Bianca Steele

Silly Novels Interviews by Lady Novelists, by George Eliot Katie Roiphe

Claire Messud’s latest novel, The Woman Upstairs sounds interesting, certainly more so than her previous one, The Emperor’s Children (oh no, another novel about young people obsessed with David Foster Wallace!).  The title makes me think of Hilary Mantel’s early novel, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, which is one of my favorites, an Orwellian gaslight mystery set behind the walls of purdah, but it could also fit well into my next “Boston-area novels” series, if there ever is one.  But on the Internet, there’s been much brouhaha over the interview Messud did with Publisher’s Weekly, part of which, presumably edited down from something a bit longer, they published online.  As the interview presented, the interviewer, a woman, asks Messud, “What are we to make of Nora Eldridge, [the protagonist]?  Because she is angry, really angry.”  Messud answers at length, talking about the kind of novel she intended to write.  The follow-up question is, “I wouldn’t want to be friends with Nora, would you?”  To this, Messud replies, in essence, that the question is a mistaken one.

Writing a brief piece in Salon, David Daley characterizes Messud’s response as a statement that the interviewer’s question was sexist.  Let’s leave aside the definition of “sexist.”  Obviously what is meant is that the question wouldn’t have been asked of a male novelist, and that it’s wrong to have different standards for women and for men.  Messud alludes to this question herself, earlier in the interview: she explicitly says that she had decided she wanted to see a book about a woman who has characteristics she only sees in novels (which she thinks are very good, and in fact loves) that are written by men about men.  In other words, she recognizes that there’s a kind of novel that’s generally written only by men.  She also explains that she doesn’t believe that fact equates to a prescription that has to apply to her.

At this point in the interview (as it was published), the interviewer suggested that she thinks characters in fiction ought to be likable, and that Messud’s character isn’t.  Messud responded by objecting to the question.  She listed, again, some of the same novels she’d mentioned earlier: those she’d already identified as the kind only men, and not women, are thought to be able to write.  There are two ways of taking this.  First, she could be saying, “Surely you think Sabbath’s Theater is great?  Then why do you criticize me?  It must be because I'm a woman.”  Or, she could be saying, “You must think Sabbath's Theater is bad, too, and it isn't.”  I think it’s more likely she intended to say the second of those, which is a common enough sentiment.  But it was actually Messud who’d brought up the question of gender in the first place, and it’s not that surprising if people took her to be saying the first.

But then Katie Roiphe chimed in, linking to Daley’s piece.  Where Daley had mildly noted that Messud implicitly criticized the reviewer’s question for being sexist (Daley mentions Laura Miller’s review of the novel in his own publication, though he doesn’t link to it[1]), Katie Roiphe attacks Messud for implicitly criticizing the reviewer’s question for being sexist.  It’s worth noting that Roiphe doesn’t only attack Messud for the accusation of sexism, Roiphe actually goes on to attack Messud for being insubordinate towards the interviewer.

([1] For that matter, it’s odd that Slate has a column called “Double X,” which is written by Roiphe, and a blog called “XX Factor,” which is written by a slate of four women.)

And as is usual for Roiphe, she gives a whole pseudo-Freudian explication of why Messud might do that and why it’s wrong.  What she says about Claire Messud is, in short, this: that she displays a “tendency to blame the world for a blanket, raging sexism that only partly exists,” that she unfairly “devour[s] her interviewer with her superior, more sophisticated literary approach,” that she throws a tantrum at the injustice of being subjected by a journalist to “indignities, like being asked if you would be friends with your character.”  This is vaguely less insufferable, actually, than Roiphe’s columns so often are.  Here, at least, she’s attributing to Messud attitudes that other writers have laid claim to, in similar situations.  She simply describes those attitudes in a one-sided way that makes them and Messud all look like whiny adolescents—that misunderstands the situation entirely (as if the idea that novelists might know more about literature than book-journalists do, for instance, was entirely novel)—and sets Roiphe up, if only for the amount of time it takes the reader to finish her column, as a voice of reason, almost as a saint.  No one will ever blame Katie Roiphe for seeing sexism where it doesn’t exist, especially if she accuses every other woman of that failing first (though you’d think she’d already secured herself on that point by now).  The most infuriating among Roiphe’s columns, at least for me, are those where she attacks women she simply doesn’t like, for some reason she doesn’t bother to articulate, but has something to do with some domestic task they do and she doesn’t herself think is necessary.  Then, she tars them with the “probably a man-hating feminist” brush, not to mention the (I am not making this up) “probably watches TV with her husband instead of having sex with him, which is a thing I’d never do” brush.  This one is just barely normal enough that many readers, following the link from other mentions of the column, won’t know why Roiphe’s name arouses such outrage.

The really bizarre thing in this case is that Roiphe goes on to give Messud publishing advice.  I suppose what’s going through her mind is, “She’s a writer (a little like me), I have a newspaper column, maybe she would like to someday have a newspaper column, so I’ll tell her what she would need to change if she’d like someday to be me.”  And the advice that Roiphe gives Messud, who’s just published her fifth novel (and is two years older than Roiphe is), is based on Roiphe’s experience with her first book of nonfiction, which she published when she was twenty-five.  Roiphe made such and such mistakes, she says, she learned some lessons in such and such a way, and made such and such changes, and she’s sure Messud can profit from making exactly the same changes.  What it comes across as, however—at best—is tribalistic defense of a journalist (the Publishers’ Weekly interviewer) against a perceived attack from an outsider.

Scott Esposito and D.G. Myers have literary responses to the fracas.  Myers’ is colored by the fact that he habitually defends exactly the kind of novel Messud would seem to be defending in the interview, as here, in a discussion of Roth’s The Human Stain, which happens to be just about at the point in Roth’s career where I started questioning my ability to go along with what he seemed to be up to. -via  For that matter, so does Mr. Claire Messud, James “hysterical realism” Wood.

A Blast from the Past, To Cure Grumpiness

I’ve been in a bad mood for a little over a week.  I think it’s because I’ve still got a copy of Backlash in the house.  Every so often I feel compelled to give it another chance.  I pick it up and flip through it.  Oh, the Republican Party decided it wasn’t so much in favor of abortion rights, equal rights and equal pay for women, or NOW, after all.  I can see how that would be disappointing, especially since it made future legislation more difficult.  But is that evidence that US culture is now “backlash culture,” really?  Or: Oh, in the late 1980s there were very few woman attorneys.  But is that evidence that the number of woman attorneys was actually not increasing, or that by 2000 or 2010 we could still expect to see almost no more women working as attorneys than we saw in 1970?  Or: Oh, here are a small handful of self-help books, summarized at length, that tell women how to attract men who want to marry them; and the writers think being a feminist or speaking your mind won’t do it.  But are they so very different from the self-help books of any other decade?  Are they even typical of the 1980s?  Are they evidence that the feminist-inclined young woman of the 1980s is internally conflicted, demonstrating by her actions and beliefs that she’s under pressure to be less independent and more childlike than she feels is right?  And what’s this “feminist psychotherapy” that the author keeps mentioning but doesn't specify?  And: Why does she mention Moonlighting to talk about media coverage of on-set politics between the director and the stars, but doesn’t discuss the show itself, when (though it was awfully entertaining) it would be a better example of backlash culture than any she’s included?  And how could anyone draw political conclusions from the data point, “male fashion designers aren’t very sympathetic to feminist ideas about fashion”?

Now that I’ve gotten that out of my system . . .  I’ll just mention that the second time I picked the book up, someone had said I should read it again, suggesting that there would be some payoff if I read it as evidence for a Marxian or quasi-Hegelian narrative.  And I’ll just say that I tried all the permutations, but none of them worked for me.

I’ve also been grumpy about the bombings at the Marathon.  I live a couple of miles from the marathon route, a couple more miles from the starting line, and like a lot of writers from Hopkinton, where the race starts, it feels irrationally like it hit especially close to home.  Friday seemed quiet, though there couldn’t have been that much of a drop-off in commuter traffic, and apparently traffic on the main roads was still pretty heavy.  Ungraciously, it occurred to me that if Boston and Newton weren’t opened up, people would have to come here to Framingham if they wanted a semblance of night life, and it would be even harder to drive anywhere or get a restaurant table.  And as with the Newtown shootings, and the rape case from India right after it, I haven’t been able to put on NPR the way I like do at lunchtime.

So here are two clips of dances by Mark Morris.  The first, “Dad’s Charts,” is of a solo performance by the choreographer from 1980.  The second, from the Met production of John Adams’ opera Nixon in China, is “The Red Detachment of Women.”  Both are pretty cool.

Faludi’s Backlash contra Carol Gilligan and Difference Feminism

In the comments section of Crooked Timber, in which I mentioned Susan Faludi’s Backlash (first published in 1991), Corey Robin (whose book I really liked) accuses me of talking about a book I’ve only skimmed.  That isn’t true, but I’m not going to argue with him on his blog about the way he teaches the book (though I think it might be useful to raise the question why a partisan contribution to a political debate that’s still going on should be treated as canonical history).

So I borrowed the book from the library for the third time and sat down with it.  Why?  Do I feel guilty for opining on a book I haven’t formed a proper opinion on yet?  No.  Am I going to finish it this time?  Probably not.  But I’m still too annoyed to put it down.  On the one hand, there’s no way in heaven or hell I’m going to be able to read this book without whining in writing about how annoying it is.  On the other hand, if it’s so easy to criticize that I have to ask myself why in the world it was published, why would I want to bother reading it at all?  But having a blog means that whining in my private notes can be transformed into something that seems almost but not quite like useful activity.  Even if nobody actually reads it.

So: one thing, at least, even if the rest of it stays in my scratch files:

(Okay, I feel bad now, because I saw that today is Susan Faludi’s birthday.  Happy Birthday!  But I’m supposed to write a thousand words and then sit on them for twenty-four hours?)

In the couple of hours I spent with the book yesterday, I was intrigued by Faludi’s treatment of Carol Gilligan and her book In a Different Voice [1].  There’s more about this discussion a little farther down, but I wanted to note a paragraph from a review of Backlash, by Jean Bethke Elshtain, in the conservative Catholic magazine, First Things:

“When I was an undergraduate in the 1960s out in the Western provinces (Colorado, it was), my instructors (Democrats to a man, no women in what was called the History and Government Department at Colorado State University in those benighted times) not only encouraged me to make the most of myself, they taught me that conspiracy theory was the hobgoblin of little minds, like those of the local John Birchers. We studied one of their texts in a Government course, unpacking the way the author crossed every t and dotted every i with his overriding paranoid theory, if it may be called that, that the Communists and their dupes ran everything, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. He had lots of facts too. It all made sense—if you shared the initial paranoid starting point. We mocked this stuff and marveled that anyone could believe it. The Birchers were pretty much defeated by this sort of humorous dismissal, as was a local group that launched a campaign against the Beatles as the instruments of Satan.”

In most of the public libraries where I’ve lived since I graduated from college, Elshtain’s books have been shelved under “feminism.”  She is a person whom Backlash does not mention.

The third section of Backlash lists a string of anti-feminist figures of the 1980s, ending with right-wing feminist Sylvia Ann Hewlett (Faludi calls her a “neofeminist”), Second Wave feminist pioneer Betty Friedan, and psychologist Carol Gilligan.  What are Friedan and Gilligan doing there?  Friedan wasn’t willing to give up the idea of traditional femininity that some of her younger colleagues in the movement wanted to reject.  Faludi accuses her of being unaware that her rhetoric is borrowed from the right; and of thinking, or at least writing, in such a muddled way that it’s impossible to tell what she really believes. 

As for Gilligan, on close inspection, the chapter is actually in praise of her.  Faludi begins the discussion by attacking difference feminism, after correctly noting that it was the preferred stance of feminist academics and theorists throughout the 1980s.  She goes on, also largely correctly, to introduce Gilligan as a participant in that same school.  She incorrectly claims that those who championed “difference” tended not to care about equality.  Then she moves on to the media discussion of Gilligan’s work.  At this point, the argument shifts to an attack on the media for taking Gilligan up as an example of their preferred narrative.  For several pages, Faludi discusses Carol Gilligan’s own statements, in which she attempted to show that the broad narrative painted by the media wasn’t an accurate representation of  her work, and a critique by another scholar, pointing out flaws in Gilligan’s research.  (This section could serve as a good illustration of some of the flaws introduced by Faludi’s writing style, which uses the journalistic, faux-objective, non-voice “voice,” in which the point of view and even apparent argument meanders from here to there and back again, following the train of thought of each major source, in turn.)  She concludes that Gilligan’s work is very important, and largely correct, but doesn’t actually make the claims most people (misled by the media) believe it does, and (as shown by Zella Luria’s scholarly critique) properly understood, only makes very modest claims in the first place.

So this chapter, like the rest of the book, is an attack on the mass media for promoting anti-feminism.  It’s not an attack on Carol Gilligan or her work.  It is an attack, also, on difference feminism.  But Gilligan, the only scholar Faludi actually discusses [2], is not (as Faludi argues) a difference feminist[3], and so her work is not part of difference feminism, and so she’s fine.  She’s a victim of the media[4].  It remains unclear why Gilligan was included in the list of horribles at all.  Why not describe a more typical member of the difference-feminist crowd?  Perhaps it’s only because Faludi wanted to write a book about the state of media coverage of feminism in the late 1980s, and Carol Gilligan had gotten a lot of press.

Is it also an attack on difference feminism?  It’s hard to say.  By the end of the chapter (save for a cryptic reference to the feminist scholarly journal, Signs), the reader has forgotten that “feminist scholarship conferences [were] awash in papers on women’s special virtues [emphasis added].”  We’re back to an attack on the media, and the media’s putative invention of an anti-feminist narrative, and an unnuanced defense of “feminism” with no apparent effort to investigate what people mean by the word.  In 1991, to be sure, it could seem unclear whether difference feminism would be a flash in the pan, or whether it would endure.  I’ve never been an enormous fan of it myself.  But it seems unseemly to attack it in the same breath as Hayes Tim and Beverly LaHaye[5].  (Here, as in other places in the book, I imagine I hear Camille Paglia off in the wings, waiting for her cue.)

Moreover, there’s that huge nugget of cultural criticism clogging up the lion’s share of the book.  A commenter at CT pointed out, helpfully, that criticizing popular culture is not, by any means, the only thing Faludi does in Backlash.  But actually doing the math shows that the popular culture section makes up a whopping one-third of a nearly 500-page book.  It comes as the second section of the book, and the first substantial section, following the kind of historical survey that you might find in an academic book, and that many readers will presumably skip.  And much of it consists of the kind of movie and television criticism that is very, very closely affiliated with difference-feminist ideas.  In other words, a difference feminist would agree with what Faludi says in this section.  A difference feminist, talking to another feminist and finding that she disagrees with Faludi’s criticism of the shows she discusses, would point to theories and writings from difference feminism in support of her own views.

I’m not saying that Faludi is arguing in bad faith in either one of those sections.  Here, she appears to be in agreement with what, say, a Second Wave feminist might say: both that difference feminism is wrong and actually anti-feminist, and that those movie and television critiques are actually correct.  Feminism in the 1980s and 1990s was fraught and tangled.  But, also, this puts Faludi in much the same position as Friedan.  Whom she attacked as on a par with Allan Bloom, George Gilder, and Phyllis Schlafly.  Why were these writers included in this book in this way?  And now the reader is back at the beginning again.

 

[1] I look forward to returning this to the library, so my four year old will stop trying to convince me that it’s a book about animals.  Because people don’t have different voices.

[2] She mentions three other books, including Suzanne Gordon’s Prisoners of Men’s Dreams, in introducing the topic, by way of demonstrating that bookstores and publishers were marketing a “difference” narrative.

[3] For what it’s worth, Google Search completion begs to differ.

[4] Says Faludi, who writes for the Wall Street Journal.

[5] Who appear in the index under the name Tim Lataye.

Morozov v. Johnson

In the past I’ve found it hard to follow the internal arguments about whether “faith in the Internet” has been somehow inflated.  Besides reviews in magazines, there was Tom Slee’s three-part discussion of Evgeny Morozov’s attempted takedown of enthusiasts, The Net Delusion.  More recently, Morozov wrote a scathing review of Steven Johnson’s book, Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age.  Johnson replied, and Morozov replied to the reply: Johnson “doesn’t understand my critique.”  I don’t think Morozov shows anything of the kind.  What he shows is that Johnson doesn’t accept the assumptions that Evgeny Morozov claims underlie Johnson’s own argument.  Johnson and others describe a more or less loose collection of progressive tendencies that can be enabled either by the Internet or by institutions that are like the Internet in certain relevant ways: he describes what those ways are.  But that isn’t enough for Evgeny Morozov.   He wants to push the idea that there’s a thing called “Internet-centrism,” a real thing, the nature and so on of which he thinks people ought to understand before they dare to talk about its effects publicly.  Yet he himself can’t or won’t explain what he means by it.  Equally, he can’t or won’t find any public, human representative of it who accepts the label for himself.  He uses the word “Internet-centric” like the name of a disease; you wouldn’t expect a sociopath to accept the label for himself, either. 

Some questions about why Morozov comes down so hard on Johnson:

Does Morozov really think Johnson should not have been allowed to write a popular, journalistic book about a contemporary social trend without having first written a Ph.D. dissertation on all the college professors who had imagined and written about the characteristics of not-yet existing social trends, in articles they expected only other college professors to read?  Presumably he would have had to incorporate the dissertation directly into each of his books, as well, or Morozov and other reviewers would have no way of telling whether he’d “done his homework” (in Morozov’s words), or not.

Does Morozov really think it’s unreasonable to write a book on the Internet as a tool, without examining other tools in the same book, and presumably allowing those other tools to come out ahead a proportional number of times?  Does he really think it’s irrational for Johnson to “start with his preferred solution—the ‘Internet’” (what’s with those scare quotes, by the way?), as if the Internet didn’t exist yet and Johnson were proposing it to readers as something they might want to ask their governments to produce?  Someone writes a book that says, “Here’s this great new tool, here are some progressive ways to use it,” and Morozov replies, “Why do you think progressive ways to use this tool will arise without any thought?  Why are you looking at this tool at all?  And ‘great new tool’ is a ridiculously utopian turn of phrase.”

It’s possible to wish someone’s books were a little deeper (why I’ve never gotten around to reading Johnson’s books, or other popular “progressive” books, like Chris Mooney’s, or Chris Hayes’s), and to wish there were a little more available at a level between the absolutely journalistic, book that’s really an article with a lot of filler, and the academic journal article available only to college professors on campuses with enough money in their budgets to spring for free access for everyone to the best academic publishers, without needing to jump to attack an author for not being what he’s not.  This is not going to get us better books.  It’s not going to instigate people like Steve Johnson to “step up his game,” in Evgeny Morozov’s opinion.  It’s going to do the opposite: intimidate writers and suggest they ought to lower their sights, lest they be accused, by the likes of Morozov, of pretending to know what they can’t.

P.S.: I didn’t look up his bio until after I had written the above: Evgeny Morozov is not, as I had assumed from his articles, a grumpy Soviet-trained engineer in his late fifties.  He was born in the same year that I graduated from high school, and graduated from Stanford.  Should that change what I think about what he says?  (Certainly, if his ideas about a thing that exists and is called “Internet-centrism” derive from what he learned from studying cutting-edge research in one of the best universities in the world, that’s very different from whether his ideas about it derive from a half-remembered compulsory study of historical materialism, combined with after-hours bull sessions with fellow engineers on Usenet.)

Antiprise and the Internet

(What’s antiprise?  It’s the opposite of expertise.)

If you’ve been on the Internet in the last couple of weeks, you’ve probably run across playwright David Mamet’s weird screed against gun control and Obama.  Now Andrew Sullivan (late of England’s blessed shores) has weighed in (via LGM and Ta-Nahesi Coates).  As Coates notes, Sullivan presents himself as the Voice of Reason as usual.  He characterizes Mamet’s blather quite correctly: “This is a sentence only a teenage anarchist could write.”  Harsh.

And yet Andrew Sullivan goes on to write nearly 650 words, plus a graph that he apparently has spent the time to work out himself (though maybe he’s had his research assistant do it for him), explaining the actual data that would have to be used in order to support Mamet’s factual claims, and explaining how they actually show Mamet’s factual claims are false rather than true.

So I guess Mamet’s essay wasn’t such a waste of dead trees after all.  It’s served an educational function of its own.  And maybe Sullivan’s attack on Mamet, accusing him of being as sheltered and ignorant as “a teenage anarchist,” isn’t as harsh as it seemed at my first, superficial glance.  Maybe it wasn’t an “attack” at all.  A more charitable reading, one that takes Mamet’s importance in the world of thought into account (and the fact that they're both largely on the same side, politically, and neither gains from making the other really look bad), is that Sullivan is recognizing the fact that obviously Mamet was really covertly dramatizing the thought processes of “a teenage anarchist” with whom he obviously disagrees.  Thus, Sullivan is telling readers what Mamet really intended to convey by the piece: “This is a sentence only a teenage anarchist could write.”  Mamet’s piece is clearly the product of an author who believes the opposite of what he says in the Newsweek piece.  He’s just engaging in division of labor.  The American Prospect is right: Mamet isn’t a political analyst.  What he is, clearly, is a prophet.  He’s harsh, scolding, and factually incorrect so that responsible journalists can be bland and informative.  But he’s the prophet and he gets to claim the moral high ground.

Apparently, the information economy of the Internet is that prophets propose, and crowdsource to bloggers to dispose.

(Irony off.)

Should Framingham Still Be a Town? There's Time to Sign the Petition.

The town I live in Framingham, Massachusetts, is incorporated as a town.  This means it's governed by an elected Board of Selectmen and a Town Meeting (as well as a Town Manager, hired by the Selectmen, and various elected and appointed boards, such as the Board of Health and the School Committee).  While many smaller towns in the area still have a Town Meeting that's literally open to anyone who wants to show up and speak, Framingham (with a population of close to 70,000) has an elected town meeting, in which each precinct elects a slate of meeting members.

There's been agitation for a few years to turn Framingham into a city, with an elected mayor and full-time city council.  I don't know all the arguments the advocates are giving, though I've heard suggestions that it would improve efficiency and accountability.  Marlboro, with slightly over half Framingham's size, has always been a city.  I don't know whether it's felt to work well there or not.

But anyway, I think it's worth airing the issues, and the advocates of charter reform have been trying to get signatures to put the question on the ballot this April.  If it passed (the ballot question, not the petition), a charter reform committee would study the question.  According to this article in the Metrowest Daily News, they have until Feb. 5 to get 5,544 signatures, a little over ten times as many as they already have.  If you want to sign and haven't yet, I suppose, you can contact them, or go find the guy who stands in front of Stop & Shop.

Thomas Friedman thinks corporations are people.

In today’s New York Times, Thomas Friedman’s op-ed calls for real collaboration in Washington, like there is in Silicon Valley.  He quotes “an expert on networks who has been involved in several successful startups,” who notes the need for “collaboration both within and between firms,” where “’collaboration’ is defined as something you do with another colleague or company.”  Then Friedman goes on to contrast this with Washington, where it’s known that “collaboration” means always and only working with the enemy.  Silicon Valley gets things done, and Washington (especially nowadays) doesn’t.  So Friedman calls for Washington types to learn from Silicon Valley . . .

. . . but he doesn’t mention people collaborating anywhere in the essay.  Instead he talks about corporations collaborating with one another.  It seems that the idea of individuals, employees, being important, is something he actually can’t begin to imagine.  The people he mentions are: a corporate vice president, the founder of an energy company, a co-founder of LinkedIn, and the current CEO of the same company.  CEO’s and heads of marketing, in the world of the New York Times Business Section (written largely for people who aren’t themselves in business, but want to feel culturally au courant about the economy, as well as the theatre), are the only individuals who matter.

I could go all critical-theoretical, and claim that Friedman is telling us a little bit about The Truth about how the economy works, who is really important in Society right now, and so on and so forth.  But why would you want me to?  Does Thomas Friedman know anything about this world that he hasn’t read in the New York Times, himself?  Why should you, or I, believe that what he says has a basis in anything except his own head?

Finally, two paragraphs before the end of his essay, he mentions developers, the people who do the collaborating.  He refers to a corporation’s “developer community,” people who aren’t formally affiliated with the corporation, and who (if they get paid at all) aren’t paid by the corporation.  They use the software developed inside the corporation—by employee developers—who do, Virginia, exist—in order to produce consumer tools, or the kinds of tools they themselves would like to use, and they’re motivated by enthusiasm for the platform software, and by the wish to create something cool.  But this is not the only model for a company.  It isn’t even the concept Friedman started out with, about five paragraphs back.  Again, I could ask what Friedman may be trying to tell us, by saying this thing that I think is wrong (or, he could argue, that I didn’t already know, that had never occurred to me before).  But why?  What is it that’s supposed to have earned a reader’s trust?

The fact that he doesn’t seem to know this, that it isn’t at all obvious that he knows anything at all about the subject he’s writing on, beyond what a handful of sources, cabdrivers, and people at cocktail parties have mumbled in his presence, has already put me off.  Just in this same paragraph, he seems not even to know that “the developer community” and “headhunters” are different groups of people.  I suppose that a New York Times op-ed writer may be assumed to know the difference.  But the fact remains he wrote a confusing paragraph that doesn’t sufficiently distinguish between them.  No composition teacher would permit this degree of confusion.  Again, why is he supposed to have earned the readers’ trust?

I can only suppose that he really does think corporations are people, and that he understood the quote at the beginning of his essay in precisely that sense.

Okay, Now I Know what 'Mansplaining' Means

This is hilarious (h/t New Apps blog):

At a major conference I attended as a PhD student, I presented a paper on a fraction of my research in hybrid digital and human networks. As the panel concluded, an angry man approached me and accused me of “using” “his” work without citing him. Between the shouting and gesturing, I came to understand that he believed the only possible source of one of my presentation examples was his (unpublished) research. As a novice scholar, I was too stunned by the aggression and implicit accusation to do more than stand there. Eventually he stormed off promising to follow up. A few days later, he emailed me a citation of a forthcoming journal article he had co-written. In his email he insisted I either cease discussing the broad topic or refer to his work *whenever* I did. He also demanded I *never* return to that particular conference to engage in similar discussions. 

I also liked the post titled “Home Economics Is Roughly the Same as Electrical Engineering.”  I’ve actually had the contrary experience.  Someone on a listserv once took the time to e-mail me off-list to explain that when he thinks of engineering, what he thinks of is in fact EE, and that to him software engineering is more on a par, probably, with “domestic engineering”—which I suppose is basically home ec (rather than “social engineering” done by the NSA, as opposed to CIA, or something).  And then again it could have been a woman letting me know what the dominant male culture thinks of what I do for a living.  Really, it could have been. 

On the other hand, some people are just jerks.  I’ve heard similar behavior to some of this—a college junior saying, “if you want to know everything there is about cryptography, come see me, because I did a research paper on it last year,” announcing this to a whole room of undergraduate and graduate students, and at least 80% men.  I’m sure that in private women get a lot more of it, and unattached from any kind of friendly rivalry where the same would be expected in return.  But a lot will be new to people who haven’t thought about it before. 

Also this one.  I have to say, if I ran across that on the Internet (rather than a close friend on Facebook whose judgment I trusted in other things), I’d assume the guy was either mentally disturbed or a character in a Harry Frankfurt essay (that link only works sometimes for me, try this if it doesn't).  At least on Facebook you could ignore the guy, instead of feeling you had to defend your honor and reputation by refusing to let him get the best of you.

Two Stories About Property Rights

First, David Koch (the Koch brothers’ other brother) has asked the government for a land swap that would grant him some lands that are currently public.  The swap would apparently take a corridor of land that has been used as a path into the mountains for more than a hundred years, making the land the path lies along into private property.  Some locals are trying to have the swap blocked.  I’m not a lawyer, but I would have thought that rights-of-way would have some influence in this case.  Yet these aren’t mentioned in the Times story.  Maybe things haven’t gotten to that stage yet.  The controversy seems to revolve solely over ownership. 

The second case, on the other hand, in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, appears to involve deeded rights of access to the beach.  Some neighbors whose land is attached to such rights have built walls that block access for the others.  (In one case, according to the Globe’s reporting, a new deed appears to have been filed that includes more access to the beach than the seller had the right to transfer.)  People who bought beach houses believed they had acquired, with those houses, rights of access to a particular shared section of the beach.  These rights were enumerated in their deeds.  Now, a few of the people who bought houses in the same area seem to have decided they should be able to build on, and to block off from their neighbors as if it were individually owned private property, the part of the beach that was next to their own land. 

From a Really, Really Big Picture point of view, this case might seem to be very similar to the various historical enclosures of various commons, mostly in England.  These took land which all people had a right to use in common, for instance to graze livestock, fenced it, and made it private property.  This process represented an enormous change in the way the economy of England (and the whole of the West) would end up operating.  I suppose it’s arguable that there was no stopping it.  So, from this Really, Really Big Picture point of view, perhaps the Falmouth case is the same.  A rich person took some land that used to be held in common by a group of people, and now it belongs to the rich person: that’s the end of that. 

On the other hand, it doesn’t seem quite legal.  The neighbors, presumably, wouldn’t themselves own Falmouth beach houses unless they were also fairly well off (and judging from what the Globe has reported happening so far, they seem to have the resources to fight this thing).  They’re not exactly peasants, with no written-down property rights and no formal connection to the government, who by virtue of the solely oral nature of their connection to society can have taken away what little they’re—temporarily, an opponent might argue—currently making use of.  It might be difficult for farmers in Colorado, for example, to see themselves making common cause with a bunch of people who are trying to regain beach rights (and I don’t know whether they are also fighting for public rights, such as between the lines of low and high tide, if those were traditionally granted in the area in question either).  But it seems to me that the issues are the same. 

At Crooked Timber, Chris Bertram has written a couple of times about John Rawls’ idea of a property-owning democracy.  Obviously, a property-owning democracy only works if each property owner can defend his own rights against encroachment by their fellow members of the society.  If the society operates under the rule of law, in other words.  A few years ago, a discussion at the same blog of a book by Steven Teles, called The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement, was eye-opening, for me, about the difference between what I supposed was the openness of the law to use by ordinary people, and what is now the case.  This seems to be relevant too.  

Also relevant is the status of the common law.  Somehow—probably largely from watching The Paper Chase—I’d gotten the idea that the common law was very important in the United States.  But checking more recently, for example, in reference books, I read lots of things that suggested I’d been under a misapprehension.  And regardless of the status of the common law in, for example, federal law, I don’t know how Colorado ranchers would view it.  Is the common law, for them, a bulwark against the tyranny of government?  Or, is it “federal” interference with their local rights?

Scandals

If you follow these kinds of things, you know that there have been a number of plagiarism scandals in journalism recently, particularly in the zone where journalism intersects with book publishing, punditry, and celebrity.  The most notorious of these might be the case of Jonah Lehrer, who was discovered to have been reusing passages from his books in writing for magazine publishers that he represented as new, and to have also both fabricated quotations and used someone else’s work without acknowledgement (ironically, he had just written a book arguing that there is little difference between creativity and borrowing from others).  The most recent of these have involved Fareed Zakaria, a foreign policy analyst and journalist who’s made a bigger name for himself discussing the issues surrounding the War on Terror, and Niall Ferguson, a British and now American historian who to a non-academic’s eyes seems to have moved very quickly from writing a popular book on history to pronouncing on US domestic policies (weighing in heavily on the side of the GOP).

Not surprisingly, the scandals have raised the question of “the blogosphere” or “the Internet” as the putative cause of everything that’s wrong with our public culture.  Henry Farrell, at Crooked Timber, instead questions the culture of paid speeches, but his links focus more conventionally on the state of journalism and its infiltration from below by amateurs without academic or journalistic credentials, and without editors keeping them in line.  (This is going to be much longer than I thought it would be when I started it, and I may have to cut it short to keep it from expanding so broadly that I’ll never be able to finish it.)

Even from the outside, it looks like this has been building for a long time.  It had been building even before Jonah Lehrer was forced to resign from the New Yorker and had his book pulled from the stores by his publisher.  There seems to be an increasing intolerance of what many people realize is, in most cases, considered unacceptable—but which, in some cases, the people in charge seem often to ignore.  Arguments like “this is how it’s always done” aren’t persuading, and the issue doesn't seem to be fading.  Instead, each successive case is worse than the one before, and more and more pressure is being brought to bear, earlier and earlier.

Dan Drezner points out that the dynamic is different from what it might otherwise be because there’s a reliance on bloggers like Evgeny Morozov (whom he mentions) and Ed Champion (whom he doesn’t).  Many (including Drezner, in a passage he quotes by another writer) have pointed out that some of the pressure is coming from reporters who are lower on the food chain, doing what reporters do and holding powerful people to account for what they say, but at the same time (in part because the lowest tier of reporters are often associated with online entities these days) there’s an appearance that the only ones complaining are the ones whose career—probably self-proclaimed and unremunerated—exists only in the digisphere.  Morozov and Champion are guys who fit into the online culture, and who do a lot of good work.  It’s true that they are, at times, very aggressive by academic or ordinary journalistic standards.  At the same time, though, their failure to meet those standards isn’t entirely obvious.  My sense as regards Champion’s Reluctant Habits blog, which I’ve read more than I’ve read Morozov, is that he’s perfectly able to do serious criticism and interviews without taking a bite out of someone.  When he goes on the attack, he seems to give as good as he gets, and he looks like he’s trying (in the same way as Morozov) to uphold certain standards that others aren’t in a position to defend so assiduously.  The guys at the top of the food chain are frequently just as aggressive as they are.  As Drezner points out, the whole “I blame the Internet” meme is practically mooted solely by Ferguson’s treatment of Paul Krugman—who as a New York Times columnist, Princeton University professor, and winner of the Nobel Prize is not exactly a liberal blogger ranting about the news in his pajamas, as Niall Ferguson knows perfectly well—yet even if criticism from the blogosphere is of lesser value, somehow, than criticism from anywhere else, it’s hard to see why aggressiveness ought to be the criterion by which they’re condemned.

Anyway, the cases of Zakaria and Ferguson seem very different.  Zakaria, it seems, although he earned a Ph.D., went straight into journalism and used his expertise to inform his work in producing reporting for the general public.  He never produced an academic book.  All his work with editors and readers came while he was working as a magazine writer.  Ferguson, on the other hand, worked for decades as a professor in academia, and developed habits and expertise related to academia, very specifically.  It was only afterward that he began writing books for a popular audience and working with non-academic editors and with general-interest magazines.  Even if the kinds of differences each ran up against, between how academic and journalistic research and writing regards the use and acknowledgement of sources, were the same, it would be surprising if the ways they each encountered those differences—and the errors they made as a result—were identical in each case.

Zakaria has always written on the same kind of thing, for the most part.  That’s not true of Ferguson.  Zakaria had a very specific take on current events (specifically, US relations with the Islamic world), which was clearly disputed by many educated people, but which was equally clearly informed by Zakaria’s knowledge of the scholarly literature.  Ferguson, on the other hand, has moved back and forth between a narrowly academic subject matter (the history of economics and banking, particularly with reference to the outbreak of war in 1914) and more popular works on everything that might be said about the twentieth century as a whole and what led up to it.  The War of the World, his book on World War II (which I haven’t finished, and which I only found out just now, from Wikipedia, was also a BBC television production) seems to be cut from two different kinds of cloth.  There are the sections that draw very broad conclusions about the world in general, and the course of history, and there are the in-depth accounts of very specific aspects of the war.  To me, the latter are more interesting, but as far as I know books like this one aren’t peer-reviewed, and as a student of history, I wouldn’t take them as gospel.  I would expect to find that the jury is still out on any issue raised by those sections that are even the slightest bit controversial.  I feel less comfortable (though this might be a very personal feeling) assuming what Ferguson says is a reliable statement of any kind of academic consensus than I do with Zakaria.

In comments at Crooked Timber, Ferguson was compared to Christopher Hitchens, which I think is rather telling.  It seems to me that Hitchens can’t really exist in a world in which Ferguson can write an article like the one in Newsweek (which, if you haven’t been following the story, and didn’t look it up already, seems indisputably to cross well over the line that divides “contentious description of disputed fact” from “blatant misrepresentation for which no excuse is given beyond the right of a partisan to break the rules of grammar in order to make the worse argument appear to be the better one”).  Hitchens’ aggressiveness is linked to his not being an academic.  It also depends on his assurance that people like Ferguson will tell the truth in an objective, academic and nonpartisan way, that he will not shade the truth to fit some agenda or other.  Hitchens did not do what Wikipedia would term “original research” (at least in the pieces I read by him, most of which I enjoyed and learned from); he analyzed and reported on what other people (researchers and critics) wrote, drawing on his general knowledge of the world and the places those other people occupied within it.  He doesn’t seem ever to have tried to do both.  He doesn’t seem to have believed both were possible.

Also: I don’t know if Drezner has gotten the target audience of Esquire quite right.  The 1%?  Really?

Why I’m glad I don’t subscribe to HBO (UPDATED)

Because I’d be tempted to watch the new Aaron Sorkin series, The Newsroom.  I kind of liked The West Wing, though towards the end I was watching in the hope they’d bring Mary-Louise Parker’s character back, and Josh post-Leo’s chastising/anointing of him as a successor was becoming slightly annoying.  I even enjoyed Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, though Emily Nussbaum has it about right when she calls that show “horrible and fascinating.”  And I enjoyed The Social Network, regardless of its mistakes.

But, on the other hand, the preview-reviews of Newsroom seem to be converging on the show as middlebrow and excessively self-important, and these adjectives seem all too likely to be accurate.  Are we really being treated to a rewriting of Broadcast News in which the Albert Brooks character—the real journalist—has disappeared, and we’re actually supposed to take William Hurt’s airhead of a pretty-boy anchorman seriously as a commentator on politics and world events?  I’m pretty sure that’s not how the flashforward at the end of that movie has things turning out.  On the other hand, I was talking with a friend about the movie, which I’d seen shortly after I’d graduated from college (in 1987).  When I asked him why he thought Holly Hunter’s character (Jane Craig, the newsroom producer) cried for no apparent reason, at several times throughout the show, he didn’t hesitate.  It was because she was on the wrong track and deep down she knew it.

I didn’t look up Sorkin’s Wikipedia page until after I’d finished my post on The Social Network.  That was when I found out that the people whom Eisenberg’s dialogue in that movie most reminded me of had not only gone to the same high school Sorkin did (Scarsdale), just a couple of years after he graduated, but like him, had participated in the school’s drama program.  So, for me, that dialogue didn’t register as “Asperger’s” or “computer geek” but—especially in the character’s willingness to say those things straight to a woman’s face—the kind of suedo-intellectual, pseudo-Sartrean self-described “brutal honesty” not uncommon among undergraduates of all varieties.

One of those people was the man who told me he had Jane Craig down cold.  I never actually, as it turned out, spent much time around entertainment-industry people (which might explain his uniqueness), but of all the people I’ve ever known with some pretention to know a little bit about film, theater, or television (which he’d studied in university), he had absolutely the worst taste.  Middlebrow?  That’s probably a good word for it.  He gushed over the moral sophistication of Enemy Mine.  He gushed, similarly, over The Company of Wolves.  His hero was Stephen Spielberg, who made money because he made movies people like.  I don’t know how much more middlebrow you can get than that.  Like Sorkin, apparently (see the piece by David Haglund in Slate), he thought of himself as high-minded without being high-brow—unless you can be highbrow and at the same time mouth the moral pieties that will make the majority feel good about themselves.

Anyway, now everything Sorkin touches will remind me of him, and that’s not what anyone wants.

Writing in the Atlantic, on the other hand, Alyssa Rosenberg seems to complain that Sorkin is not middlebrow enough.  (Nussbaum makes a similar complaint.)  She goes beyond my friend’s worship of the market with its razzle-dazzle valuelessness to a kind of deep populism that redefines “what will make money” as “what is really good.”  Sorkin makes fun of cable news, with its partisan polarization, but according to Rosenberg this is what most people like, and they have good reasons to do so.  Sorkin, therefore, is explicitly making fun of his own audience, insulting them to their faces.  I tend to think Rosenberg is tying herself up in knots to make her argument here, because Sorkin most likely not only isn’t making fun of the vision of the world she alludes to, but in fact has probably never actually heard of it.  If she’s right, however, then maybe Sorkin isn’t so middlebrow after all—or maybe Rosenberg has touched on the possibility of a kind of art that eludes all our categorizations so far.

In her review, Nussbaum complains, in part, that the female characters, and their interactions with the men, are stereotyped and vaguely offensive.  She has a point; the same thing over and over again would quickly become tiresome.  If the stories are good, though, it sometimes is actually possible to ignore what gender the characters are, and how they treat their significant others in the mandatory romantic subplots needed to make sure the show has enough “adult” content, and pay attention to something different for a change.

UPDATE:  HBO has decided to do an end-run around my cancellation of their service by making the first episode of the series available online for free.  Oh, well.  Anyway, this article by NPR blogger Linda Holmes is also very good (she says the first episode is easily the best of the four that have been distributed to critics).  So, shall I download the episode to my iPod Classic?

In This Week's Papers: Copley, March, Mehanna, Bellafante, and Roiphe

My daughter now has a tricycle, a helmet, and summer clothes that will still fit her in September.  She also has a promise that we will plant some flowers in front of the house, something I’ve never actually tried to do (I did plant some bulbs about ten years ago, but only some of them came up).  And being between landscapers, I’ve pruned one of a small number of flowering shrubs (a PJM rhododendron, which grows well in this climate, setting its buds before winter and blooming just after the forsythias do, but which isn’t in the standard plant books).  I have all the tools now, from the little snippers through the lopper and the saw, and I’ve almost become comfortable enough with the pruning to no longer fear I’m going to kill the thing, but not quite.  So finding the flowers will be next.

Copley as a British Painter

This article about John Singleton Copley in the Boston Globe is interesting, because it argues that Copley—who has numerous sites around Boston named for him, as a Revolutionary-era hero, and whose paintings, along with those of Gilbert Stuart, form the backbone of the Boston MFA’s eighteenth-century American collection (which is well worth seeing)—didn’t see himself as “American” at all.  He sided with the British Tories, the Loyalists; hated and feared the revolutionary movement; and moved to England to escape the war, spending the rest of his life painting portraits of members English aristocracy and royalty.

His American paintings, though, have an explicitly (little-r) republican, even a Puritan, air to them.  The backgrounds are simple, usually dark brown.  The men depicted wear plain clothes, the costumes of their everyday working life, and hold the implements of their work (often pens and books).  The women’s dress is also relatively plain, compared with European subjects (especially the English princesses who sat for the painters late works), and behind them Copley painted the branches of flowering trees.

It would be easy to conclude that the artist admired such simplicity.  He could have painted his subjects in the traditional style, in a more ornate fashion that might appeal to the art collectors of Europe.  Benjamin Rush—himself a solid advocate of independence and self-governance, along with the education of women—did, in fact, paint in that style, as when he depicted his wife and child using the form of a Madonna by Raphael.  The simplicity, even drabness, of Copley’s American portraits looks like a statement, but it may have only been a matter of the sitters’ own preferences.

Freedom of Speech and the Study of Other Cultures

A professor of political science at Yale, Andrew March, has an op-ed about the Tarek Mehanna case in today’s New York Times.  Mehanna was sentenced earlier this month for materially supporting a terrorist group, mostly on the basis of his online activities publishing translations of Al Qaeda propaganda and defending Al Qaeda online.  There’s no question, as this article about Mehanna’s behavior at his sentencing hearing shows, that he did intend to give Al Qaeda material support and that he did intend to support their self-declared “war” against the United States.

What concerns March is that there seems to be little difference between what he does professionally and what in Mehanna’s case is considered a crime.  Both engaged in discussion to further the knowledge of a group that the US government has declared a terrorist organization.  There is the matter of intention: March’s for pure knowledge, Mehanna’s for proselytization—and presumably the latter was more intent on insistently promoting sympathetic understanding among his correspondents than March insists on.  However, it remains the case that the case involves an unprecedented criminalization of speech.  In fact, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, in another case, himself held that material support did not encompass speech, unless there were explicit coordination from the group supported, which did not exist in Mehanna’s case.  March seems to worry that studying certain topics might become too dangerous for anyone without a kind of license to do so, in the form of a university post or similar professional position.

Even worse, however, in March’s opinion, is that the prosecutors used even Mehanna’s penchant for hiking as an example of his engaging in terrorist activities.  He had translated an Arabic text describing physical fitness as an alternate means of participating in jihad.  March argues that the intention behind the text is to deflect would be terrorists into peaceful community-building.  Yet the list of activities gave prosecutors an opening to describe Mehanna as spending nearly all his time on “jihad,” even when he was apparently innocently working out or talking about working out.  Imagining that this could happen to you—that somebody could twist all your actions around in order to cast an evil light on them, simply on the basis of an unrelated statement—would be infuriating for anyone.  But in the context of the court case, it doesn’t strike me as so worrying.  Prosecutors most likely engage in overstatement all the time.  Their job is to persuade a jury to vote to convict—not to find ultimate truth or be fair to everybody who might someday exercise.  Nobody’s criminalizing hiking.

Is Katie Roiphe Searching for a Female Midlife Judd Apatow?

There’s a new sexy novel for housewives out, by a woman in England, that is the new hot topic of conversation among feminist journalists and bloggers (or was, before Girls went on the air).  One of these, inevitably, was the ubiquitous Katie Roiphe—as Ginia Bellafante points out in the Sunday New York Times.  There’s always something to criticize in Roiphe’s “what’s the matter with women today?” pieces, and what Bellafante points out in this one is that Roiphe—once again—“suggests that career women . . . long to be sexually dominated” and to break out of the feminism-driven self-controlled, competent lives they’ve come to lead.

What I thought was interesting, and what Bellafante doesn’t ask, is, “why sex?”  She interprets Roiphe as wrongly believing that career women still (as they did in the 1990s) fear associating themselves with the label “feminism,” and she interprets sex fantasies like these as stemming from a feeling that “sexual abjection [is] the penalty the culture exacts on the average-looking woman for the offense of her averageness.”  But the novelist herself thinks the book is popular because most women actually don’t look for ultra-masculine, dominating behavior from a potential husband or boyfriend; they want someone who will help do the dishes, who will pull his own weight around the house.  She is English, of course, and they do things differently over there, but she does have a point.  As much as twelve year olds love Twilight, most twenty- and thirty-somethings are not in mourning for those fantasies, nor even for the fact that they’ve given them up.

So why does Roiphe keep returning to the subject, as Ginia Bellafante complains?  She seems to want to insert sex into every situation.  To me, this seems strange.  True, there is a cultural obsession with sexlessness and with the idea that for certain groups of people, in order to be fully adult, sexlessness is something they have to get over.  So we have bromances and we have movies by Judd Apatow—for teenage boys who apparently wouldn’t know marriage existed unless a movie showed them the world beyond the Playstation, and therefore would necessarily remain eternal children on their parents’ couch, with no interests beyond the Fritos bag and no interest in getting a job.  But why would we expect to see a parallel narrative for women?  Much less for middle-aged women near the peak of their professional careers?

Angels with Dirty Faces

In an episode last Tuesday, titled “Occupy Hollywood,” critic Garen Daley was interviewed by Callie Crossley on NPR about “the history of social movements through American cinema.”  I’d like to listen to the episode again, but I wonder about some of his choices.  Talking about Angels with Dirty Faces, which at one time was my absolute favorite old-time movie, Daley claims that what made the story acceptable to an audience, as a film with a good message, was the happy ending.  My recollection is that the final scene of Angels with Dirty Faces has James Cagney being executed, in the electric chair.  That doesn’t seem like a happy ending.  I suppose what he has in mind is the fact that Cagney goes out, not defying death and Society, but crying for his mother and asking whoever’s out there listening for forgiveness—not because he really repented, arguably, but because he wants the Dead End Kids listening, who look up to him, to abandon their own lives of crime.  That moment is, assuredly, a heartwarming one, which affirms the meaning of the film for the audience leaving the theater.  But to call it, not even tragic, but “happy,” to me seems peculiar.

Is Changing Rules by "Nudging" People Undemocratic?

Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler wrote a well known book called Nudge (not “noodge”), arguing that various social policy should be set up in a way that “nudges” people towards doing things that policymakers thing they should do.  For example, if policymakers think more people should invest in 401K plans, employers should be required to make 401K contributions a default.  People would have to opt out of their employer’s 401K plan if they didn’t want to make contributions, rather than (as now) having to opt in if they did want it.  It does make sense to arrange defaults appropriately, both to decrease the amount of work people have to do (human resources workers as well as employees), and to encourage or discourage certain actions (modifying a thermostat to encourage energy savings, might be another example, or setting printer defaults to minimize paper use).

On the other hand, the way Sunstein and Thaler discuss “nudging” can sound a bit nanny-state-ish.  Henry Farrell, a political science professor, and Cosma Shalizi, a professor of statistics, have written an article in the New Scientist (via Crooked Timber) criticizing their views.  I agree with their argument, but there is, I think, a problem with the “nudge” theory that I have never seen addressed.  Farrell and Shalizi write:

…[T]he key problem with “nudge” style paternalism [is] presuming that technocrats understand what ordinary people want better than the people themselves. There is no reason to think technocrats know better, especially since Thaler and Sunstein offer no means for ordinary people to comment on, let alone correct, the technocrats’ prescriptions.

Nor will they ever be able to.  “Nudging” is nonverbal.  It doesn’t give people the ability to understand their situation better.  It doesn’t give people the ability to discuss their situation better.  It doesn’t give people the ability to provide the nudgers with extra feedback.

Worse, it lessens people’s ability to deal with the real world.  Before the nudge was implemented, people were at least somewhat able to discuss policies, like compensation, on their merits.  Afterwards, everything ordinary people suggest will mess up the nudging part of the policy.

Anyone who’s worked in a reasonably large organization will recognize what’s likely to happen next: any suggestion for improvement will be met with objections along the lines of: that’s not what’s really at stake here.  But it is what’s really at stake!

It would become impossible to discuss or decide anything except at the topmost levels.  There, presumably, are personnel who know how to discuss both aspects of policy and can take account of nudging as well as ordinary practices.  But before the nudge, those people delegated a lot of that work to lower-level personnel, who afterward will have slipped out of the loop.  And the nudge, in the first place, was implemented by people outside the organization, not those within it.  So how this could possibly work is far from clear.  What’s more likely is total sclerosis, as nothing changes significantly at a policy level, and things either fall apart or rules are modified surreptitiously and unofficially, day to day.

The idea of the “nudge” seems, on paper, to presuppose that organizations work by choosing (or falling into) a set of rules that define every decision ahead of time, at a very detailed level.  If this were literally true, then, we would expect to find a group of architects, highly educated, well aware of everything that needs to be known (practically, theoretically, politically, strategically), who think about policy; and also a group of workers who don’t think about any of this at all.  For the latter group of people, presumably, it would be an exaggeration to say that they do what they’re told or that they make decisions by applying rules; they would have to make decisions unconsciously on the basis of rules they’ve somehow internalized but can’t actually articulate.  Yet their rules could be changed—by the nudge—on a fairly short timescale.  But that isn’t much like what really happens, and isn’t especially plausible.

Most people, most of the time, are a combination of the former and latter groups.  “Nudging,” as Farrell and Shalizi show, is undemocratic because it makes it more difficult for them to carry out the former functions.  But more than that, it seems to assume an extremely implausible picture of society.

(Now if I could only nudge my three year old to sleep past 6:30 AM now that we’ve moved the clocks back an hour.)

Rebecca Traister: "Ladies, We Have a Problem"

In a piece in today’s New York Times Sunday Magazine, Salon regular Rebecca Traister considers the wisdom of the SlutWalk movement in the context of recent rape scandals like those involving Lara Logan and Dominique Strauss-Kahn.  She begins by attacking the triviality, the futility, and the vulgarity, of “stripping down to skivvies and calling ourselves sluts,” as a means to changing the terms of the political discourse concerning rape—given how much of the culture does still, twenty years after Anita Hill testified before Congress, blame victims for provoking their attacks by dressing or behaving improperly.

The style Traister disparages is a style that was more prevalent in the 1970s and 1980s than it is now.  Then, during marches protesters often adopted a provocative appearance, particularly an appearance that was personally—as opposed to politically—provocative.  Groups like ACT UP were criticized by outsiders to the movement, and also from those within the movement who preferred to remain socially respectable.  The movement’s successes, however, which include increasing numbers of states legalizing same-sex marriage, and the end of the military’s policy prohibiting service by homosexuals, arguably was the work of the activist groups more than that of conservatives who distanced themselves from the movement because they couldn’t abide the nonconformism of some of its members.

I don’t think “slut” is a word that can be reappropriated by feminists the way “queer” was reappropriated in past decades by activists in some LGBT movements.  For this to work, for me, “slut” would have to be a word that was regularly applied to a much larger range of styles and behavior than I think it is.  But maybe there are women who feel otherwise.  Maybe they feel comfortable calling themselves “sluts,” maybe even when they are dressed in ways I (and probably Traister) would consider totally appropriate.  I don’t see any reason to think that’s the case here, though.  The point of the protest is not to encourage young girls to see themselves as “sluts.”  The point is to show up people who overuse the word “slut” as ridiculous.

Rebecca Traister does not think women should parade around in public in their underwear.  She is happy to agree that a woman who dresses like that looks like a slut.  She does admit, at the end of her essay, that extreme measures might be necessary if we want to “upend” the assumptions so frequently implicit in press accounts of rapes like those she cites.  The essay does end with four paragraphs—beginning, “None of us can know the veracity of any of these women’s claims.  But the standard response . . . is still [as David Brock wrote of Anita Hill] that she is a little but nutty and a little bit slutty”—in which the author wonders whether her own argument will be convincing.

But she really seems not to understand why the protesters are dressing like that.  It isn’t because they think going around out of doors in only underwear should be normal.  It isn’t because they think the category “slutty” shouldn’t exist—even if they don’t like the word “slutty” itself, they recognize that some ways of dressing are sexual, and some are excessively sexual (whether just according to social, situational norms, or because they are literally too provocative).  It isn’t because they want to change people’s opinions about what it’s normal to wear.  They are being—politically—provocative.  They want to draw attention to an issue: women do not deserve to be raped no matter what they wear.  Really, this should be obvious.  When a woman is said to be dressed “like a slut,” the chances that she is wearing only Wonderbra and Spanx is pretty low.

It is unfortunate that Traister feels the need to turn this around.  She seems to be willing to approach this topic from only one point of view.  She makes sure to reassert both her belief that there are proper ways to dress, and also her willingness to condemn women who do otherwise.  She makes the centerpiece of her essay the argument that women who dress “sluttily,” in the name of feminist issues, are doing harm to their own interests.  She makes this argument from within feminism, advising the presumably younger women in these protests for their own good.  She doesn’t say where she herself would draw the line.  She does imply, though—by her focus on the term “slut” and the inadvisability of trying to reappropriate it—that there are younger women who she would say look like “sluts,” who defend their style with feminist arguments, who she thinks should behave differently.  And this has the effect of suggesting that feminists, especially, should be more concerned about obeying even rather conservative social norms than with methods of gaining political success that might require them to appear undignified.

I don’t like the practice of reading people out of a movement for being “incorrect,” or insufficiently radical, or taking the wrong position on arbitrary litmus-test concerns.  In my opinion, Rebecca Traister has the right to call herself a feminist, and to criticize other feminists, as she likes and thinks best.  But using a political movement, the ultimate goals of which she appears to support, as a hook on which to hang an argument about how women like herself (non-activists) ought to dress if they want to defend themselves from sexual and verbal violence, doesn’t seem to have the purpose of advancing the cause.