George F. Will Disapproves of What You Put in Your Mouth. And Has Suggestions!

Here is a quiz for you: can you find the glaring omission in George Will's recent essay about shifting attitudes towards food and sex? HINT: it involves the sexism!

Imagine... a 30-year-old Betty in 1958, and her 30-year-old granddaughter Jennifer today. Betty's kitchen is replete with things -- red meat, dairy products, refined sugars, etc. -- that nutritionists now instruct us to minimize. She serves meat from her freezer, accompanied by this and that from jars. If she serves anything "fresh," it would be a potato. If she thinks about food, she thinks only about what she enjoys, not what she, and everyone else, ought to eat.

Jennifer pays close attention to food, about which she has strong opinions. She eats neither red meat nor endangered fish, buys "organic" meat and produce, fresh fruits and vegetables, and has only ice in her freezer. These choices are, for her, matters of right and wrong. Regarding food, writes Eberstadt, Jennifer exemplifies Immanuel Kant's Categorical Imperative: She acts according to rules she thinks are universally valid and should be universally embraced.

Yes, imagine two women who are both solely responsible for obtaining, preparing, and serving food for themselves and, in Betty's case, "everyone else," by which I am assuming George Will means Don and Sally and Bobby, because that is always fun. Now imagine that one of them is a big old whore!

Betty would be baffled by draping moral abstractions over food, a mere matter of personal taste. Regarding sex, however, she had her Categorical Imperative -- the 1950s' encompassing sexual ethic that proscribed almost all sex outside of marriage. Jennifer is a Whole Foods Woman, an apostle of thoroughly thought-out eating. She bristles with judgments -- moral as well as nutritional -- about eating, but she is essentially laissez-faire about sex.

Yes, my friends, imagine: imagine that preparing food, and ensuring the moral and sexual purity of the heterosexual pair bond, were both entirely women's responsibility. Imagine that, in your grandmother's day, women risked losing their sole commodity for negotiating financial and social security - that is, their virginity - should they engage in sexual intercourse, and that marriage, for women, was basically a contract granting them access to money should they grant one man sole sexual access (whereas non-monogamy, for men, was an admittedly roguish but pretty much expected move) and perform unpaid domestic labor, meaning that dudes got access to personally prepared meals, sex, and the social and institutional power that comes from having a professional life and the possibility of advancement therein, in exchange for basically letting a lady live in their house and maybe giving her some money for dresses if they could spare it. What a crazy mixed-up fantasy world that would be!

Now, imagine that women your age fucking wrecked it by maintaining their sexual autonomy and expecting men to cook for their own damn selves. These women, these Jennifers, probably have jobs, too. All sorts of things can happen when you don't assume that a woman's moral standing and her sexual inexperience are inextricably bound to one another! You could even become some sort of arugula-eating liberal who cares about things like "nutrition," and "responsible food production," and "whether or not it is OK to personally end a species because you think it is tasty." It is terrifying, I know. I apologize for forcing you to contemplate this dark, dystopian vision.

Kant, my ass. This essay isn't about food, or sex, or morality, in any real sense; if it were, Will would have actually mentioned dudes, who, as far as I can tell, all come equipped with both mouths and genitals. (That last might not be true of George Will, I admit; if nothing else, it would explain why he always looks so pinched and uncomfortable.) It is about gender, and the Good Old Days, and why things were better before women actually started doing things other than working to please their men. Right now, right this minute, George Will is saying, he could be in his spotless home eating steak and anticipating a furtive, guilty sexual encounter with his lawful wife, who has never seen nor touched another penis and therefore cannot judge his own. (SHOULD HE HAVE ONE.) This is a lovely fantasy, for George. It is also a fucking horror show for any woman forced to contemplate it. That's why that way of life ended, and that is why, rail against Whole Foods as Will may, it's never coming back.

[Via.]

CHICKS AGAINST DUDES: A Responsible Post

Lest we forget, amid the various personal anecdotes and YouTube clips that are spreading like pinkeye, this is, and will always be, a BLOG ABOUT GENDER. The sexes, they are at war! Yet, as said war wages on, turning bro against bro(ad), too rarely do we stop to reflect: who's winning?

Yeah, yeah, patriarchy hurts everyone, intersectionality of oppressions, blah blah blah, got it. I have a Google alert for the phrase "women than men," people! Time to tally up some scores!

ISSUE ONE: BEING TOTALLY BROKE


Google Alert Says: "The drop in the number of women working so far in this recession is smaller than the decline for men — even when measured in percentage terms — as has been the case in previous recessions."

Who Is Winning: CHICKS. Yay, chicks have jobs! To the broke living in our midst, who are (I have concluded) all dudes, I say: just worry about having dinner on the table and making sure the house is clean, kittens. We'll take care of the rest. Although we may need to rack up some Don-Draper-esque man-mistresses (masters? EW) because you are SUFFOCATING US with your petty domestic concerns.


ISSUE TWO: KEELING OVER STONE DEAD


Google Alert Says: "Women calling 911 with cardiac symptoms took longer than men to get to the hospital after an emergency medical services team had arrived in response to the call, a new study found."

Who Is Winning: DUDES. It's pretty clear-cut: EMTs are watching us die on the floor instead of rushing us to the hospital like our manly counterparts! Oh, there's some bullshit about "symptoms presenting differently," but we all know what's at play here - envy over our BIG FANCY JOBS, WHICH DUDES NO LONGER HAVE. Come on, cupcakes, don't be jealous. What you do is very important. If you define "cleaning bathtubs" as "important," which no-one does.


ISSUE THREE: BEING BASICALLY TORTURED TO DEATH FOR ADULTERY IN A NIGHTMARISHLY OPPRESSIVE REGIME

Google Alert Says: "Men Stoned to Death for Adultery, Murder in Iran."

Who Is Winning: DUDES. It turns out (well, it doesn't "turn out" so much as "confirm what many people, especially feminists, already knew and have been protesting") that "the majority of those sentenced to death by stoning are women. Women are not treated equally with men under the law and by courts, and they are also particularly vulnerable to unfair trials because their higher illiteracy rate makes them more likely to sign confessions to crimes they did not commit." Also, people who are sentenced to death by stoning can be spared if they dig their way out of the holes in which they are buried? And men are buried up to their waists, whereas women are buried up to their necks? And, for women, "adultery" is sometimes defined to include being raped? In related news, HOLY FUCKING SHIT THIS IS AWFUL. No picture here.


ISSUE FOUR: THE DREADED CROTCH ROT


Google Alert Says: "Rates of the sexually transmitted disease chlamydia are climbing in the U.S., and rates of syphilis -- once on the verge of elimination -- rose for the seventh consecutive year... Women bear the brunt of both chlamydia and gonorrhea, especially their long-term consequences, CDC officials said. Untreated, both can lead to pelvic inflammatory disease -- an infection of the uterus and fallopian tubes that can cause chronic pain, infertility and life-threatening ectopic pregnancy, or pregnancy outside the uterus."

Who Is Winning: INCONCLUSIVE. When it comes to the Dreaded Crotch Rot, no one wins.

The Sad Ballad of Phyllis and Betty

You know, reader, when I want well-informed, thought-provoking, responsible essays on gender as it pertains to literature (or literature as it pertains to gender) there is one publication to which I turn: the New York Times Book Review. KIDDING! Ha ha ha, woo boy, sometimes I crack myself up.

I read Bitch, of course, which published an article roughly nine billion years ago about NYTBR's tendency to ignore major new feminist works or assign them to obviously hostile reviewers, and its tendency to assign more space to writers who embrace feminist backlash (because that's "edgy" now; think of it as the old-people version of Vice) than to writers who embrace actual feminism. Bitch will no doubt be pleased to note that its article, despite being nine billion years old, is still totally true! For what did NYTBR publish, in this week's edition, but an essay on the life and work of Phyllis McGinley?

They published several other things, actually, some of which might have been good. I couldn't tell! I was unable to read them, because I had been blinded by the terrible, terrible essay on Phyllis McGinley!

Who is Phyllis McGinley? Why is there an essay about her in the New York Times Book Review? Why are she, and the essay, and the essay's author, all so crazy? I will let the essay's crazy author, noted television critic Ginia Bellafante, explain it in her own creepily approving words:

[McGinley lived] contentedly for a number of years as a wife, mother and well-known poet in Larchmont, N.Y., writing reverentially of lush lawns and country-club Sundays in The New Yorker, Harper’s and elsewhere... McGinley’s light verse sought to convey the ecstatic peace of suburban ritual, the delight in greeting a husband, in appointing a room, in going to the butcher. Anticipation pervades her work, the feeling of something quietly joyful about to happen — beloved friends coming for dessert, perhaps.

Have you barfed yet? Get it out of the way now, because this essay ("Suburban Rapture!" Is its title!) is dead set on sickening you, being as it is about how mind-blowingly great it was to be a suburban housewife in the 1950s. History students among you may recall the 1950s, along with most of the 20th century, as a time when women had precious few viable options other than becoming housewives, and even the ones that did work (or had to work, due to social marginalization and corresponding poverty - I'm not discounting that) were relegated to menial, low-paying positions with little to no hope of advancement, due to pervasive, unchecked, institutionalized sexism and racism, which were of course inextricably bound to each other and also to class! Ginia Bellafante, apparently not into this whole "history and also actual well-documented fact" thing, seems to recall the 1950s differently: as a blissful Eden, from which women were expelled when they ate from the Tree of Wanting an Actual Freaking Choice. To demonstrate how very lovely it all was (we grow good people in our small towns!) and how the elitist lib'rul media (referred to here as the "contemptuous... literary and intellectual class") just doesn't get it, she has chosen to utilize the marginal and deservedly forgotten McGinley.

The facts of McGinley's career are as such: the lady churned out a lot of crap. It was extremely commercial crap, mind you - so very commercial, in fact, that some of it was used in actual commercials, as in her many catchy jingles. She was your basic ladyhack (not to be confused with your basic Ladyhawke) and, as a ladyhack myself, I cannot judge her for cranking out women's magazine articles, children's books, and light verse that was... well, about what you would expect from a writer of commercial jingles. I can, however, judge the Pulitzer committee for awarding her a prize in 1961, a gesture which I can only interpret as proof that the nascent second wave was making a great deal of gentlemen very uncomfortable, and that they felt the need to placate the bevaginad masses by rewarding a token female who knew her place and stuck to it - er, I mean, "exhibited a uniquely feminine sensibility." For here is a sampling of the timeless, Pulitzer-worthy verse of Phyllis McGinley:

A lady is smarter than a gentleman, maybe,
She can sew a fine seam, she can have a baby,
She can use her intuition instead of her brain

... She can write sexist poems that drive you insane!

Ginia Bellafante insists (and insists, and insists) Phyllis McGinley loved being a suburban housewife, and so did lots of people, so it's just plain silly that people keep insisting that women who became housewives when it was the only economically rewarding, unstigmatized choice for women did so because it was the only economically rewarding, unstigmatized choice for women. Ginia Bellafante just doesn't understand why Betty Friedan "dismissed" McGinley as "one of the housewife writers." I mean, as Ginia Bellafante points out in her own piece, her entire career and aesthetic was about being a housewife, so you can see why that was a completely unmerited attack!

This piece is really miraculous, in that any given line has the capacity to inspire epileptic rage fits, as in, "Having married happily at 33, she loved domesticity the way a woman can only when it has come late to find her," which manages to imply within a mere 22 words that (a) "domesticity," meaning marriage and babies, is the only thing that can make a woman complete and happy, (b) women who don't have it are failures, and women who get it should be simperingly grateful, (c) THIRTY-FUCKING-THREE is late to find it, or, I'm sorry, to be found by it, since we obviously don't have any choice in the matter and can only hope to be chosen by that one very special boy, who can evaluate and reject women as if we were avocados he were squeezing for ripeness in the fucking supermarket, for he is Man, Master of All Things. Jesus, and they wonder why we drink. However, I would rather skip right over most of the piece, and deliver to you its creamy, poisonous center, which goes like this:

“A liberal arts education is not a tool like a hoe . . . or an electric mixer,” McGinley wrote, dismayed at a world she thought was conspiring to make women feel as though any acquired erudition would be wasted in a life of riffling through recipe cards. “It is a true and precious stone which can glow as wholesomely on a kitchen table as when it is put on exhibition in a jeweler’s window or bartered for bread and butter.” She went on to dismiss the already benighted suggestion that Bryn Mawr was a threat to what ought to get done in a kitchen. “Surely the ability to enjoy Heine’s exquisite melancholy in the original German,” she wrote, “will not cripple a girl’s talent for making chocolate brownies.”

McGinley’s point, an eternally divisive one, was clear: a woman who enjoyed herself as a wife and mother should not submit to imposed ambitions.

Fair enough! If you have absolutely no goals in life other than to get married and have babies, no-one should force you to discover a cure for cancer, or to make any use whatsoever of your education. However, if you do have other goals, a life spent doing nothing but making chocolate brownies would be pretty goddamn tragic. That, one suspects - and hears, from women who survived the era - was the more common scenario. And, hey, good news for ladies whose brains are capable of comprehending something other than the fine points of selecting lawn furniture: it turns out that having ambition does not automatically make you barren or unlovable! You can, in fact, have a career, a marriage, and a baby, or a career and marriage with no baby, or a baby and career with no marriage, or whatever else your heart desires. It's just strange that the women who tell us otherwise, the women who insist and insist and insist that being a wife and mother to the exclusion of all other things is an honorable and beautiful route that is not in any way limiting or likely to drive you out of your mind - women like Phyllis Schlafly, Phyllis McGinley, Caitlyn Flanagan, and the woman who seems to just love them all, or at least to be unable to frame an incisive and well-merited critique of their message, TV critic Ginia Bellafante - are only able to reach us with this message because they have, well, jobs.

--- AND NOW, THE SECRET PRIZE ---

I know, right? This post was freaking huge! I've decided that whenever I write a bonkers nutso long-winded thing like this, I should reward people who make it all the way through, as with the Cracker Jack prizes which are maybe the only reason on Earth to eat Cracker Jack, which is sticky and gross. Therefore, I present to you: women's education in the McGinley Age. Strangely, none of them seems to be studying Heine!

Lady Business Book Reports: Prolegomena

Once upon a time, in a magical land called Brooklyn, I got very drunk and ended up having a passionate discussion about Christopher Pike with someone I had just met. There were two dudes at the table, and one other lady. I don't know what we had been discussing before - politics? - but I do know that, up until that point, everyone had been involved. The second Christopher Pike came up, however, it was just me and the other girl, frantically trying to figure out who killed whom in Gimme a Kiss (so, this girl faked her death, because someone else read her top-secret sex diary, although she'd fictionalized the hot stuff because in reality her boyfriend was kind of a choad, and then he died trying to save her life, although she wasn't really dead, so WHOOPS, and then Fakey McNotDead's friend found her hiding out in a shack, and Fakey set her on fire for reasons that remain unclear, although I think the friend killed people too because Dead Choad had given her herpes and the herp had driven her mad, mad for revenge) while the dudes were like, "huh what why no let's go get some beer."

This is an extremely roundabout way of saying that I believe there are books in this world that most women have read. These books tend to overlap with the books that men don't read, or are encouraged not to read. It's not new or groundbreaking to point out that women buy books more often than men do, but books that are specifically gendered as feminine tend to receive a whole lot of scorn. (Scorn and terrible cover designs.) A man who writes a book primarily for other men (like, say, The Corrections, or All the Sad Young Literary Men, or any of the FUSWG canon) is perceived to be more serious and literary than a woman who writes primarily for other women. Virginia Woolf and Adrienne Rich both made this point, in their own ways: men can and do write for men with no difficulty, whereas women have to perform for both genders, or maybe just for the guys, if they're going to be taken seriously. Lots of girl-focused books (I refuse to utter the term "chick lit") are, in fact, poorly written, broadly stereotypical, and regressive - but then again, so is the work of Chuck Palahniuk and Nick Hornby, and as far as I can tell I may never stop hearing people praise those men.

I sometimes contribute to a blog for young women. The writing staff of that site once received an e-mail reminding us that we should be fun for guys as well as girls. I spent a while puzzling over that one. Then I turned in an article about birth control and waited for the site's male commenters to show up and call me a whore again. To be fair, they had a lot of fun with it! That's another sad fact about writing while female, one which several of my friends can confirm: write about sex, or clothes, or anything traditionally feminine, and people will call you a vapid slut. Write about the issues of the day, and people will call you a stupid bitch who should stick to writing about sex and clothes. Write about dieting: you're anorexic. Write about the pressure to be thin: you're a pig. Girl stuff isn't to be taken seriously - and it is allllways open to insult and ridicule - but God help you if you should try to cover anything else. That's man talk!

Anyway, I had a little epiphany about all this while watching Mad Men - specifically, a scene in which all the secretaries are huddled around a copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover, giggling about the dirty bits, and Joan reflects ruefully that "men still won't read it." I have no idea whether this was accurate (I am thinking yes, based on other things I've heard and read) but it would make sense for women to be early adopters of Lady Chatterley, because, unlike other novels of infidelity, such as Anna Karenina (which was about wanting "passion," in some vague sense) or Madam Bovary (which was about some woman who'd been corrupted by reading too many sentimental novels), Lady Chatterley was very specifically about a woman learning how to get off. Admit it: at some point in your life, maybe when you were eleven or twelve years old, another girl passed you a dirty book in secret. Everybody knows basically how dude parts work - we certainly hear enough about them - but girls still have to take an active part in digging up information about their bodies. In the early sixties, a book like Lady Chatterley, despite its flaws, would no doubt have been used to aid in the investigation.

Women use stories socially - to form a basis of shared knowledge, to communicate things we're not supposed to know or discuss, to approach difficult personal topics, and to conduct all manner of lady business. Girls still probably get copies of Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret at puberty, and after one breakup, I received no less than three copies of Eat Pray Love. It was the first thing that women wanted to do for me: give me a book so that I could understand what had happened. They'd read it; they wanted me to read it; it was the book one read in such a situation. Oprah knows about this stuff. That is why she is rich.

Maybe it is the same for guys! Maybe they are all passing around worn Norman Mailer paperbacks with instructions to read certain passages, or providing each other with giddy recaps of their favorite Hardy Boys novels. I've heard (oh, okay, I've read) that sports, and talk radio about sports, provides sort of the same function: it's a space that is overwhelmingly male, and when dudes get together to talk about it, they're also, in some back-handed way, discussing masculinity. Is it better to stay with your team or your team's city, demonstrating loyalty, or to carve out the best possible deal for yourself, showing independence and assertiveness? Is it better to be a star player, or to negotiate your role on a team so that the team is winning more even if you're spending less time with the ball? Things like that, I take it, are what guys discuss in a sports context. Then again, I am not a dude, so I have no idea!

I am a lady, and I conduct lady business. So: because of all this, and because this is apparently my Winter of Projects (dear God, I love projects), I am taking it upon myself to read books of the girly variety, and to report on them. That, in case you were wondering, is why I have a copy of Little Women in my bag right now. Look - don't even start.

There Was... a Man...

So, I thought I was going to miss the Mad Men finale, and then it turns out that you can find it online!




Ha ha, no, this is from Saturday Night Live, and I am a dork for posting it.

I can, however, confirm that Steps #1 and #2 will actually work on a real live woman! Try it. She says, what are you thinking? You say, I... do not know. Perhaps... I never have. She says, wow, you're deep. Or she would, if she could talk through all the smooching.

Hello, It's Dick Whitman

Here are two things I love: Mad Men and Mean Girls. It is permissible to love one of these things, but not the other, and I will let you guess which one is which. The thing is, I love both of them for the same reason, and that reason is that they are both about how we are robbed of ourselves when we agree to perform traditional gender. They just tell that story from two different perspectives.

---

OK, Mean Girls. I was watching this movie for perhaps the millionth time while cleaning my room yesterday, and it strikes me that when I see it now I see mostly the problems. This is a thing that happens to me when I look at something too much. Yes, it is dumb and formulaic in places, and painfully unfunny in others. But! Here, up front, is why it is just so good.

It is about a girl, Cady (as in, I think, Elizabeth Stanton) who was homeschooled (!) and is entering a real school for the first time and has basically no grasp of pop culture (!!) or performative femininity (!!!) and finds herself adopted by a girl named Janis Ian who dropped out of school briefly and came back as a foul-mouthed misfit rageball after having her social world wrecked by a rumor that she was in fact a lesbian (!!!!). So, like, already you could write this off as oh, Sara is going to have a Very Special Moment with this movie and have done with it, but that is not all.

You see, Cady is attractive, which means that she is quickly claimed by Regina George and her Plastics, a band of rich/hot/elite teen girls; these girls comprise the most powerful clique in school and are universally adored, in the way that people only ever adore someone who can destroy them. Cady agrees to act as a double agent for Janis, who is just never going to forgive Regina for her eighth-grade devastation, and together they scheme to infiltrate the Plastics and bring Regina down. So far, so formulaic, but this is merely a plot contrivance! For the real story is about how Cady learns to be a girl: how she learns to sexualize herself, to control while seeming to submit, to be smarter than everyone around her while seeming dumber, to handle rage and the lust for power by wrapping it all up in a little pink dress and some lip gloss, and how sooner or later she stops performing Mean Girl and starts being a Mean Girl, because it is the best way to get what she wants, and because beneath the "Diva"-printed tank top of every girl beats the heart of George Patton. That is the movie, and while it goes off in a lot of directions (this is a movie that will linger on a shot of a five-year-old girl watching a "Girls Gone Wild" commercial and lifting up her little nightie, that will let you think about how you learn what your body is worth and when you start to learn it) it is basically just that, femininity and aggression, how girls learn to look sexy and fun and lightweight and friendly while engaging in the most brutal forms of combat. Yeah, it's a by-the-numbers teen comedy, but it is a by-the-numbers teen comedy that is much, much smarter than it looks.

Also, Tina Fey is in it! She wrote it! So that's nice.

---

Then, there's Mad Men. It's often said that the women on this show are more interesting than the men, and I agree that they are easier to identify with, because they represent such an accessible range of archetypes. You can be the sexy girl who's starting to panic because sexiness loses its value at a certain age, or you can be the powerful girl who's starting to panic because she needs to negotiate her own autonomy in a world where autonomy isn't really an option, or you can be the girl who played by the rules her whole life and got the house and the kids and the husband and is starting to panic because that is all just so much more painful and lonely than they told her it would be, or you can be Peggy, and oh, how I love Peggy, the good Catholic girl from nowhere who is eternally confounded by her own body and her own desire and her own talent, which has gotten her somewhere, yes, but that somewhere is the break room behind the Xerox machine, and it's just not fair, is it, in fact she's starting to suspect that nothing is ever fair, and where she comes from people have manners, where she comes from you get rewarded for being good. These are all interesting characters. However, it's not true that they're more interesting than the men. They're certainly not more interesting than Dick Whitman.

I told you that this was the same story from two different perspectives, and it's true: if Mean Girls is about learning to perform "girl," as exemplified by Cady, then Mad Men is about learning to perform "man," as exemplified by Don Draper, who is not even Don, but Dick.

Everything about Don Draper is a lie: his name, his past, even the way he speaks and moves and inhabits his body. Watch Jon Hamm play Dick Whitman in Korea, and watch him play Don Draper in New York, and tell me those aren't two different people. The fascinating thing is how perfectly Don exemplifies everything that a "real man" is or was supposed to be. It's like he read a manual entitled "How To Construct Your American Masculinity" and just followed all of the instructions. You got your job, right, you're in charge there because real men are in charge, and you got your wife, your kids, your house in the suburbs, you got your mistresses on the side, you got your drinking (rye, it's good to have A Drink, a man's drink, rye is that), you got your cigs, your suits, your deep voice and manner of command, most of all you got your emotional impenetrability, your basic opacity, because that's the key thing there, you've got to be opaque, you've got to make sure no-one knows what's going on in there, because men don't open up or break down or confess or admit or cry out in pain, a man is a suit of armor worn by a suit of armor within which you find yet another suit of armor, because a man's never weak.

Don is the obvious construct, the conscious construct, and for that reason he is the most perfect. Yet all of the men around him are doing the same thing, on one level or another: hail-fellow-well-met Cosgrove, who got his instructions in the frat house, and Kinsey, who's repping the Bohemian model this year, and Roger, who is so used to getting everything he wants that he has to find new and impermissible things to want so he can remember what it's like, and Pete, whose problem is that he's trying so hard you can actually see him trying, and Sal, oh God, poor Sal, who knows what he wants and who he is and will deny or destroy all of it so that no-one else can find out, because what he wants is not what a man wants, which means that what he wants makes him less than a man. For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? This is the question Mad Men asks every week, and it provides the answer: privilege, acceptance, profit in the most literal sense of the word.

On Mad Men, the women are clearly suffering, and they are clearly wrestling with gender constructs, and that may be why they are easier to like. Femininity was associated with artifice and deception long before feminism ever happened, and feminism took it one step further by suggesting that the artifice and deception were in fact socially imposed, tactics of survival which kept women relatively safe while estranging them from themselves. The funny thing is the obvious thing which is the thing that people rarely if ever point out: men are doing all of this too, and have been all along. Femininity may be about artifice, but it is far more transparent than masculinity, because at least people are willing to point out or admit that it's an act. Masculinity has long been founded on the idea that it is absolutely real - that men are in charge because men naturally take charge, and no they're not faking, no they're not panicking, yes they know exactly what to do, because that's what men are about. It is only when we start taking that act apart that we make possible the things we really need: things like empathy and change.

---

And, OK, I wanted to write more (shocker! I know) about the problems, about how the stories of people of color aren't really told in either Mad Men or Mean Girls, and about how they both have huge issues regarding queer men's masculinity, to the extent that the only gay male character in Mean Girls is essentially just presented as "one of the girls" and the only openly gay man on Mad Men actually comes over to Peggy's house and gives her a makeover, like despite his background in advertising all he really wants to do is embrace the destiny of gay men everywhere which is to tell straight women how to be fabulous. And is there any chance, even the tiniest chance, that you can tell the whole story of the fucked-upness of gender without discussing the ways in which it has been denied to or used to hurt queers and people of color? No. But I want to end here, with empathy.

People think of Mean Girls as a story about how stupid and shallow ultra-feminine women are; they think of Mad Men as "man porn," a story about how awesome it was to be a guy back in the golden years when men lived like men and women lived like whatever men wanted them to be. I can't help but think that those people are engaging in some Olympic-level Missing of the Point. The point, as I see it, is this: what if no-one is as dumb or as happy as they seem? What if those "golden years" never happened? What if we were never the girls or the men that we tried to be? What if we were something else, all along - something much stranger, much scarier, something we didn't know how to name or accept? What if that something else could save us?

SCIENCE FACT: People Who Benefit From Privilege More Likely To Think Privilege Is Awesome

So: there is a study which states that men with "traditional" views on gender earn more than men with egalitarian views. Surprise! (By the way, I love the euphemistic use of "traditional" rather than "sexist." Like, if I burned a woman to death because I thought she'd been blighting my crops with her menstrual blood, that wouldn't be a witch hunt - that would be "traditional agriculture.") Here, the authors of the study, Livingston and Judge, struggle to explain this puzzling new phenomenon:

"It could be that traditional men are hypercompetitive salary negotiators -- the Donald Trump prototype, perhaps," Judge said. "It could be on the employer side that, subconsciously, the men who are egalitarian are seen as effete."

Oh, "effete!" Yes, that's probably it: employers only give raises to sexist men because non-sexist dudes are giant pussies. By Jove, Science, you've done it again! 

Anyway, it's probably true that sexist men are rewarded more than non-sexist men (and all women) for their work. It might even be true that sexist dudes are super-powered ultra-negotiators who earn higher salaries because of their manly fortitude, although I really doubt it. However, it really seems not at all groundbreaking to point out that the people who benefit most from sexism are the people most invested in preserving it. Call me an idealist, but I generally think that a study should, if at all possible, be slightly more enlightening than an average episode of Mad Men.

Because, seriously, Mad Men has this: 

And he wears shorts.