Spending Time with C.J. Cregg, or the Great West Wing Re-watch of 2013.

If you're anything like me, you've spent an unholy amount of time in the last couple of weeks watching episodes of The West Wing, recently made available to junkies like us via Netflix streaming. (For those of you who were unaware of this development: You're welcome. We'll see you in a few weeks.) I was a junior in college when The West Wing debuted on NBC back in the halcyon days of must-see TV. My roommates and I were immediately addicted; we gathered faithfully for an hour each week to catch up on the latest adventures of Toby, C.J., Josh, and the rest of the Bartlet gang. We rooted for Sam's call girl friend Lori, despised Mandy along with the rest of America, and, this being Bryn Mawr, idolized C.J. Cregg to no end for her willingness to stand up for women in the face of the boys' club.

Since then, though, I've grown up a bit. I've lived more than thirteen years of real life since The West Wing debuted in the fall of 1999, and I've learned a thing or two in that time. Here's a few of the things that hit me during my re-watch: some good, some bad, some truly ugly.

Embarrass, then pwn It's no secret that Aaron Sorkin's shows espouse a sort of lazy, benevolent liberalism---the kind that makes well-off white people feel good without making us think too hard. And, hey---there are days when we all want to stop thinking and just bask in the fantasy, right? One notable, repeated expression of this liberalism is the embarrass/pwn move employed to take down the mean conservatives (as opposed to the nice conservatives) on the show. A conservative character (usually a one-timer, sometimes a repeat visitor) makes a statement of what they believe to be fact; a central, liberal character corrects the statement, then uses the upper hand to smash the moral conclusion the mistaken fact implied. It happens right in the pilot, when one of the mean conservatives misidentifies "honor thy father and mother" as the first commandment, then, perhaps most famously, when President Bartlet takes down Jenna Jacobs (a stand-in for Dr. Laura) over the biblical condemnation of homosexuality. It's satisfying, to be sure, but it's also a bit repetitive (these are two of about five examples in the first season alone), and implies that the only (and far too simple) reason mean conservatives aren't nice ones is that they're stupid.

Mandy disappears Remember Mandy? The media consultant played by The Cutting Edge alum Moira Kelly? Her without-a-second-glance disappearance from the show after its first season was pretty ballsy in its complete and utter lack of further mention. But it kinda works. Well-played, Schlamme and Sorkin. Well-played.

Cool-girl sexism I welcomed the season 2 arrival of Ainsey Hayes to the Bartlet White House. Emily Procter is a delightful actress, and the character is a ton of fun. Plus, she gave the show the opportunity to explain what the White House Counsel's office does on a day-to-day basis, as opposed to when a crisis (The president's MS diagnosis going public, for example.) is in motion. She is also, unfortunately, a vehicle for much of the show's casual sexism; in this case, she exemplifies the "cool girl" fantasy---the kind of girl who can eat donuts all day long and still be a perfect size 2, the kind who just loves being one of the guys but also having her sexiness acknowledged, openly and pretty ickily, in an office environment. She's The West Wing's resident Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

C.J. Cregg is still my idol Allison Janney made Claudia Jean Cregg one of the most compelling women on TV---not just at the time, but pretty much ever. Sorkin wrote her some snappy dialogue, to be sure, but the depth, the sexiness, the ridiculously sympathetic nature? That's all Janney, and it's marvelous to behold. Witness, if you will, her statement about gun violence in the aftermath of the Roslyn shooting, her struggle on behalf of the women of Qumar, or even the time she dealt with a total jackass whom she 1) used to sleep with and 2) decided not to hire for a job at the White House. I would follow C.J. Cregg into battle anytime. For reals.

Related: C.J. and Danny are the hottest OTP in history I always wanted C.J. and Danny to get together, but it's only with time, age, and an appreciation of how rare it is to have both true sexual and intellectual chemistry with a single person that I can see how incredibly hot the match is. Right from the start, it is achingly delicious. The two of them finally ending up together is possibly the most satisfying part of the series, especially since it also involves a career move that C.J. actually wants to make. Loves. It.

Blatant heartstring pulling pulled off by magnificent actors Aaron Sorkin is pretty much the most blatantly emotionally manipulative television writer in history. (Hyperbole? I think not!) He injects some pretty obvious heartstring tuggers in a high percentage of West Wing episodes, things I would normally find gag-inducing. He's saved, though, by the incredible barn of performers---especially Dule Hill, Martin Sheen, John Spencer, Allison Janney and Richard Schiff. This cast can take some seriously cheezy writing and spin it into gold. A few favorites, you ask? How about the time President Bartlet gives Charlie his family's heirloom carving knife? Or the time Toby and Mrs. Landingham attend a homeless vet's funeral? Or maybe, just maybe, the time C.J.'s romance with a Secret Service officer ends in his murder? Oy.

All in all, I'm enjoying my re-watching binge. While watching the episodes in such quick succession brings out some of the show's fault lines, it also reminds me of why I loved it so much the first time around. And nothing at all can be bad about spending so much time with Ms. Cregg.

[photo: NBC]

What Are You Reading (offline, that is)?

Samantha Shorey is an essay writer and film photo taker from Portland, Oregon. She recently moved to a small New England town to get her masters studying communication and culture at The University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her current research focuses on the way people create authentic identities online.  Samantha's blog Ashore looks at everyday life through metaphors and a camera lens, mostly in close-up. She believes photos should look more like memories and in Motown records on Sunday mornings. Even though I love (I mean, really love) browsing bookstores, back-cover paragraphs just don’t work for me. They’re all plot synopsis, and no “this book made me realize that love is the bravest choice!” or “this book made me ugly cry on public transportation.”

So, I asked my friends Laura and Meg for a recommendation over coffee at Stumptown in New York. Both of them are heart-stirring writers, and they’re my go-to girls for books that make me feel.

After our chat and a little iPhone voice-memo magic, here are five books to make you feel hopeful, encouraged, understood, inspired, and interested---respectively.

Recommended by Laura Marie Meyers | Little Things and Curiosities

Love Walked In by Marisa De Los Santos When people ask me for book recommendations (which happens a lot because I’m a full time writer!) my number one choice is Love Walked In. I’m a sucker for characters that stay with you long after you’ve finished the book---as if you might actually run into them somewhere. With names like Cornelia and Teo, they were so unlike anyone I’ve ever known that I wanted to find pieces of them in people around me. This book follows so many different types of love that you’re not really sure which is the most important---whether it’s the love of a child, or the love of a family member, or the love of a lover. It’s about every type of love.

And really, I’m a sucker for the title. I love the ide of love walking in---as if it was somewhere else and then stepped through the door. Like Love was out doing it’s own thing and it wanted to drop in on you one day. Love walked in? “Oh! Hey, Love! It’s been a while, fancy seeing you here!”

Recommended by Meg Fee | The Wild and Wily Ways of a Brunette Bombshell

Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice from Dear Sugar by Cheryl Strayed Dear Sugar is a collection of advice columns written by Cheryl Strayed, previously written under the pseudonym “Sugar”. Advice columns are usually all about the person asking for advice and not the person giving it. But, she totally turned the thing on its head and decided to talk from her own personal experience.

I think this book is so great because every time you think you know the advice she is going to give---it isn’t. Her advice just calls attention to what the person is actually telling her. They already know the answer. She tells people that they have to be guided by their truest truth, and that is an immovable thing.

Two of my favorite pieces of advice from her are: “every last one of us can do better than give up” and “we have to reach in the direction of the life we want.” I think about that last one a lot. Real change is happening on the level of the gesture. It’s one person creating a tiny revolution in their own life.

Recommended by Samantha Shorey | Ashore

High Fidelity by Nick Hornby “Only people of a certain disposition are frightened of being alone for the rest of their lives at twenty-six.” If you’re that type of person---and I definitely am---then High Fidelity is a book for you. Rob, an English record storeowner, narrates the story in the days after his live-in girlfriend moves out of their apartment. Hornby’s writing is funny, full of emotion, and punctuated by music references and “top 5” lists.  I’d like almost any book about heartbreak, but this one especially captures the messiness and uncertainty of this in-between age---the unquietable desire to love and be loved, but the fear of being tied down. In times of happiness and in times of sadness the question is the same: is this all there is? or will something better come along?

Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time by Jeff Speck Walkable City is the perfect book for cocktail party conversations with the hip and urban. After reading it, I’ve started quite a few sentences with “did you know _____?”. (Did you know that additional highway lanes often make congestion worse because of “induced demand”?). Being from Portland, Oregon, I have first-hand experience with a lot of the things that Speck says make a city walkable---and ultimately, wonderful. His argument is so compelling because it has less to do with buying into “being green” and more to do with the tangible things that make life better. Cities have corner coffee shops, chance encounters on the sidewalks, easy errands, and less time spent in traffic. All of these are the reasons why cities like mine and San Francisco, Chicago, New York and even Charleston are attracting disproportionate numbers of the bright and creative.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion I’m pretty sure Joan Didion is my spirit animal! Slouching Toward Bethlehem is a collection of her essays about California and the counter-culture movement, written in the style of “New Journalism”. It isn’t removed third-person newspaper writing---her sentences have such extraordinary presence and clarity. She’s inspiring to me as a researcher too, because she’s acutely interested in the way people live their every day lives.

One of the personal essays in this book, On Self Respect, is the most important piece of non-fiction I’ve ever read. In it she writes “People with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things.” Without it “we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out . . . their false notion of us.” As a people-pleaser, it’s a bit of tough love that I’ve always needed.

Barbie and the Blonde Normative

While shopping for Christmas presents for the young children in my life, I was able to get reacquainted with the toy aisle, with all the nostalgia and wonder that entails. It’s a feeling akin to what happens when I step inside my childhood closet, still so snugly preserved in my room at my parents’ house, which overflows with shelves of vintage Barbies, Littlest Pet Shops, Polly Pockets, trolls, stuffed Disney characters, and Happy Meal toys of yore.

The kid part of me rejoiced in the possibility of the toys and was immediately drawn to all those that are obviously aimed at the female gender. The social critic in me, however, registered shock at the sheer catastrophe of gender and racial normativity that the American toy aisle promotes (i.e., the marketing aimed at boys vs. girls; the way dolls default to white, blonde, straight-haired, blue-eyed). This caused me to reevaluate my own historical relationship with toys and the ways in which toys shape our understanding of the world from a very young age---and what, potentially, could be addressed to improve them in the future.

Take Barbie and her absurdly voluptuous figure which, achieved in a human, would probably point to severe physiological abnormalities and health problems. Incidentally, when Barbie appeared on the toy scene in 1959, many mothers were indignant about her “sexy” image. But despite this she went on to become the standard-bearer of dolls for the next half-century because Mattel understood that little girls often like to think forward, to what they aspire to be when they get older; and Barbie’s body, distorted as it may be, represents our society's ultimate feminine beauty ideal. Also-- while Barbie has brunette, redheaded, and minority friends, the woman herself is always as white, blond, and blue-eyed as her legs are long.

My own Barbie drawer, by the way, overflowed with blondes. I had roughly forty Barbies with an approximate demographic breakdown of 96% Caucasian, of which 96% were blonde. A good portion of the non-blondes (and non-whites, for that matter) were Disney characters---Jasmine, Pocahontas, Belle and Ariel. Other non-blondes included a Hawaiian doll and a 1996 Olympic gymnast that I named Dominique in honor of Ms. Dawes. A rainbow coalition it was not. More likely, it was probably a contributing factor to an early childhood desire to be blue-eyed, fair-skinned, and blonde.

A slightly more inclusive and educational doll franchise is the American Girl line, which features tweenish girl characters of diverse backgrounds from important periods in American history. Each doll comes with multiple cultural outfits and her own series of books. Of course, most of the characters are white and a good number are blonde, but there is an effort at representation of minority backgrounds, most notably in characters like Addy, Kaya, and Josefina.

However, these characters’ stories don’t necessarily do much to present complexity to minority stories: Addy is a runaway slave, and one of Kaya’s playsets is a horse, saddle, and tepee. While there are definite positive efforts going on here, it would be great to be presented from time to time with minority characters who aren’t merely historical and tied to a mythic essential identity---instead, maybe breaking with tradition by having a Native American girl living in the 1970s, a black girl living during World War II, and giving children of color someone to identify with in the now (or relatively now)---which, unlike white children, they often don’t have readily available.

(A possible response to the minority doll question: American Girl’s popular “design-your-own-doll” feature, which encourages girls to choose the hair color, skin color, eye color, and facial features of their doll to ostensibly resemble themselves.)

And while we're on the normativity train, lest we forget that the toy industry also has the teensiest tendency to reify gender categories and designate which types of toys boys and girls “should” want to play with, usually tying into concepts with wider implications like respective household roles, occupations, and standards of appearance. So few playthings for the over-4 set are gender neutral---really, the marketing of toys is probably one of the earliest socialization experiences we have, when it comes to gender traits and aspirations. More could be said on this, but I think this kid kind of sums it up.

I'm wondering if the upcoming gender neutral EZ Bake Oven is a sign o' the changing times? Or a testament to the power of the individual to contest the deeply-entrenched normative stereotypes in the toy industry?

What Are You Reading (offline, that is)?

Lauren Kodiak is a Connecticut native living in Portland, Oregon with her boyfriend and her slightly overweight cat. She has a master’s in Educational Policy, Foundations and Administration, but still doesn’t know what she wants to be when she grows up. She loves to spend hours in the kitchen, practice yoga and eat ice cream for dinner. My boyfriend, Drew, is an MFA in creative writing candidate, so every inch of our tiny studio apartment is occupied with books of all kinds. I rarely have to make a trip to the bookstore or library when I’m looking for a new read, as I have a seemingly endless supply at my fingertips. Since reading is such an integral part of our relationship and life together, I thought I’d extend the invitation to him to share a favorite book with you all. Perhaps in light of the tragedies our nation currently grieves, our picks lean toward the darker side, full of raw emotion. But in these stories, as in life, there is always humor and light to be found if you choose to look for it.

Lauren: We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live by Joan Didion Comprised of seven books of nonfiction, dating back to 1968, this is certainly a hefty undertaking. But what I love most about it is that I’ve been slipping back and forth between books here and there, in no particular order. My first foray into Didion was just this past year, when I read The Year of Magical Thinking. I found myself captivated by her precise observations and minimalistic prose. I kept rereading sentences, trying to decipher what it was exactly about each one that elicited so much emotion. After reading from We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live—specifically The White Album—I see now that it’s not the how, but the what. Sure, her sentences are sparse, but what they contain are stories of a nervous breakdown, of her multiple sclerosis diagnosis, and of the paranoia and anxiety she experienced while living in California during the unsettling time period of the 1960s-70s. She shares everything, spares us none of the unsavory truths. As I read more of Didion, I’m beginning to understand that writing about deeply personal issues is not synonymous with depressing others. Actually, these dark anecdotes inspire and reassure, universalizing anxieties and fears we all have felt at some point in our lives.

Drew: The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt As a graduate student of creative writing, I’ve read some great literature. And while I enjoy much of what I read, I sometimes agree with the opinion that criticizes contemporary literature as plot-less and humorless. Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers reminded me why I fell in love with literature in the first place. A hilarious adventure set in the old West of Oregon and California, the novel drives forward in short, sometimes mere page-long chapters, which force things to happen—force horses to fail, whisky to be drunk, and gold-seekers to be murdered. The voice, younger brother Eli’s first person account of a manhunt undertaken with his brother, is pared-down, even keeled, sharply chiseled and oftentimes downright hysterical. Yet at its core, The Sisters Brothers meditates family and the moral compass of a mercenary. These topics, of course, are potent and worthy of examination in imaginative literature. Lucky for us, deWitt doesn’t crutch on his sentiments to carry the book; instead he juxtaposes them against a hilarious cast of characters, situations and killings gone wrong, all of which make this the best novel I read this year.

Both: Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout We have a soft spot for coastal Maine, the setting of Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of thirteen linked stories, Olive Kitteridge, and the title character—a crotchety, opinionated retired teacher—serves as the collection’s nucleus. Regardless of whether we are inside Olive’s head or see her through the lens of others, her big, boisterous character is ever-present. Despite Olive’s abrasive and callous demeanor, we can’t help but find her loveable as she lumbers through life. With such emphasis on Olive, it would be easy for the rest of the book to fall to the wayside, but the scenery of Crosby, Maine and the lives of those that inhabit it are richly illustrated. As you become privy to the gossip and secrets of the townspeople—an elderly couple is held at gunpoint, the mother of a killer becomes a hermit, a widowed old woman finds love in the least expected man—it’s difficult not to feel intertwined and invested in this little community. The range of emotions and experiences expressed throughout Olive Kitteridge are representative of those of the human condition. We both got lost in the day-to-day trials and misgivings of these characters, and cheered for them when they found glimmers of hope and happiness. A must-read for all!

Would you like that book in print or pixels?

Armed with a shiny new gift card, I set about fulfilling my reading wish list this week. There was only one problem. For each title, I hovered over the “add to cart” button, wavering unsteadily between two options: print or ebook. In the past, the print vs. digital decision has always been an obvious one. I wanted to feel the weight of a book in my hands, inhale that new (or used) book smell, and wander my way through the geography of its pages. My Kindle library, on the other hand, is made up largely of books I couldn’t find at the university library two hours before a class. The sensory aspect of print always won out; ebooks were second-string.

Lately, though, the gravitational pull of digital has dragged me right into the center of the debate. It used to seem as if digital libraries were isolated ones. When all of our recent reads drift into the abyss of the cloud, we lose that particular intimacy of hovering over a friend’s bookshelves, running a finger over the titles, and uncovering the stories behind the stories.

That’s the thing about personal libraries. They bear witness to the places we’ve been and the people we’ve loved. The collective provenance of our books is like a time capsule. Where were you when you read this one, and who were you with, and where did you get it, and who had it before you? The used books and those with personal inscriptions are of particular interest. They remind us of our connections to friends and strangers.

And anyways, have you ever had an author sign your ebook?

But despite the compelling arguments for print (and I can think of many more), I am beginning to glimpse the possibilities for reading in community with ebooks. You can read together long-distance and share impressions in real time with 24-Hour Bookclub. You can share favorite passages with Readmill, and you can even browse your friends’ digital libraries with Goodreads. I’m just touching the surface of these and so many other possibilities, but I’m excited about reading as a communal sport. I hope it lands comfortably somewhere on the spectrum between very quiet alone-time reading and social media overwhelm.

In the end, I bought one ebook and one print. I’m devouring the former while I wait a whole forty-eight hours for the latter to arrive, in all of its weighty, book-scented glory. As for the rest of my list, I’ll let you know how it goes.

Akiko Yosano: Poet. Pacifist. Tanka Powerhouse.

The other day I happened upon a Wikipedia article entitled “The Top 100 Historical Persons in Japan” and I got historian-nerd excited. This was apparently a television program that appeared on Nippon TV in 2006, which had Japanese viewers vote on who they thought the most important historical figures in, well, history were. For me it’s exciting to get this little peek inside the historical mindframe of a non-Western nation—one that hasn’t been brainwashed into believing U.S. presidents, Italian explorers, and German composers are the most important people of all time-- but who has probably been brainwashed in parallel historical fashion, of course. Yet lo and behold, some of our “top historical figures” still ranked (Christopher Columbus came in at #75; Mozart’s #36; the highest-ranking Westerner of all, at #3, is, surprisingly, Thomas Edison).

The list is mostly dominated by Japanese figures, of course; almost all people who would not have placed on any Western country’s “Top 100 Historical Persons” list. And incidentally, one of these (#80) is today’s Historical Woman.

Akiko Yosano (born Shoko Ho) was a Japanese poet from outside of Osaka who revitalized, no, crushed the 1200-year-old tanka tradition in turn-of-the-century Japan. Born in 1878, young Akiko grew up in an oppressive household, daughter to a baker who privileged his sons over his daughters and actually kind of hated Akiko for the first years of her life for not being a boy. (Ja-HERK.) He got over it enough to realize she was incredibly bright, and was decent enough to get her a good education, as good as was possible for women at that time—but it was Akiko’s own ambition and talent that propelled her out of that house and into Japanese history.

Wandering her father’s library as a teenager, Akiko had become enamored with literature. She began writing poems and started contributing to Myojo, the literary magazine of one Tekkan Yosano, fellow poet. Akiko moved out of the family house and to Tokyo, and in 1901, she and Tekkan were married.

Like Sylvia and Ted, Diego and Frida, Sid and Nancy, Akiko and Tekkan had what can delicately be described as an interesting relationship. Tekkan had already been married twice before, and even after he married Akiko he continued to borrow money from his ex-wife. He was also regularly unfaithful, according to most sources, including with one of Akiko’s best friends, Tomiko, who died of tuberculosis at 29 and who Tekkan proceeded to write twelve poems about.

Tekkan had also helped to spearhead the anti-establishment poetry movement that Akiko’s poetry would be a part of, the revitalization of the centuries-old tanka form that had previously been dominated by an institution literally called the Old School (I know, right?). What’s interesting to me is that feminist icon Akiko’s husband Tekkan had actually written an essay in the 1890s called “Poetry Inviting National Decay: A Denunciation of Today’s Effeminate Tanka,” in which he advocated for a more “manly,” virile poetry. This went over well with contemporary Meiji nationalism, as the nation was in the midst of a war against China. Fittingly, Tekkan wrote some pretty “manly” stuff about swords and battlefields.

But by the early 1900s, Akiko was the famous one in the family. Her poetry star was on the rise; and Tekkan, naturally, began to feel inadequate. One day, Akiko came home to find him squatting in their yard, killing ants. (How sad is that? How freaking sad is that?) To make him feel better, she told him to go spend some time in France.

Akiko’s rebellion and feminism went beyond her poetic success story and her pants-in-the-family home life, though. Her poetry often focused on the emancipation of women, portraying women of all backgrounds sympathetically and advocating for their sexual freedom. One of her most famous collections, Midaregami (“Tangled Hair”), evokes a feminine image of a woman with “hair in sweet disorder”—this ran counter to the public beauty ideal that saw a Japanese woman’s hair as always straight, never out of place. “Tangled hair” could even be read as a sign of the erotic. Additionally, she founded a girl’s school where she also taught, passing her progressive ideas and literary skills to a new generation of little poet-feminists.

Akiko was also a pacifist in an era when the Japanese national attitude was anything but. Late Meiji Japan (1868-1912) was characterized by the rapid modernization of a formerly feudal nation, and over these and ensuing decades an increasingly militarized Japan turned its focus towards expansionism. During the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, Akiko wrote the poem Kimi Shinitamou koto nakare (“Thou Shalt Not Die”), which later became a kind of anti-war protest song for the pacifist movement.

Akiko died in the midst of World War II, and her poetry was largely forgotten for many years. She has, however, enjoyed a resurgence of late, as demonstrated by her aforementioned 2006 placement on Japan’s list of favorite historical personages. To commemorate her revolutionary-ness, and to celebrate her anti-sexism-ness, I think I’ll end with one of her steamier poems:

Fragrant the lilies In this room of love; Hair unbound I fear The pink of night’s passing.

What Are You Reading (offline, that is)?

Nina Sovich is an American writer who lives in Paris. She is releasing a travel memoir in July 2013 titled To the Moon and Timbuktu. She has written for Reuters, the Wall Street Journal, Time magazine and the Patriot Ledger. She blogs on travel and raising children in France on www.thesestolendays.com/blog. Every year, at this time, I find myself rereading books I loved as a younger woman. It might be that the holidays make me nostalgic. It might be too exhausting to discover great new fiction or it seems too selfish to buy a present for myself. It may have to do with the fact that I drink more than usual around Christmas and if I don’t read something familiar at night I’ll lose the plot.

I list below the books I love to read, many of which I have read before, that I will inevitably read again. These are not happy stories, but there is a certain authoritative melancholy to them that works in the dark month of December. Many are books that center on the family and wonder on the notion of love.  Many have a strong moral voice or ask ethical questions, which I find acts as an antidote to all the hysterical cheer of the holiday season.  Most importantly, all contemplate escape—from an overbearing Russian husband, a large family in St Louis, the decay of a colonial outpost, even from the myth of African salvation. These books make me feel like myself again, giving me the fortitude to start the New Year.

Lie Down in Darkness. William Styron.  This book came out in 1951 just as the intelligentsia, if not the nation, was realizing the life of convention-bound, country club-going WASPs wasn’t all it’s cracked up to be. As Virginia gentry, the Loftis’s drink and fight, abandon each other, rip each others’ hearts out and then scream for protection. Love is the least stable element in this family, resentment the most. Styron writes with urgency, despite all the hot summer afternoons and gentle landscape descriptions, and every scene is filled with real terror. Who will save them? Why must they do this to each other? Will the selfish, beautiful damaged daughter Peyton escape, at least a moment, before her death? So much is at stake, yet nothing need be lost. For any woman who has marveled at her mother’s callousness and her father’s adoration, this is your book.

Mating. Norman Rush.  This book is told through the eyes of a smart, unnamed female graduate student who casts out into the Kalahari desert in order to find a commune run by a brilliant anthropologist. She is tough, smart, well-read and romantic. The professor, on the other hand, is a total phony. He spouts social theory, contemplates Marx and sets about the unwinnable task of creating an African utopia by eliminating African men from the equation. The book is both a discussion of obsession and a strong commentary on foolish white expats who try to save Africa. I read it in my 20s, as I travelled the world in search of a cause, and saw worrying reflections of my own life. Perhaps I aspired to escape ordinary American life for something cleaner, more structured, theoretical and moral.  But, in the end, there was always a man at the heart of it--calling the shots, talking about equality… doing nothing.

No Hurry to Get Home. Emily Hahn. This is a compilation of autobiographical stories from The New Yorker that Hahn wrote starting in the late 1920s. She writes a big life for herself, without ornament or hyperbole, and even the small family anecdotes lead to greater freedom. Mickey (Hahn’s nickname) and her sister wear knickerbockers to school, because skirts are impractical, and earn press attention. Mickey goes to college far from home, where she startles the professors by studying engineering. She travels across the country with a friend and gets a job as a writer. Every step is taken with the hope that the world will bend to her conventions and not the other way around. In the end, it does. Soon the girl from St. Louis is travelling alone through the Belgian Congo, recording the racism and hypocrisy of the colonizers. She is smoking opium in China and reflecting on addiction. She is in love with a British intelligence officer and watching the Japanese invade Hong Kong. She lived so many lives in this one book that any one of them would do for me.

Anna Karenina. Leo Tolstoy. The story is known--Anna Karenina abandons her staid husband and young son to run away with her the rich, handsome Count Vronsky. The great thing about this book (yes, I am here to tell you) is that the moral stakes are high, but Tolstoy doesn’t write judgment into the pages. As a young, single woman, I sympathized with Anna and felt she had the right to pursue happiness, even if she abandoned her young son. Now that I have my own marriage and children, I find myself wondering if old Karenin was such a bad guy after all. I read this book over and over again, always changing my mind. And if Anna’s poor choices and narcissism becomes a bit too much there is Levin, a sweet and conflicted man who falls for the lovely Kitty.  ‘Freedom what is the good of freedom?’ Levin thinks. ‘Happiness consists only in love and desiring; in wishing her wishes and in thinking her thoughts…” That’s a man I can get behind.

Burmese Days. George Orwell. The entire colonial enterprise and all its failures are laid bare here. There are vicious British colonial officials who live for gin cocktails and enmity. Dr. Veraswami, a cultured Indian doctor, whose only pathetic desire is to get into the European club. U Po Kyin the corrupt Burmese official who has money and power but can only see enemies around him. But the heart of the story centers on one British man’s loss of identity and faith. John Flory, drunk, alone, and high up the white man’s pedestal, the view has become blurry. His best friend is Dr. Veraswami, but he won’t admit it. He keeps a Burmese mistress but won’t love her. When the young Elizabeth Lakersteen comes to Burma he courts her, but he has forgotten the small-minded, provincial ways of his countrymen. Needless to say it goes horribly, unbearably wrong.

Slowing down (with Emma and Erin)

“She appears to write much of her poetry, as Americans eat their dinners, in hot haste,” said one critic of Emma Lazarus’s early work, according to Esther Schor’s biography of the poet. I had to laugh at how the 1871 comparison still applies today. We still eat quickly, and we write quickly too, jotting off breathless blog posts and status updates without looking back. Lazarus would have thrived in today’s digital world, I think. In sharp contrast to her contemporary, the reclusive Emily Dickinson, she was a determined extrovert, eager for her writing to make it into the hands of the literary giants of her time. She wrote letters to Emerson demanding feedback on her poems. She milked her “network” in search of literary success. Her persistence and tenacity were astonishing.

But even the talented, energetic Emma Lazarus eventually hit a wall of anxiety as the speed and the pressure to produce caught up with her. As she wrote to a friend, “I have come home to hard work—finding three books to read & review by Tuesday . . . as soon as I feel that a certain thing is expected of me by a certain time, I get a panic & don’t know how to do anything. How anyone lives by writing I cannot imagine.” I was nodding emphatically as I read along. Preach it, sister.

Beyond the usual deadlines and expectations many of us receive from others or set for ourselves, I think there’s a sort of insidious pressure these days to exist online, to be always on and constantly, consistently producing. It’s the marketing advice about “personal branding” and blogging every day and building your audience. It’s that feeling of needing to “keep up” with the internet, as Erin Loechner describes it in her post, “The Rebirth of Slow Blogging.”

Forgive me if I sound like a broken record. I’ve written about slowing down here and here and here and here. It’s been at the heart of my work with Uncommon, a growing slow web community. I’ve been writing and thinking so much about slow food, slow tech, slow everything, coming at it from different angles as a way of figuring out what slow really means, as an intention and a practice.

Something clicked when I landed on Erin’s post, because I think she helps explain something important about the idea of “slowness.” It’s not about doing things in slow motion, but rather taking time for depth and storytelling. It’s about aiming for quality over quantity. It’s about taking time for reflection and creative restoration.

As I head into the new year, I’ve got Emma and Erin in the back of my mind, and I’ll be wondering about the delicate balance between creative impulse and depth, busy production and quiet reflection.

Grab bag.

I don't know if you'd heard, but it's the holiday season. Things are festive and lit up and draped in tinsel everywhere you look. For the next two weeks, the world, my friends, is your disco ball. And while I love the holidays---being a fan of everything sparkly, gifts, and brown liquor, how could I not?---I can't help but spy feminist pitfalls everywhere I turn. The world suddenly seems littered with holly-draped, mistletoe-encrusted problematic situations. In celebration of the season, therefore, I humbly submit to you a grab bag of my feminist holiday dilemmas. Some of these I've come to terms with, some I'm still battling---where all are concerned, I'd love to hear what our lovely readers think, and what they do to cope, especially in these seven weeks of heightened sensitivity and exposure to less-than-perfect relatives. (Or whomever.)

His and Hers gift guides I know, I know. This doesn't seem like a real problem. And I guess it's pretty far down the hierarchy as far as problems go---let's call it, instead, a manifestation of a real problem. It's sometime in November when these types of guides start popping up in magazines and on blogs, and they drive me nuts. Invariably, the His side has something having to do with cocktails, whiskey, and wood, while Hers often features nail polish, cookware, and purses. (Stationery, to be fair, can usually be found in both the His and Hers columns, thank you notes being a universal post-holiday activity.)

The real issue here, of course, is that these routinely gendered guides represent and reinforce ridiculous standards. At the risk of stating the obvious: men like to cook. Women like whiskey and things that come in a burled finish. And sometimes, kids, the binary breaks down even further. Men wear clothes made for women, and women dare to buy tools and use them to fix things up around the house. I know---what will come next? The nationwide right to same-sex marriage? (We can only hope.) While I heartedly admit that most men and most women have different tastes, I'd argue that almost all of that difference comes from stuff like this---overt and insinuated guides to what we should want.

That said, I still totally want those pink J. Crew snowboots. Got it, Mom? (I told you I was still battling these things, right?)

The lyrics to Baby, It's Cold Outside I love Christmas music. I love carols, I love secular Christmas songs, I love the classical masses and oratorios. I. Love. It. All. One of my long-time favorites? Baby, It's Cold Outside, written by Frank Loesser back in 1944 and debuted, adorably, in duet with his wife at a housewarming party. It was sometime in college or just after when my friend Miles ruined my fun by pointing out that the song is, it must be said, a little rapey.

If you're not familiar, check out the song, then come back on over. Back? Okay then. Now you should go check out The Atlantic's recent discussion of how the song's problematic lyrics (most notably "Say, what's in this drink?" and "The answer is no!") might be addressed, and then you should pour yourself a cocktail (A Manhattan is really best for this.) and listen to the song again, appreciating how awesome it is despite the creeptastic undertones. As a matter of fact, those undertones (that tension) might be one of the reasons it's just so good.

Men who don't help with post-dinner cleanup This one is both the one that annoys me most, and the one we can actually do something about. Even with the advent of men to the holiday kitchen when it comes to meal prep, I've noticed something: they typically don't stick around afterward to clean up. After dinner on Thanksgiving or Christmas, it's still the women who are far more likely to be found performing the far less glamorous cleanup work while the men relax with a Scotch. Since we've already established that women like whiskey, too, I hope we can all agree to do one thing for our sisterhood this holiday season: confront the lazy men in our lives and make them clean up. Even if they cooked. Because they have quite a backlog to work off, as far as I'm concerned.

I hope you've enjoyed this tour of the little things that torture me during the holidays. I'll leave you now to go ogle some sparkly lights, drape myself in baubles, and order cookbooks for all the women I know. Because, let's face it: I, too, am a product of the patriarchy, and I can't fight it 24 hours a day. Especially when it's so pretty!

Books to Read If . . .

By Randon Billings Noble December is a loaded month---loaded with meaning, tradition, preparation, celebration and, finally, the anticipation of the coming year.  It can be exhilarating, frantic, lonely, relaxing, nostalgic, hopeful---and sometimes all of those things in one day.  But the end of the year always brings talk about books.  Prizes are announced, the “best of” lists come out and people browse bookstore tables shopping for both themselves and others.

Here are my thoughts about what to read this season …

... if you want something in small bites, enjoy adventures but are NOT traveling by plane: Contents May Have Shifted by Pam Houston tells the story of Pam’s efforts to balance family and travel, stability and risk.  Its 144 short vignettes describe her home-and-away adventures in Colorado, Tunisia, Wyoming, Tibet, New Jersey and beyond.  It takes a while to get comfortable with the peripatetic nature of this narrative (in the first few pages we jump from Great Exuma to California to Texas to Alaska) but I feel like that might be part of the point.  Sometimes a thread of story will pick up again a few sections later.  Sometimes it backtracks.  But I never had trouble following it and I always enjoyed seeing where it would lead next.

... if you love the sea and/or whaling but can’t quite manage Moby-Dick right now:

In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick tells the story of the whaleship Essex, which was the inspiration for Moby-Dick.  The Essex left Nantucket in 1819, whaled its way to the center of the Pacific Ocean, and was rammed and sunk by one of the very sperm whales it was hunting.  For ninety days its crew tried to sail three lifeboats to the safety of the South American coast while enduring storms, disease, hunger, dehydration and worse.  In the Heart of the Sea continues where the fictitious Moby-Dick leaves off, and it pulls no punches as it describes the aftermath of a shipwreck and the desire to survive.

... if you want a fictitious story about wild animals and shipwrecks:

Jamrach's Menagerie, by Carol Birch, starts with a bang---an encounter with a tiger.  Jaffy Brown, then eight years old, is running errands on the streets of London when he is swept up into the jaws of a tiger, an escaped resident of Jamrach's menagerie.  Jamrach is so impressed by Jaffy's daring (he reaches up to stroke the oncoming tiger's nose) and his survival (his only injuries are some scraped toes), he concludes that Jaffy has a way with animals and hires Jaffy to work for his exotic animal import/export business.  Years later Jaffy is sent on a quest to find and capture a rumored dragon---the ultimate animal for the menagerie.  As in Life of Pi, there is a sea voyage, a boat with a dangerous animal aboard, a shipwreck and a catastrophic outcome.  But my belief in this story never faltered (as it did with Pi), my patience was never tested, and its ending was surprising in quite a different way.

... if you want to be challenged:

What Happened to Sophie Wilder, by Christopher Beha, is a quiet yet demanding novel in which the main character, Charlie Blakeman, wonders what happened to his best friend and sometimes girlfriend, Sophie Wilder, after college and her sudden conversation to Catholicism and almost immediate marriage to a rather unlikely man.  What had bound Charlie and Sophie together in school---a love of writing---does not seem enough to rekindle their romance when Sophie shows up ten years later.  But the book is about much more than their relationship.  It’s about faith and doubt and growth and despair and the way we craft the stories of our lives.  If you can, read this book with someone else; you’ll want to mull the ending over with someone who’s read it too.

... if you want to change your life:

Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar is a collection of advice columns from the once-anonymous Sugar at the online magazine The Rumpus.  But Sugar recently revealed herself to be Cheryl Strayed, and anyone who has read her essays (“The Love of My Life,” “Heroine”), or her bestselling memoir Wild, knows that Strayed is a writer of honesty and empathy.   In her answers to questions about divorce, miscarriage, identity and infidelity, Strayed tells stories from her own life, which makes Tiny Beautiful Things a memoir as well as a collection of columns.  Even if you aren’t looking for particular answers to specific questions, reading this collection will inspire you to live a richer, truer, more generous life, reassured, as she writes in her last letter, that even the “useless days will add up to something … The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not.  These things are your becoming.”

... if you like historical fiction:

Hilary Mantel’s award-winning Wolf Hall tells the story of Thomas Cromwell, who rose from obscurity (he was a blacksmith's son, which his enemies at court never let him forget) to be Henry VIII's chief minister during the king's turbulent divorce from Catherine of Aragon, his subsequent marriage to Anne Boleyn, the execution of Thomas More and various misadventures after that.  Usually More is painted as the hero of these stories---a Catholic martyr to his conscience, which wouldn't allow him to name the King head of the Church or grant his right to divorce his wife.  But Mantel transforms Cromwell from the king’s lackey into a full-fledged person: husband, father, guardian; admirer of women, fashion, food and learning; a man committed to his work, his faith, his king.  Wolf Hall tells the story of Henry VIII’s first divorce from a whole new perspective … and then Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy continues with Bring Up the Bodies and the forthcoming The Mirror and the Light.  You will want to read until Cromwell’s (rather bitter) end.

... if you want a smart, quick, engrossing read:

A little bit The Talented Mr. Ripley, a little bit Howards End, a little bit Swimming Pool, and a whole lot of Harriet Lane’s own making, Alys, Always draws your attention from the first word and will not let go.  One winter night, Frances Thorpe stops to help a victim of a car crash.  The woman, Alys, dies on the scene, but once Frances meets her grieving family she begins to insinuate herself into their lives---to what end you’re not sure, and maybe Frances isn’t either.  But as she becomes more deeply involved with Alys’s widower, the reader keeps turning pages to see if it’s at all possible that this twisted story ends well.

... if you have the time/stamina/constitution to read a book in one sitting:

I do not want to give away even a hint of a spoiler about Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, but I will quote the line that hooked me, which occurs early on, on page 37.  In the first 30 pages Nick Dunne has woken on the morning of his fifth wedding anniversary at exactly 6:00.  He has braced himself to go downstairs to his wife.  Then there is a space break.  Then he narrates that he was very late getting to work.  What happened during that space break?  We're not sure.  Nick drives home to find his wife missing and a couch overturned and a coffee table smashed.  The police arrive and question him.  He answers their questions, sometimes shrugging, sometimes blurting and sometimes with a lurching stomach.  The last two sentences that end the chapter are: “That was my fifth lie to the police.  I was just getting started.”  The lies stack up and the plot twists do too.  In a way I feel like this book was a dare to its writer: can you pull of this twist?  How about this one?  And THIS one?  I'm not sure how you'll react to the ending, but you'll be chasing Amy Elliot Dunne all the way through.

... if you are a romantic and/or an academic:

Love, in Theory, by E.J. Levy, is a collection of ten stories that entwine love with its seeming-opposite: academic theories.  Sometimes the characters actively ponder these theories, sometimes they are living illustrations of them, but always the story is enriched and not burdened by its intellectual overlay.  My favorite of the ten was the last, “Theory of Dramatic Action,” which is told in the provocative second person, so “you” are the star of the story.  You are film student who has recently left Colorado to attend film school in Ohio.  You are learning about theories of dramatic action and fear your life has no such arc.  But then you meet a handsome professor of ancient Greek.  And then an old friend comes to town.  And then your story might be moving into “Plot Twist (I)” or “False Resolution” or perhaps “Plot Twist (II)” after all …

... if you are a new mom and don’t have time to read:

Stealing Time is a new literary magazine for parents started by Sarah Gilbert and Katie Proctor.  They describe it as “a quarterly print literary magazine about the heart of parenting … fiction, essay, poetry, book reviews, and other pieces that are sad, hopeful, ebullient, resigned, reverent, wry, surprising, gut-busting, or just plain strange.”  The very first issue’s very first essay---“Into it All” by editor Sarah Gilbert---evokes all of those adjectives.  Gilbert writes---lyrically and inspiringly---about ways to balance writing and motherhood, art and biology, your own written words on the page and the unexpected words that come out of your child’s mouth.   Her writing and her magazine remind us to look up from the task at hand, the dishes in the sink, the search for the lost object, the Virginia Woolf novel at your bedside, and revel in the ambivalent and infinite role of being a parent.

... if you are or have a baby:

Big Board Books: Colors, ABC, Numbers by Roger Priddy

If you are a baby you will want to sit with this book for many minutes at a time.  If you have a baby, your baby will want to sit with this book for many minutes at a time---which will leave you free to read some of the above!

Happy reading, all!

If I Had to Dress Up as a Lord of the Rings Character...

I haven’t seen The Hobbit yet. I’m sad about this. This will be remedied soon.

The reason I’m sad is because I was obsessed, no really, obsessed with the Lord of the Rings trilogy when it came out. I wasn’t a huge nerd—I hadn’t even read the books all the way through—but I nerded out to the max when it came to Peter Jackson’s ridiculous over-the-top epic trilogy. I saw the first one four times in the theater. And recently, I rewatched the movies again and, thank goodness, I’m still an LOTR nerd, ten years and fifty viewings later.

One thing I really appreciate about the film trilogy is its amplification of the female roles in the translation from book to movie. Like many fantasy worlds, Tolkien’s universe is, you know, kind of a sausage fest. The female characters that appear in the movies—Arwen (Liv Tyler), Galadriel (Cate Blanchett), and Eowyn (Miranda Otto)—all appear in the books, but with proportionally diminished roles. In particular, Arwen’s role was beefed up big time to provide a lovely elfin female face for the franchise and give greater emphasis to the films’ central (only) romance, between her and Aragorn.

But if I were to dress up as a Lord of the Rings character for, say, a premiere, or a convention, or a nerd party, I would forgo the elf costume (the Rivendell aesthetic is kind of played out by now anyway) and choose Eowyn, because she’s the closest thing to a feminist hero that the overwhelmingly masculine story has.

Eowyn is Rohan royalty, and like most womanly royalty she’s expected to stay in the castle, but all she really wants to do is fight. Her uncle, King Theoden, forbids her from battle, so she does what any self-respecting sword-wielding lady would do: cross-dresses in some battle gear and goes to war anyway. (Like Mulan!) She also transfers her own pathos onto the hobbit Merry, who is likewise forbidden from war because of his small stature, and sympathizing, decides to take him along with her.

The crowning kick-ass feminist moment comes when Eowyn comes face to face with the Witch-King, whom “no man can kill.” First she chops the head off of his flying dragon transportation. Then she dodges a ton of terrifying mace blows (while admittedly looking absolutely terrified). Witch-dude reiterates for both Eowyn and the audience’s benefit, “No man can kill me!” Eowyn pulls off her helmet, revealing her flowing locks, and says:

“I am no man.”

And bam! Sword to the face. Or the black void inside his helmet that we can only assume contains a face somewhere.

The moment walks a fine line between eye-rolling and fist-pumping, but I still enjoy it. It’s great to see that even in medieval-seeming Middle-Earth, traditional gender roles are being challenged. Of course, besides her war story, the character of Eowyn also contributes a touch of romantic triangle by falling in love with Aragorn, who is, duh, Arwen’s boyfriend, but eventually she finds her own happiness without him. (In the books and in the extended film version, she rebounds with Faramir; also a great guy.)

I’ll wrap up this nerd post by saying that, in general, fantasy can be limited in the roles it offers its women characters, not to mention minorities (see LOTR: minority actors appear only as evil men or under globs of Uruk-hai makeup), so I’m gladdened whenever a strong, realistic female character shows up—even if that means broadening and underscoring a minor role from the source material.

Conversely: Why is Galadriel in The Hobbit? Fellow nerds?

Since You Brought It Up: Good, Grief

By Rhea St. Julien In the first five minutes of the 1965 classic A Charlie Brown Christmas, the main character pronounces himself "depressed", "let down" by Christmas, and lonely.  He dislikes the tradition of card giving, because it reminds him that no one likes him when he doesn't receive any.  He rails at the over-commercialization of Christmas, and despairs that no one seems to take it, and him, seriously.

Watching it with my toddler on Hulu, I realized that if it were made today, A Charlie Brown Christmas would be deemed too glum for mass consumption.  Characters on TV today have bizarrely huge smiles even in the worst of situations---Diego's grin at having to find the lost maned wolf reassures kids that "Sure, the mom lost her pup, but don't worry!  Everything is okay!  Al rescate!"  The expressions of the Peanuts gang look more like they have chili-induced indigestion, over things as small as decorations, unhelpful advice, and ill-thought-out letters to Santa.

I love that the Charlie Brown special depicts the big emotions of kids at this time of the year, because children are totally overwhelmed by all the bustle, no matter how tinseled it may be.  They act up, get scared more easily, need to be held during nap times and have melt downs in the middle of Target.  They are hopped up on sugar (when did Advent calendars start having chocolates for each day?!) stay up late for parties, and the stress of their parents is passed down to them.  It's a never-ending cycle, as parents get more stressed by their kids' behavior, and disappointed when special holiday-themed outings turn disastrous.  "I'm just trying to give you a good Christmas!" I saw a mom say thru gritted teeth, outside a store where other families were bopping around to carols, enjoying the discounts at the annual holiday party, happy it wasn't their kid that had filled their fists with cookies and ran out onto the street.

I felt her pain.  Just last week I took our toddler to a showing of The Velveteen Rabbit, a dance performance for children based on the Margery Williams book.  She had never been to anything like that, and though she overall enjoyed the experience, I did not.  She sat on my lap and asked questions throughout the entire show, at times scared, at other times just trying to make sense of what she was viewing.  All the kids in the audience were talking, laughing, and shouting, but mine seemed to be the very loudest.

The grandmother in front of us concurred with my estimation.  She turned around every five seconds, sneering, sighing, and shushing us.  I tried to explain to her that it was a children's performance and kids are allowed to make noise, but she proclaimed I had "ruined it for her" and I bowed out of the discussion before I got really angry.  What that lady thought she was getting when she bought a ticket to the 11am matinee is beyond me, but her shaming of my daughter while I was working really hard to parent her through the performance was horrible.  I left feeling defeated.  I had tried to do something special with my daughter for the holiday season, and had only managed to totally overwhelm her, myself, and the people sitting near us.

This week, at a winter-themed Story/Song/Dance time I was leading at my friend's store, I took homemade paper snowflakes out of my bag and let them drift down onto the children while I sang "Let It Snow", the closest those California kids would get to a snowstorm.  My daughter stood right in the middle and screamed, "Mama, I'm done!  Mama, no singing!"  I just sighed and asked my friend to take her for a walk so I could continue being all magical for the tots who were actually enjoying it.

Are we really so different from my easily-overwhelmed little one? I think not.  Everyone I know seems to be already over the holiday season, and we have at least two weeks more of it.  As adults, we dull our feelings with cocktails and present-buying, but they are still there.  That's why tonight, instead of heading out onto the wreath-lined streets to hit up a friend's pop up art show, I'm going to stay in with a book and a journal.  I'm going to write about how I miss my sister and my mother, who I am not seeing this year, and my father, whom I will never be able to spend another Christmas with on this earth again.  I'm going to take some deep breaths, and make some Charlie Brown faces.  I'm going to feel that good grief he keeps talking about, and create some space and patience for my daughter's feelings, as well.

***

We believe we can find more joy in the holidays by squashing the little voice that tells us bright spirits and good cheer are only possible when we’re perfect.  The magic of this time of year comes from connecting with loved ones near and far, reminding ourselves of all we have to be thankful for, and . . . covering everything in twinkling white lights. 

We’re embracing our present lives—foibles and all—so we can spend more time drinking egg nog and less time worrying we’re not good enough. Imperfect is the new black; wear it with pride.

Want to lighten your load? Read the post that kicked off the series, Ashely Schneider's Down, Not Out. Add your story to the “Since You Brought It Up” series by submitting it here. 

XVII. états-unis

One Christmas, Clémence sends me a thin paperback collection of stories called Lettres de mon moulin. Letters from my windmill. I love French books, not just for reading but for the sake of the object itself---the spines are upside-down, the words going from top to bottom, which makes bookstore browsing feel simultaneously awkward and fun.

I read the stories not knowing anything about where they come from. Provence, as it turns out. The author, Alphonse Daudet, is one of the more known provençal writers. He had a windmill where he wrote these stories, a collection of tales about his life and experiences in the south of France. The mill is still tucked away in the countryside somewhere to the east of Avignon. But I don’t learn any of this until years later.

My favorite story, then and now, is “L’Arlésienne,” about a young man in love with a woman from Arles. He finds out that she’s married to someone else and he kills himself.

Il s’était dit, le pauvre enfant: “Je l’aime trop . . . Je m’en vais . . .” Ah! misérables coeurs que nous sommes!

It sounds melancholy, wistful, and it is. But the language is sparse and lovely and the ending always makes me cry. Just like this France of mine.

And to All a Good Night

What happens when you put your Jewish friend in charge of stringing the lights on the tree, is that you get to the bottom and have no way to plug them in.  “What I have here in my hand is two female parts, but it seems like I need two male parts,” I called out to my oldest friend.  She looked perplexed, herself, having never been the one to do the lights on the tree.  The tree endeavor (both selection and installation) had always been the province of her husband, who made a big production out of it with her kids.  He had been gone just three months and the whole operation carried a pall of sadness.  I was determined to establish a fresh tradition, help her feel confident in her new role and win the day with enthusiasm.  The kids had been good sports at the tree lot that morning, although it must have been terribly disorienting to be there without their father.  I felt the least we could do was to get the tree going before nightfall.  Ultimately, we had to call up our reserves---two effective and creative friends (with four children between them), both Mommies who were responsible for all things tree-related in their homes.  Within the space of twenty minutes, those two had stripped the tree, restrung the lights and carefully dotted the whole situation with ornaments.  That day, my status as “other” when it comes to celebrating Christmas and participating in the “Holiday Season” took a back seat to being present for a loved one. I returned home feeling decidedly less sorry for myself.  Even considering my pattern (like so many American Jews) of feeling a bit left out at this time of year, I had to consider the heartache of my friend and so many others who have lost a spouse or someone close to them, knowing the pain of a loss like that is much more acute during Holidays, birthdays, anniversaries and the assorted benchmarks of life.

As much as I have my own issues with the Christmas behemoth, its value as a touchstone for many families in this country is undeniable.  It is a marker around which people create important memories with one another.  Children experience Christmas as an expression of familial love and have the opportunity to be showered with special attention by parents and extended family.  Adults take time away from work to be with their families and reflect.  Sometimes people even use the Holiday as a way to process wounds that haunt them from childhood.  The corrective experience of making your own Christmas for your own family as an adult must be incredibly powerful on a number of levels.

There still resides inside me, the smart-ass fourth grader who wrote an essay about how the White House Christmas tree lighting ceremony was a violation of church and state.  This represented my desperate attempt to communicate the plight of the American, Jewish 8-year-old during the Holidays.  Back in the 80s, they didn’t really show much of Reagan lighting an obligatory Menorah somewhere or sitting down with his staff for a game of Dreidl.  And I likely would have argued that, to be fair, he shouldn’t be publicly participating in any religious celebration.  They also didn’t give Chanukah much air-time in the media in general back then, which made it even more critical that I drag my Mom into my elementary classrooms so that she could fry up Latkes on an electric griddle.  There is almost nothing more tragic than a bunch of disinterested school children carting floppy paper plates of greasy potato pancakes and dollops of applesauce to their desks to “enjoy.”  “Also, we get chocolate coins!” I asserted to anyone who would listen.

While I feel certain that I will be confronted with many uncomfortable conversations with my own children about why we don’t adorn our home or really do anything amazing at this time of year, I also trust that they will find ways to turn their outsider status into something interesting.  They might end up with a fantastic sense of humor about it.  It might increase their empathy for people that experience actual “other” status (people of color, immigrants, gay families) and who live permanently outside the mainstream.

I will always feel a little twinge at Christmas time.  I will try and remind myself that I can appreciate someone else’s traditions and how profound they are without needing to participate myself.  We have our own traditions on December 25th– Dim Sum!  Blockbuster movies!---and I remain grateful that I won’t need to cling to them like a life-raft, girding against loss.

What Are You Reading (offline, that is)?

Megan Flynn is a self-proclaimed foodie and writer with dreams of a literary life.  She has a master's in Children's Literature and an affinity for cultural studies, good food, caffeine, cute animals, dirty martinis, bookstores, and those first few weeks of autumn. Her hobbies include running, cooking, taking photos, crying over her favorite music, trying to keep her room clean, and blogging away at freckleditalian.com. She currently resides on Smith Mountain Lake in Virginia, where she drinks wine and works in the social media & mobile apps division of a software company in downtown Roanoke. When fall and winter come around with their chilly mornings and fog, I cling to old books. My Norton Anthologies from undergrad move from my bookshelf to my bedside table, and I flip through the bent and sometimes coffee-stained pages of my favorite novels from that time. Sometimes I don’t even read the whole thing; I just page through until I find a section with a lot of underlining or notes in the margins. It reminds me of the days when the majority of my time was spent reading, sharing clothes with my girlfriends, doing work in a library.

But eventually it’s time for a winter with new books. So I’ve compromised this season, toting around three new ones with only one repeater. And I asked an old college friend to tell me what she’s reading right now, too.

--

Atonement by Ian McEwan This is my nostalgic winter read of the year.

“Cecilia knew she could not go on wasting her days in the stews of her untidied room, lying on her bed in a haze of smoke, chin propped on her hand, pins and needles spreading up through her arm as she read her way through Richardson’s Clarissa.”

Atonement very deeply conveys the power of writing. I love McEwan’s ability to tell me a story without being overly emotional and still make me feel more than some Nicholas Sparks novel would. I love that when I first read Atonement, Cecilia and I were both reading our way through Richardson’s Clarissa. It’s a book that will stay with you, and remind you of where you were in life when you first read it.

Les Misérables by Victor Hugo I have literally been working on this book since June. The story is gorgeous, but I sometimes get lost in Hugo’s narration. I take breaks and read other things, which I think is fine, and people keep asking me why I don’t just put it down and forget about it. It’s so long, they say. I know that. But I started it because I thought that any novel that could inspire the songs from Les Misérables, the musical, was worth a try. And I haven’t felt like putting it down for good yet. I’m trying to finish it by Christmas, when the new film version comes out. Hey, I dreamed a dream!

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami From the back cover: “Japan’s most highly regarded novelist now vaults into the first ranks of international fiction writers with this heroically imaginative novel, which is at once a detective story, an ccount of a disintegrating marriage, and an excavation of the buried secrets of World War II.”

One of my smartest friends gave me this book as a gift, and I’m only twenty-five pages in, but when I close the thing I’m left with the feeling that I have no idea what I’m about to get myself into. I mean that in the best possible way—this novel is already beautifully mysterious and odd.

I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter The same professor (my absolute favorite ever) who had me read Atonement and Clarissa in one semester also recommended this book to my class. An English professor with a Ph.D. in British Literature, he said that every year he tries to read something from outside his field in order to see things with an open mind and stay sharp. Although not rocket science, I thought that was amazing. Right now, you’re listening to a woman who had so much trouble with math in school that she shies away from basic addition and subtraction, and certainly doesn’t make time to try to tackle algebra head-on.

Hofstadter addresses the idea of what we mean when we say “I”—is it even real? Is it just a state of consciousness? His writing is more accessible than I anticipated and he tells great stories. Never mind the fact that I bought my copy three years ago and am only on chapter four. I’ll get to it with a bit more energy soon, perhaps once I’m done with Les Misérables.

And as a bonus, here is a suggestion from my dear friend Emily, a 9th grade English teacher. When Emily suggests a book, I always pick it up.

The Paris Wife by Paula McLain This book deliciously tells the story of Ernest Hemingway and Hadley, his first wife. Although this is a fictional account of their marriage, the novel is meticulously accurate on all major plot moments and was clearly written after much research. Readers will be re-introduced to familiar names such as F. Scott, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound as Hadley and Hemingway drink their way around a glittering Paris in the 1920s.

This novel is creatively, gracefully told from the perspective of Hadley, and I couldn't help but find her vulnerability infectious. I thought I knew Hemingway before this novel, but I was amazed to discover how re-shaped my perspective is now on such an electric, but selfish, man. I devoured this novel, knowing all the while that their love didn't last, hoping all the same for Hadley's happiness in the end. Once you've read this novel, you will never read The Sun Also Rises the same way again. (And, if you're like me, that's exactly what you'll pick up once you've finished the final page of The Paris Wife.)

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So, what are you reading?

When the universe winks [or: Wagon Wheel]

There have been times in my work with communities affected by conflict when I have longed for a stronger belief in a supernatural deity. I have been compelled to pray, to hope that someone out there is listening. At this stage in my life, my imagination of that "supernatural something" that resides outside of ourselves does not take the form of a deity. Rather, my belief can be summarized in the following phrase: The universe is winking.

You know the moments I am describing: In the face of adversity or great irony, of what seems like undue strife, something happens to reassure you that you are not alone, that the world is not laughing in your face, that life unfolds on a continuum and the narratives of joy and heartbreak exist side-by-side. And, if recent experiences with fragility have been any indication, the universe winking at me comes with a soundtrack---Old Crow Medicine Show's "Wagon Wheel."

The song appeared in my life during a relationship that may never have happened had it not been for grief, fragility, and emotional confusion in the first place. As Joan Didion advises in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, "we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not" and, in that vein, I need to extend compassion to the self who thought she could drown grief in affection and be blind to the traits that would make the affection shallow and the grief immutable. He hated my music. That should have been a clue. Anyone who hates the company that Cat Power and Brandi Carlile and Rachael Yamagata keep, anyone who cannot reconcile himself with my army of women singer-songwriters, is dancing on a different sheet of music than the one in which I live. So he made me a CD. [Pause for nostalgic indulgence in the quaintness of making someone a CD, not a Spotify playlist.]

Of all the tracks on it, Wagon Wheel jumped out. Even after that budding relationship withered, Wagon Wheel lingered as the soundtrack to a segment of life for which I never quite found the words.

***

Second day in Cairo. I met the girls on an email list of foreigners in Egypt looking for roommates. I met the boys on a sailboat on the Nile the night before, on my first day. Coincidentally also the first day of Ramadan, the first of many firsts. We are in the boys' apartment and I am alive with the exhilaration of belonging, with the relief of how quickly one belongs when she is a foreigner among foreigners, a stranger among strangers---all of whom wish to throw out that label and slide over to best friends already. One of the boys picks up his guitar. Wagon Wheel is the first song he plays.

That song came with me to Uganda... Sudan... Colombia... Guatemala... Jerusalem. "Points South" of all that. Now Boston. So did the guitar. And so did the boy.

***

Katherine's birthday party. Budding friendship, united by parallel narratives which---defying all laws of geometry---intersect as they unravel. The kind of friendship that fills your sails with gratitude, that makes you feel like the universe can wink simply by putting someone in your path. Her friend brought his guitar. Barenaked Ladies. The Beatles. Leaving on a jet plane. Hallelujah, Jeff Buckley.

And then, inevitably, Wagon Wheel. A room full of people singing the words along. The universe winked extra pointedly that night, to make sure I knew I was home.

***

My love for the song is immaterial. This is not the kind of song that one feels was written for her. I have never been to Johnson City, Tennessee, never picked a banjo. This is not a lyrical attachment. Rather, Wagon Wheel is my clue to pay attention. It is the way that I know that, even if I am trudging through the mud right now, somewhere out there the universe is winking. It is the music that plays, almost invisibly, to make sure that I am listening.

What Are You Reading (offline, that is)?

Bethany Suckrow is a food-instagramming, coffee-obsessed writer at bethanysuckrow.com, where she shares both prose and poetry related to life, faith, storytelling and creativity. Her writing has been featured in Prodigal Magazine and Relevant Magazine. She and her musician husband Matt live in the Chicago suburbs. I set out at the beginning of the year with a goal to read twelve books, hoping for an average of one a month. I began this endeavor with a few fiction classics I had always wanted to read---On the Road, A Moveable Feast---and then I plowed through the entire Hunger Games series after my cousin insisted I borrow them (after Twilight, I've grown wary of fiction fads). As the year went on, an unintended proclivity for nonfiction emerged from my choices---memoir-style works on faith, to be specific. Some I had been wanting to read, some were given to me, some I stumbled across. Reflecting back on this unintended theme in my reading life this year, I've realized that my spiritual life was starving for enrichment.

And how better to feed my spirit than to consume the written word?

This list of books has challenged the way that I express my faith, internally and externally. They've given me a better understanding of the Hebrew roots of the Christian faith, the benefit of learning from the authors' faith journeys, and encouragement as a woman when I don't understand the stories found within Scripture.

I'm curious---what do you read to fill your spirit and refresh your faith, whatever tradition you identify with---agnostic, atheist, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist? Are there any fiction books you've read that have fulfilled you spiritually?

Blue Like Jazz

by Donald Miller

Originally published in 2003, Miller's Blue Like Jazz is a spiritual memoir subtitled "Non-Religious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality." A lot of my friends read it in college, but I didn't pick it up until early this year. I appreciated this book for Miller's rawness as he wrestles with his belief in God and how he expresses his belief to others.

A quote from the book that explains its unusual title : "The first generation out of slavery invented jazz music. It is a music birthed out of freedom. And that is the closest thing I know to Christian spirituality. A music birthed out of freedom. Everybody sings their song the way they feel it, everybody closes their eyes and lifts up their hands."

Mudhouse Sabbath

by Lauren Winner

After her conversion from Orthodox Judaism to Christianity, Lauren Winner sought ways to incorporate the spiritual principles of Judaism into her Christian faith through the rich traditions and practices that she grew up with. What she shares in this short book is more than ritual, but an invitation to explore eleven Jewish spiritual practices that offer a transformative view of God, the world, and our relationship to both. I have loved uncovering the layers of symbolism found in the Jewish tradition that Christianity has thrown by the wayside. So much of what Jesus did spoke directly to those rituals and the meaning behind them, but Christians don't often understand them because we neither study nor practice them. Rediscovering them has helped me understand Jesus's teachings on a deeper level.

Ruminate Magazine, Issue 25 : Unraveling the Dark

This latest issue of Ruminate Magazine titled "Unraveling the Dark" explores our cultural preoccupation with remaining positive. Having lost my mother early this year, the theme of this edition touched the depth of my sadness in a way that few things have been able to during this season in my life.

Nicole Rollender's poem, "Necessary Work" throws life and death, dark and light, into high contrast with lines like, "the beautiful plum falling / from its long branch, then sweetly decomposing."

It is exhausting to live with the reality of loss, even more so to daily extol the "blessings" of grief that Christians, for some reason, always seem to expect of one another. "Unraveling the Dark" offers relief in its somber reflection on the darkness of life's circumstances. After all, even the psalmists bore lament.

A Year of Biblical Womanhood

by Rachel Held Evans

I had the pleasure of meeting and dining with Rachel Held Evans at STORY Conference this year, and there I also heard her speak about her new book, released this month, which chronicles her pursuit of "biblical womanhood" over the course of one year, as she explores the literal interpretations of the Bible's instructions for women.

I commend Evans for her grace, humor and valor in challenging what Christians, especially those of the evangelical persuasion, believe about women's role in the home, the workforce, and the Church. Having grown up in a faith tradition that is infamous for repressing diversity and gender equality, I found Evans' book enlightening and empowering. You can read extended excerpts of Biblical Womanhood on Evans' blog.

Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers

by Anne Lamott

This one is actually on my Christmas wish-list and so I haven't read it yet, but if it's anything like Bird by Bird or Traveling Mercies, Help, Thanks, Wow will be a great read for continuing my habit of memoir-style spiritual nonfiction into 2013. In Help, Thanks, Wow, Lamott distills our groanings of the spirit to three simple prayers for help, gratitude and wonder. You can read a wonderful excerpt of it on Salon.

I'll take today.

I have many guilty pleasures, including the queso from Torchy's Tacos in Austin, The Real Houswives of New York, and, most importantly for us here today, the British miniseries Lost in Austen. It's a sort of wish fulfillment version of Pride and Prejudice, in which a plucky, modern-day heroine named Amanda Price finds a portal to Austen's England via her bathroom wall. The show plays into what is, admittedly, a pretty widespread fantasy of women (and likely some men) the world over: slap on an Empire-style dress and a bonnet, and you, too, will no doubt be irresistible to Mr. Darcy. As a bonus, you'll get to live inside the world of your favorite novel, surrounded by the insufferable Mrs. Bennet, the kind, understanding Jane, and the tragically hands-off Mr. Bennet (revealed here to be graced with the Christian name Claude).

But it's Amanda's present-day roommate who, in the final moments of the series, reminds us of a cold, hard truth: while those women in flowing gowns and men in knee-high boots might seem impossibly elegant to us when viewed from a comfortable 200 years' distance, the reality differs somewhat. When Amanda asks her to come along with her to 19th century Longbourne, Pirhana (her roommate) says, "Amanda, I'm black. And what's more, I can't live without electricity, chocolate, or bog paper."

When (major spoiler alert) the miniseries ends with Amanda swapping places with Elizabeth Bennet (in time, space, and Fitzwilliam Darcy's affections) the implication is that while Lizzie was clearly too modern for her own time, Amanda belongs to it.

It's an adorable and satisfying conceit for a TV show meant to be consumed along with obscene amounts of chocolate, no doubt. On reflection, though, is anyone served by this kind of sentimentality about the past? Especially a pastiche of time gone by? After all, it's the Republican spin machine's treacly version of a 1950s paradise (one which, let's be clear, never existed, except on TV) that's used as a reason to roll back the rights women and people of color have spent the last 60 years fighting for.

By dressing up the past in our own expectations for it, we do those whose dedication and hard work has brought us this far a disservice. Nostalgia for one's childhood is understandable, but nostalgia for a time in which slavery was commonplace worldwide (though it has yet to be eradicated, even today), women were treated---by the law as well as by men---as property, and there was little to no access to things like Charmin and Vosges?

No thanks. I'm too busy making sure it doesn't reassert itself in the here and now---a place which, incidentally, is looking pretty good these days, what with Obama's reelection, New Hampshire sending an all-women delegation to Congress (plus a female governor), more women than ever in the House and Senate, and the first openly lesbian and bisexual members of Congress headed to D.C. Yup, I'll stick with the era I was lucky enough to be born into, thanks. Pass the chocolate.

What Are You Reading (offline, that is)?

Emily Matchar is the author of Homeward Bound: The New Cult of Domesticity (Simon & Schuster, May 2013), which explores our current mania for "new domesticity"---the knitting, the Etsy-ing, the backyard chicken-keeping, etc. etc. She writes about culture, work, food and women's issues for places like The Washington Post, Salon, Men's Journal, the BBC and others. She lives in Hong Kong and in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. 

How to Be a Woman by Caitlin Moran I just finished this, inhaling it in, like, 15 minutes. Moran, a British music journalist and columnist, is 1,000 times cooler and more hilarious and foul-mouthed than your most cool, hilarious and foul-mouthed friend. She gets drunk with Lady Gaga. She talks openly about her abortion. She goes to strip clubs and pronounces them bullshit. She rails against things like bikini waxing and butt-floss thongs without giving a damn about whether she sounds like a “strident feminist.” She IS a strident feminist. We should all be strident feminists. In Moran’s world, there’s a lot less guilt and uncomfortable underwear, and a lot more rock n’ roll and cake and tickle fights with your kids.

Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen by Alix Kates Shulman Shulman is a feminist activist who achieved fame/notoriety for publishing her 1969 “A Marriage Agreement,” a contract formally dividing up housework between her and her husband. She’s been mocked for it ever since by people who think it’s petty or humorless, but given that we still don’t have a fair divide of housework in this country, she clearly had a major point. Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen is a novel, a very 1970s novel raging with anger at possessive husbands and no-good lovers and rapey high school football players, full of lines like “Even in a separate bed I would be trapped under his ego.” It’s a bit hard going, but makes me feel really good that a lot’s changed in the past 40 years when it comes to male-female relationships. I interviewed Shulman about housework and gender for my book (Homeward Bound: The New Cult of Domesticity, out this coming spring), and she’s a real trip (to borrow piece of 1970s vocab). “We didn’t want to abolish housework!” she cried. “We just wanted men to do their fair share.”

O, The Oprah Magazine I’m not always a big fan of Oprah. I mean, she’s an amazing woman and entrepreneur, but her fondness for pseudoscience and “The Secret”-type power of positive thought crap is idiotic. Still, I love her magazine. I’ve never been able to read aspirational glossies like Vogue or Vanity Fair without feeling terrible about myself (why don’t I have a “great friend” who is a Duchess? Why don’t I have “the new wool pant” in my wardrobe? Why aren’t I at a book party in Brooklyn fending off advances from Salman Rushdie?). Oprah understands that everyone’s life is messed up in some way or another, and her magazine’s all about working with what you’ve got and having a good attitude. My punkrock 14-year-old self would kill me for admitting this, but I eat it up. My mom just sent me her back issues of O along with a bunch of Halloween candy, and I’ve been enjoying both in the bathtub. So sue me.

The Passage by Justin Cronin Ever since I picked up Steven King’s Carrie as a morbid and bookish 9-year-old, I’ve loved literary horror novels. Apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic? Even better. As an adult, I’ve branched out into mystery (Tana French, Kate Atkinson and Gillian Flynn are some of my recent favorites), largely because a lot of horror novels are real shite in the prose style department. So I was super-psyched to start The Passage, as Cronin comes from the non-genre side of things and really knows how to write. I’m 23 percent of the way through the story (yes, I usually read on my Kindle), a tale a government-sponsored trial of a modern-day vampire virus that goes out of control (naturally). There’s a rogue FBI agent with a broken heart. There’s a little girl with superpowers. There’s a nun from Sierra Leone who talks to God. It’s so good I’m not getting any work done.

The American Plague by Molly Caldwell Crosby Speaking of apocalyptic horror stories involving dreadful viruses: this is about a real one. The yellow fever epidemic in Memphis in 1878 sickened 20,000, killed 5,000, and turned the city into a giant morgue. Everyone with means (ie, wealthy whites) fled to the highlands, while the poor and black stayed behind. In a lot of ways, the city never recovered. As a Southerner (I grew up in Durham and Chapel Hill, North Carolina), I’ve always been fascinated with the ways the region is haunted by its past.

On that cheerful note, thanks for asking me to participate! I hope everyone’s eating leftover turkey and lying on the couch with a good book (or, let’s be honest, a backlog of “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo” episodes).

Flashing the Audience

Can I tell you one of my least favorite things? It’s that moment—you know the one—when you’re watching a trailer for such-and-such action movie, and there’s EXPLOSIONS, and there’s CAR CHASES, and there’s sweaty close-ups with a tough-looking guy muttering something cliché like “here we go again,” and all of a sudden there’s a brief, almost subliminal flash of a female actress taking her shirt off, and you’re like “what?” but they’re already to the next shot and/or the graphic title of the movie.

Sometimes the woman’s face is shown; sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes it’s a recognizable, hot actress, a Zoe Saldana or a Scarlett Johansson. Sometimes it’s a love scene. Sometimes it’s T, sometimes it’s A. But it always feels incredibly gratuitous, like a really transparent non sequitur. It’s like a big, “HEY! Hey guys! There will also be hot women wearing very little clothing! Just in case that influences your decision to spend money on this movie.” (Operative word being “guys”: I don’t discount that this marketing might also appeal to queer women, but there’s a definite exclusion happening in the message that both ignores and potentially discomfits and alienates the female demographic.)

So I was reminded of this when I saw this week that GQ’s Man of the Year issue, which has multiple covers, will feature one cover with Rihanna completely naked save a very open leather jacket, while the other two covers feature very clothed, close-cropped male actors (Channing Tatum and Ben Affleck). Seeing as how GQ is basically the journalistic equivalent of an action film in terms of its gender appeal, it’s not entirely surprising.

But, as Jezebel puts it: “Just imagine a little girl who looking at the three covers and wondering why the lady is the only one with no clothes on. What message is she getting about her body? What has she learned about a woman's worth?”

As I mentioned in a previous post on pretty comediennes, it’s disappointing that women in entertainment, no matter their talents or personality, are expected to play sexy on magazines, in movies, on red carpets. Rihanna may be more in control of her hypersexual image than most—but the juxtaposition of her “Obsession of the Year” cover and the two male-dominated covers is revealing. It’s that wink at the audience, that barely coded message to men that says, “Hey! We have women in this issue—and those women are not wearing any clothes.”

Watch for it next time you see an action or thriller trailer. They think they're being sneaky, but it's easy to spot if you're looking for it. What I'm hoping is that . . . that moment, that shirt-taking-off moment, will more and more seem like a harsh dissonance, a “where the hell did that come from?”, and will be less and less employed. Or hey, at the very least, let's have a little more male objectification to keep things equal. What's good for the goose is good for the gander! (I kid. Kind of.)