keeps them safer, and breaks some of the levers that are used to hold them down.

Girls are going to experiment. It's part of growing up. The best thing we can do for them is not yank away the lipstick (if you don't get your beginner makeup mistakes out of the way when you're 12, you might wind up making them when you're 22, which -- take it from me -- is way worse), but to give them a space to explore and experiment safely, with clear and calm parental guidance that gives them the freedom to learn without abandoning them to fall too far. We would do better, too, to arm them with the knowledge (about contraception, about STDs, about the emotional and mental health aspects of sexuality) that they need to safeguard themselves. Ignorance never keeps anyone safe; it only makes them easier prey.

And girls are going to make mistakes, as we all make mistakes, because that too is part of life and how we learn. I think destigmatizing those mistakes goes a long way toward neutralizing their corrosive impact, though. So much of the shame and moral panic about women's sexuality is used to coercive effect: the high-school girl who gets blackmailed with her nudie pics; the one-time porn starlet who feels locked into a job she no longer wants because, having been made "dirty," she feels like she can't do anything else; the stereotypical but too-frequently-real rape victim who blames herself because she wonders if wearing a short dress and getting a little too drunk meant she was asking for it.

It's all part and parcel of the same thing. It is all shame and stigma used to strip women of agency, cow them into compliance, and reinforce the patriarchy.

And I will yell about it all day every day forever, if need be.

Pride and Process

Something I've been kind of poking on-and-off at is what it means to live a meaningful life, and how one defines that, and how one gets there. I'm going to poke clumsily at some aspects of that question in this blog, and yes, I'm aware that it's clumsy, and no, this isn't meant to be universal. It's just me talking through some things that have worked for me and that may or may not work for anyone else.

Today, pride and purpose and process, beginning with two observations:

(1) One of the things that happens when people learn that you are "a writer" (meaning, for present purposes, someone who's had one or more books traditionally published) is that lots of them will confide that they also wish to be "a writer" and ask how you achieve that. And the standard answer (which is, again, simultaneously facile, true, and misleading) is that "if you write, you are a writer."

(2) One of the things that college admissions people supposedly look for is a student who demonstrates sustained passion for one or two endeavors, rather than superficial engagement in a bunch of scattershot activities. For a long time I really didn't understand what that was all about. Now I do, and I wish I could go back and tell my seventeen-year-old self the cheat code to that particular minigame, which confounded me for the longest time.

Anyway, the reason I bring up those two points is this: they're both founded on the fact that, paradoxically, you get much better results and will be much happier in life if you focus on the process rather than the outcome. On doing, rather than on having done.

Staking your sense of self-worth on whether or not you can get a book published is a pretty common pitfall. I mean, I get it; when my first book was out on submission, I really really really wanted somebody to buy it. But, for me, it was never like not getting published was going to destroy my identity as a person. The point wasn't to be A Published Author. The point was to try and write a story that I could have some (perverse, masochistic) fun writing. The point was the process, not the outcome. Write, and you will be a writer. Facile, but true.

Similarly, what I eventually realized (much too late to do me any good, but hey) those college admissions officers were looking for was the same thing: a person driven by the joy of doing rather than the perceived status of "having done"; someone who was engaged by the process of discovering and practicing and the pleasure of doing a thing for its own sake.

Sometimes this means you get really good at a thing. Sometimes it doesn't. In either case, that isn't the point. Gerald Mazorati has written movingly about the pleasures of

improving at a demanding skill or set of skills — a craft, a discipline. I have in mind something that will take years to get proficient at, something that there is a correct way of doing, handed down for generations or even ages, and for which there is no way for you to create shortcuts with your cleverness or charm. Playing the cello, maybe. Or cabinetry. Or, in my case, tennis, serious tennis.

Mazorati took up tennis in his mid-50s. He knew going in that he was never going to be great at the sport, and he found that knowledge freeing:

Here’s a blessing of late-middle age (and there are few): You will not be inhibited from improving by the perceptions of others. No one is paying attention to you! Haven’t you noticed? And unlike a pro athlete or master-level practitioner, you will not be committing to anything — be it swimming or judo or open-sea sailing — that you have either any serious talent for or the body to get great at. You are not young, and learning and improving at a sport or activity will not make you feel young in any physical way. In fact, you will feel more consciously and intensely to be of a certain age, which I happen to think is a benefit.

[...]

Which brings us to the beauty of a disciplined effort at improvement and, I think, the only guaranteed benefit of finding something, as I found in tennis, to learn and commit to: You seize time and you make it yours. You counter the narrative of diminishment and loss with one of progress and bettering. You spend hours removed from the past (there is so much of it now) and, in a sense, the present (and all its attendant responsibilities and aches), and immerse yourself in the as yet. In this new pursuit of yours, practice is your practice: It comes to determine the way you eat and sleep and shape your days. It is not your life, but one of the lives that make up your life, and the only one for which looking ahead, at least for a little while longer, is something done without wistfulness or a flinch.

Process, not outcome.

There are several excellent benefits to approaching life in this way. One, as Mazorati noted, is that "you counter the narrative of diminishment and loss with one of progress and bettering" -- true not only in the context of aging, but whenever one might be tempted to take the measure of one's own life and find it wanting. It might not be great today; it can, at least in this specific context (and really, that's enough to sustain hope) be better tomorrow. Another, also as he noted, is that it affords a certain discipline and structure that can be invaluable to those feeling directionless. You are on a journey, and that pulls you forward; you must master certain skills along the way, and that gives you purpose.

It teaches you resilience. You learn that failure stings mightily, but that it's survivable. A failure is something that happens, but it is not who you are.

And you learn that there's a deep satisfaction in attaining the small triumphs and moments of beauty that are earned along the way. It is satisfying to work at something and come out of it with a delicious pie or a cleverly knitted hat or an improbable, beautiful shot in a tennis game. It's satisfying in a way that only comes out of repeated failures and struggles. It isn't really the pride of a perfect performance I'm talking about here -- no pie I ever bake is going to be as perfect as one of Magpie Bakery or the Hungry Pigeon's; pros are pros for good reason -- but of seeing your own personal improvement and understanding, for yourself, what it took to get there.

Focusing on process takes you down unexpected, interesting, and occasionally rewarding roads. Sometimes you do get good at a thing, and sometimes that opens up new opportunities. Even if you don't, the pursuit of process often introduces you to whole new worlds of teachers and fellow students, of unimagined expertise in the most arcane subjects, of new perspectives on the world and previously unseen connections between facts and ideas. You find a community bound together by enthusiasms, and that's worth a lot in this atomized world.

The outcomes become secondary, almost unimportant. They're markers of where you've been, but they aren't the endpoints of the journey. And the opinions of others, outside of your coaches and knowledgeable colleagues (which are valued for information and not for judgment), are of no consequence at all.

A funny thing happens once you get to a place you've been headed for a long time: you crest the hill, you reach the landmark, and... you find that the trail keeps going on the other side. If you're focused on process, this is an excellent development: there's more to do! Farther to go! But if you're focused on outcome, it can be crushing: there is not and will never be an end. Not really. There's always another mark, a little higher and harder, just a tiny bit out of reach.

And that's the paradox of pride and process. If you're focused on the journey, on learning and bettering yourself as its own pleasure rather than to reach some external objective, you're more likely to reach your goals. You are, in short, more likely to do something worth being proud of.

But you also become less dependent on that. You realize that the external markers are just that, external and arbitrary and ultimately unimportant. You become a person who can be proud of achievements, but who doesn't need to be.

It's like a koan in a kung-fu movie: to achieve pride, you must forsake pride.

But it's true, or at least it was for me.