On therapy
Snowqueen has a good, thoughtful post up about her reservations about psychotherapy, especially its likeness to Christian mythologies of redemption and the resultant tendency to focus on finding the ideal self. And when I was shopping for a therapist recently on PsychologyToday.com, I was totally put off by this kind of language in therapists’ ads, which make plenty of annoying references to “a better you,” as if therapy is some kind of plastic surgery of the soul, taking away your big nose or your love handles because they aren’t “really” a part of you; they’re hiding your “true” self, which, of course, happens to resemble some televisionish ideal.
My dissertation work has made me especially sensitive to these ideas of consensus about the ideal person, which has almost nothing to do with individual people, nor with the things that make us individually capable of great success. I don’t in any way mean to pathologize all of humanity, but rather to say that, just like pretty much no one has the body that women’s magazines would tell us is ideal (even supermodels get airbrushed into inhuman forms), no one has the psychological makeup one might think of as ideal. Trauma and idiosyncracy make us wonderfully human, just as my own individual body makes me myself. I would no more want to snip off my obsessive self-consciousness or anxieties than I would want to cut off thirty pounds from my midsection. I might be more likable to more people, but I would cease to recognize myself. That ideal self simply doesn’t exist.
The parts of my mind that make me paranoid, despondent, and self-lacerating are the same parts that develop careful, interesting theories for my work. My constant anxiety about what is reasonable or unreasonable also makes me justify my work to an academic audience that is certain to be hostile to it. In my personal life, I struggle with being manipulated to want what I don’t want just as, in my work, I struggle with the influences of theory that move me outside of my own project. With both the body and psychological makeup, there is this constant, anxious negotiation between saying, “Fuck you; this is who I am” and acknowledging that one cannot expect one’s own idiosyncracies to be acceptable to others. They’re unacceptable not because our interlocutors feel themselves to be the physical or psychological ideal (which no individual is), but because we triangulate ourselves with respect to others by adding this third idealized standard between and above us.
Let us think of intimacy, for the moment, as the process of lowering that ideal point to somewhere in between two people, or between a reader and a text. One begins to see the other not as a poor instantiation of the ideal, but closer to something like an ideal of themselves with respect to oneself. I think that for me, the anxiety of intimacy is that the third point still remains, but begins to move closer to one member of the relationship or the other. That is, the relationship begins to settle such that the point of reference is not a shared impossible ideal, but something that is more controlled by one party than by the other; we both interpret the two of us through terms that are more favorable to the other. This happens to me especially I think not because I am particularly generous or loving or whatever but because I am, in my most lizard-brained mood, a nearly sycophantic reader. I love the books I love for themselves, for their own sakes, and even with all their oddities, they become their own ideal selves.
So too with people, my various intimacies begin, after the initial lowering of the third ideal point, to place that point as close to the other person as possible. I am not debased by it, but we begin to interpret both of us with the understanding that the other person is the ideal self against which I become strange—not bad, but strange. The other’s desires are always reasonable, and mine, we both suspect, are kind of weird. I’m sure this emotional habit has something to do with my relationship with my mother; being raised by a very demanding, irrational person who holds your life in her hands will make you learn how to think of yourself always in the context of others’ mercurial desires. The best thing you can do in that case is to have the blandest, most rational possible excuses for everything. That is, you learn never to insist that you have an idiosyncratic selfhood of your own at all. And if, God help you, you suddenly decide to exercise the right to irrational or emotional needs in the midst of a relationship in which the other’s needs are always central, you can expect a swift and painful correction.
In response to Snowqueen’s thoughts about therapy, I totally agree that the pernicious Christian doctrine of an idealizable self is sewn into the fabric of a lot of psychotherapy. The marketing of everything now is based on this model in which the true self is a perfect self lying dormant within and waiting to be made public through financial exchange. The color you choose for your iPod, the meal you order at Applebee’s, and the therapist you visit are all your personal PR team, marketing your inner perfect self to the world, washing you white as snow and making you finally deserving of love. But the kind of therapy I value, and that I’m currently involved in, seems far less about finding an ideal within myself, or seeing the world as a free market of souls to win for one’s Likability Hedge Fund, and is instead focused on analyzing the relationship between desire and failure, questioning assumptions about what makes a successful life or a successful relationship, and exploring the sources of and the need for theories, narratives, and ideals.
At least, that’s what I hope we’re doing. I went into therapy again not because I needed fixing—I’m nothing if not an expert self-repairman—but because I need time and space, outside of my intimate relationships in the world, to give consideration to the deepest levels of my mental and emotional organization. I know and am pretty comfortable with who I am, but I am tiring of my limitations.
I don’t know that I can say anything yet
For anyone not personally connected to a public person who has recently died, there is an awareness of the selfishness and futility of one’s grief. I can’t publicly mourn DF Wallace here because I am not ready to share that with you. Some of you may have read a few of his essays, or a bit of his fiction, and you may have thought that you didn’t get what was such a big deal about him. Maybe you thought he was over-hyped or self-humoring or too deeply emotionally flawed to produce anything of genius. I’ve been hearing this shit for eleven years, since I started reading Wallace during my freshman year of college. And all this time, Wallace is the one writer I loved at that age whom I defended vociferously whenever I got the chance. The body of work he produced holds up to the backlash. It is that good, and I’d even go so far as to say that Wallace was the only writer of his generation who actually seemed to know what he was doing—not in terms of craft, which plenty of people seem to be trained in, but in terms of art, in a philosophical sense. He knew what art does and can do, and unlike his low-aiming contemporaries, his work never gave up at “giving the reader an experience”—the poor post-post-modern excuse for an aesthetic sense—but worked very hard at an attempt to make sense of an impossibly nonsensical world through painful, rigorous, irresolvable dialectic thought.
We all have those figures in the public eye whom we don’t know and yet we claim them. We don’t even want to know them. We just feel an affinity of spirit, or purpose, or mental organization. Wallace seems to have felt this way about Lynch, that seeing Blue Velvet awakened him from his dogmatic slumber and he began to think about art and its possibilities in a totally new way. And I don’t necessarily think Lynch would agree to Wallace’s description of his work. Maybe Wallace knew it too, and didn’t want to subject his own analysis to authorial interpretation. That’s how I felt about Wallace. I never wanted to know him; I wanted to use his work to help me and my students learn to think analytically about the world.
I don’t care if people who met him disliked him, or if his suicide proves he was “selfish” (thanks, all you LA Times obit commenters, you fucking assholes). He isn’t mine in that way to judge. Jonathan Swift lived a famously unpleasant, selfish, neurotic, depressed life, and few of us could live with ourselves if we agreed with his worldview. But will any of us deny that Swift has given us a body of work singularly outstanding in its bravery, its unblinking rage at the abyss? Like Swift, who many casual readers think of as “funny,” Wallace also has suffered the indignity of seeing his profound anger and sadness recast by readers as some kind of gimmicky joke. Of course there is humor there, as in Swift, but that humor exists within a worldview that is stunningly hopeless, if only because they both wish for the possibility of hope so badly. The human condition is, for both of them, a very sick and sickening joke.
There’s also the unfairness. I won’t name names, because that’s creepy, but I would give the next 30 years of almost any other living writer’s future production to have seen another great novel from Wallace. I am trying not to think this way.
I am teaching some Wallace this semester, as I have in my composition classes every semester I’ve taught it in the past seven years. Last night, as I was re-reading that essay, it struck me that suicide is on nearly every page in one way or another. I’ve always known this and noticed it. Wallace frames a lot of feelings in the language of violence against himself, but he also makes metaphors out of the language of sex without really talking about sex. (There is never really sex qua sex in Wallace, but the language of sex is everywhere.) But now I find the prospect of teaching this essay incredibly daunting. It’s hard to see the humor in it right now. Or rather, since I did find myself laughing particularly hard at some lines, the humor is too important. The sadness is too important. I don’t know if I can handle talking to eighteen-year-olds about it.
On the other hand, what better thing could I do with this feeling of grieving not a man, whom I never met, but a mind, other than to honor him in my classroom? It is a small thing.
I miss him. I feel selfish and ridiculous, and I miss him.
Watching this is sad and enlightening.
Watching this is pretty fun, in that you get to see Wallace totally pwn Jonathan Franzen so fucking hard it hurts. Mark Leyner escapes with some mild scratches, and Wallace comes off as almost unbearably condescendingly academic, but he’s the only one of the three who seems to have thought in any coherent way about aesthetic theory. It reminds me of this exchange from Broadcast News:
Paul Moore: It must be nice to always believe you know better, to always think you’re the smartest person in the room.
Jane Craig: No. It’s awful.
Feel free to comment on this if you care, but seriously, I will moderate this thread heavily. I am feeling sensitive about this right now.
Update: You should probably also read “Consider the Lobster,” if you haven’t recently. Gourmet got a doozy of a thing, and they put it online. It’s not my favorite essay of DFW’s, but it’s a wonderful example of his dialectical process, full of honest, intense moral self-analysis.
On squeaky wheels
I’ve been teaching at one of my two jobs for two and a half years now. One of the main things I’ve come to think about this particular population of undergrads is that they tend to be passive aggressive about their education. If you don’t milk it out of them, they’ll sit there through a whole semester smiling blandly at you, blandly getting B’s, and then walk out at the end of the semester pissed off that they didn’t get the experience they wanted. A while back, I made it my most solemn duty to get right up in their faces, nearly every day, and ask how class is going for them, what they want me to do that I’m not doing. I’m a pretty flexible teacher, and, aside from changing the syllabus, I give them as much freedom as they want. If they ask for extensions or revisions, I grant them. If they want more help on the writing process, I’ll do that. I’ll meet with them in my office to talk about anything that concerns them, and if they’re not really getting why I assigned the literature I did, then I’m open to discussing it. I don’t mind being surrounded by angry people. It’s the waxy-eyed look of the blandly pleasant student who has decided to tune me out that I can’t stand. Those are the ones who end up on RateMyProfessors.com saying all manner of horrible things.
At the other college where I’m teaching, the mood in the room is mercurial, and the drama of it builds throughout a class. It’s nerve-wracking, but I love it. My students there are constantly going meta on me. “I don’t like this author and I wish we weren’t reading him for the next month” or “This class is very difficult so far, and disturbing to me personally, but our discussions have been rewarding.” They will mention the two students who dropped and talk honestly about their objections. They tell me when they’ve especially enjoyed a day of class, but also tell me when they need more instruction in a certain area. Most of these issues I can address, and others I explain are not ones that we can achieve total clarity about. It can be stressful, but they’re already engaged on day one, and they stay engaged throughout the semester. The very high percentage of A-grades I gave there in the spring were because they really deeply mastered that material, in part because I was a better teacher for their input, and in part because having that input made them feel more personally responsible for learning.
When I first started teaching there, I went back to my class at the first school and told them about my other students. I said they’re not necessarily “smarter” or better in any intrinsic way, but they’re more confident in their right to complain and get what they want. They’re in a smaller department, where they know the profs better, so they seem to feel a lot more freedom, and they act with the understanding that if they ask for help, they’ll get it. I told them that if they’re unhappy, or if they feel there is something that would make the class or their curriculum more fruitful for them, they need to complain, not when it’s too late, but now. They can talk to the department about classes they want to take. They can ask professors for clarification when they’re confused. No one wants them to walk out of that room, or off that campus, saying, “I guess I just didn’t get what I wanted.”
And most of them gave me the cynical eye. They’ve been a cog in a big public ed wheel for a long time and they don’t expect results. But a handful of them made a vow to be more proactive. They got together after class to talk about what they wanted from their education and began asking for it. And, from what I understand, some of those squeaky wheels are getting some pretty serious grease, not just from me, but from the department in general. One student came to me several times about how to phrase his petitions, and has since gotten himself enrolled in an independent study with one professor, a graduate class with another, and a spot as my TA this semester. He wanted more work and more individual instruction, and he got it. I know of a few others in the department, both my own students and others, who are known for being unusually prickly or demanding, and they are the ones who get what they want.
In my own education, most of my best learning experiences have been in classes that I hated at first. I sat there with a sour face, thinking, “Jesus Christ, this is bullshit.” The profs either called me out on it, or I started complaining, and in most cases, we figured out what I wasn’t understanding. I’m in the field I’m in because of one such class, and my dissertation research has taken the direction it has because of another. Most instances of changing one’s mind start with a bit of anger or resistance. We don’t all take to scholarship the way a water-baby takes to the pool at the Y. Some of us do a lot of fussing and squirming first.
This semester, I’m teaching one section of freshman comp, which I haven’t taught in a long while. Already, I can sense how teaching more advanced students has changed how I am treating these freshman. I’m particularly worried about them settling into college as just an extension of a bad high-school experience, which I’ve seen way too many seniors doing. If they don’t learn how to complain fruitfully, they’ll only learn to be quietly bitter about education, and they won’t get what they want. They’ll assume no one gets what they want except for the few who, like baby birds, just open wide for whatever gets stuffed in. So I’m teaching them how to bitch at me.
So far, the experiment seems to be going really well. They bitch about the weird book I assigned them, and I am forced to defend my choice. What is especially cool is when one student bitches about the assignment, and then I hear another student defending it; they’re having an argument, in class, about the pedagogical efficacy of my methods, and they’re discovering not only what I’m teaching them, but why. I don’t expect that everyone will walk out of the class convinced, but that’s not the point of the bitching. The point of the bitching is to make sure we’re in constant dialog about their expectations and needs. If I can explain to them why I’ve made certain choices and they’re convinced, they’ll be more engaged in the material. If I can’t, then I’ve been made aware of a particular student’s needs and can maybe address them in a different way.
What I was especially pleased to see while they peer-reviewed their first writing assignment yesterday was the way they’d begun to feel comfortable bitching at one another. One young man, who has already shown a bit of playful mean-spiritedness, took a very thorough pen to the essay of a shy girl in his group. I noticed lots of comments like “Cliché!” in her margins. I asked how things were going, and the shy girl beamed at me. “Oh my God, he is, like, SO mean!” The boy beamed, too. He added, “Yeah, I think I got carried away. I never got the chance to be critical of someone else’s writing before, and I think it makes me worried about my own writing. I’m not great, but I can only see the flaws in someone else’s paper.”
“Is everything OK here, though?”
“Oh, yes,” the girl said. “At first, I was all emailing him, like ‘OMG, lighten up!’ but we talked about it, and he is giving really good advice. I’m really happy with how my paper is going.”
“Yeah, I think she’s a really good writer, actually,” the boy added.
The class as a whole is mostly shy, earnest kids, with a few smart-alecks thrown in, which usually results in the smart-alecks shaming everyone else into silence. But this semester, it’s not happening. The smart-alecks are getting increasingly earnest, while the shy kids are opening up. Some of the shyest ones are openly asking for help, or even teasing me a bit. They’re really helping one another, and productively kvetching about their freshman-year experience. I’m very proud of them.
One of the peer groups was staying a bit later than the rest, so I went to check out how things were going. A shy boy paused and said, “So hey, Professor, I remember you said tomorrow was your birthday, because it’s mine, too! Happy birthday!”
I said thanks, and returned the wish, and a shy girl piped in, “So how old are you, Professor? No wait, lemme guess. You’re…. 36?”
I made a horrified face and told her I was turning 29. The boy turned to the girl with a dead-serious look and said, “OK, peer review is over. You are now failing this class.” We all had a good laugh. They stayed another ten minutes to finish working on their papers.
Stupid dreams
I know I haven’t posted for a great long while. The semester’s started, therapy’s started, I’m turning in my prospectus, and there’s all this political stuff in my brain that I promised I wouldn’t post about. So instead, I offer you the dumbest dream I’ve ever had.
So you may or may not know that I don’t really have a thing for Michael Phelps. I’ve never thought he was particularly cute, and while I respect his athleticism, I’m not one for giant super-muscly guys with 6′6″ wingspans. I’m sure they feel the loss of my devotion mightily, but so must it be. I have, however, dated a few swimmers in my time, and, IME, they’re not exactly the most sexually attentive people in the world. All that energy goes into the pool and stays there. Swimmers are good at hugging, and if you’re particularly into hugs, I recommend dating a swimmer.
This morning, I had a dream that I was working for a magazine and my assignment was to interview Michael Phelps. I go to the house where he’s living with his affectionate mom and his mom’s boyfriend, and his dog and several kids (cousins?) seem to be running around everywhere. Phelps is boyish and smiling and talks about how he’s been playing a lot of Xbox now that he’s taking a little break from training. I ask him if he feels there’s a hole there, now that he’s not in the pool all day. His smile flickers a little and he says he has to go mow the lawn. I follow him out, past his smiling mom and mom’s boyfriend and the dog and several kids.
As he’s mowing the lawn, I ask him about how he’s spending his time, if he’s thought about going back to school or dating or anything like that. He sort of laughs this weird, distant laugh. “Have you ever had a girlfriend, Michael?” I ask. He smiles uncomfortably and shakes his head, continuing to mow the lawn. “Are you a virgin?” He stops smiling and says, “I… think so.”
Now, we all know this dream has entered the territory of insanity. Surely Phelps got 50 nationalities of ass in the Olympic Village in August. Bear with me.
In the dream, I suddenly have tremendous compassion for this guy who’s given up everything about having a normal life for this stunning athletic achievement. Normally not given to “volunteer work,” and certainly breaching several kinds of journalistic ethical standards, I am overwhelmed with patriotism and gently offer to have sex with Michael Phelps.
He is delighted. (Good God, this dream is stupid.) So we go back in the house, past his smiling mom and mom’s boyfriend and his dog and several cousins, into a little back room where Michael begins showing me his various medals and trophies. He is just like a little kid, and I begin to feel like what I’m doing is incredibly wrong. But he sort of pulls himself together, and I show him a few things, and the deed is awkwardly done. He is delighted, and a look of dawning possibility crosses his face. It’s definitely not about me; it’s about, you know, life.
At that moment, his mother comes into the room and makes a terrified yelp, but continues smiling, muttering, “What will your father say? What will your father say?” As I get dressed, the mom’s boyfriend bursts in screaming obscenities and curses while the dog barks and the other kids come in, playing cops and robbers or something, creating all kinds of horrible ruckus. I start to realize this is a horrible, horrible thing, not for him as a person, but for him as a family member of whom a certain lifestyle has been expected since he was 12. “I am so so sorry,” I feebly mutter.
I start to gather my things, and go to say goodbye to Michael. He’s in the shower with a seam ripper, looking at his wrists. Then I wake up.
Dreams are incredibly stupid.
Noriega’s Penpal
I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to care about This American Life, but this particular show about how a 10-year-old from northern Michigan became the penpal of History’s Greatest Monster (1988-1991) is really impressive. She wanted a cool hat like the ones he wore in his news bits in the US, and ended up going to Panamá to meet him. Great show.
I now make my retirement into the “kind of people who like TAL.”
Weirdest catcall ever
Lord knows I hate catcalling. There’s a guy up the street who does it every day, and is increasingly nasty, to the point that I dread needing something from the store he works in because he’s so hostile and awful. It all started with “Hello” and has now escalated to an absurd sucking/smooching/staring awful thing. I hate him, and was just thinking about it today as I, yet again, decided to put off going to the store for olive oil.
So, after making my gross fat-free beans and rice for dinner, I went out with Bave and had a lovely time that ended around 3am, when we got a cab back to Brooklyn. Splitting the difference between our places, I still had a few blocks to walk and decided to hit the all-night grocery store so I could make an omelet in the morning. It’s 3am and I don’t like running into people as I’m going home at 3am, and I see a guy clearly cross the street in the middle of the block to walk past me. Aw shit, I think, someone wants to chat. Any dude who needs to chat at 3am on an abandoned street should know that there’s a high likelihood that the chick is just going to walk on by. I think of all the times this has happened before, when I’ve ended up yelling, “IT’S 3AM. I GIVE NO ONE DIRECTIONS AT 3AM!” But I’m in a good mood from spending a good night out, so I’m not going to be weird about it.
He says, “Hey there, Superstar!” and walks on by.
I laughed. I got my olive oil, as one of three weirdos doing grocery shopping at 3am, and went home.
I feel like Clark Kent
I just got an email from my landlord that saluted me with “Hi W/B!”
OMG, I thought. My landlord reads my blog. He’s admitting it to me. I should acknowledge that. But how did he find it? Isn’t that weird? That is weird. Should I… say something? “You know who I am?” Too weird.
So I just wrote a response about the content (favor needed, something mundane) and ignored the salutation. Weird. How weird. He knows who I am.
Then it hit me:
Welcome Back.
Pseudonymous blogging has the power to make one both paranoid and vain.
In other news, I’m entering psychoanalysis next week! How fun! OK, so it’s not the multiple-times-a-week stuff, but therapy, done by a psychoanalyst. Hopefully it will be slightly more awesome than my previous experience of therapy, which was me talking to a nearly-silent trainee, who had a camera on me the whole time, and would occasionally pop into my monologue to say, “You’re so strong!” Well, duh, my problem is that I have wicked-awesome coping strategies for short-term survival. Obviously, everything underneath my meticulously-groomed sanity is a fucking wreck. The analyst seems really smart and nice, and I have a good feeling about her. We shall see.
Hating television
Just to get this out of the way, because I know my Prudence-hatred is overly-well documented, shorter Yoffe: “Even though I was technically in pretty good shape before, I indulged in a luxurious resource to make me feel more attractive, but I still hate myself, so it’s OK. Am I right, girls?” Along the way, she has some insightful thoughts about how humiliating it is to have a “35 inches, 28 inches, 37½ inches” figure at 40-something, and how “alarming” it is to weigh 127.4 pounds. She receives much gratification from being horndogged by a septuagenarian perv at the gym (”proof it was working”), but laments that “I never got in bathing-suit shape (unless the suit is the Speedo LZR Racer)—the blubber content of my stomach could be used to prove that humans once shared a common ancestor with cetaceans, and I still avoid three-way mirrors.” What the hell is “bathing-suit shape”? And how can any woman who is “alarmed” to reach 127.4 pounds claim that her “blubber” is inhuman? I keep reading her damn columns because I can’t figure out whether I think she’s mean (I can’t wear a swimsuit at 127.4 pounds; what are you thinking, Fatty?) or just sad. It’s one thing to take up the serious problem of anorexia and self-loathing that primarily affects women. It’s another to reinforce that self-loathing as a reasonable response to having a body that is, by any measure, of healthy proportions. I expect that kind of shit from Cosmo, which is why I don’t read Cosmo.
It’s also why I don’t watch television. A Netflix account, an internet connection, and a decent library seem to fill my entertainment needs pretty well, so I’ve managed to avoid TV except while on vacation. My mom doesn’t get around very well anymore, so we tend to watch a lot while on trips together. I’m sure she thinks I must be the most humorless feminist harridan of all time, but watching TV is just such a huge culture shock if you don’t do it all the time. People in real life (at least my real life) simply don’t behave this way. Is there a single character on a fictional network program who isn’t rigidly neurotic about gender performance, to the point that entire plots revolve around men hating themselves for not being masculine enough and women hating themselves for not being feminine enough?
One of the weirdest things that has happened since I stopped watching TV was that I started being accused of not knowing how life really is. My father claims I’m ridiculous for not acknowledging that women are usually stupid and vain. My mother claims I’m hopelessly quixotic for imagining that I could date a man who isn’t a dick-swinging chauvinist. They’re both constantly telling me that I don’t understand how gay and bisexual people really are, because I keep referring to people who exist instead of stereotypes from sitcoms, which is their only contact with the queer community. And God forbid I try to argue that almost none of the people of color I know think it’s hilarious to ironically play out racist stereotypes to entertain their white friends. All of my evidence seems to come from this weird place I call “the world,” which is, it seems, a figment of my imagination. What happens on TV is the real thing.
It seems that right now, the most intense stereotype on TV is the masculine male. I’ve bitched about this before, but OMFG, can a man on a television program do anything other than remind us that he has a dick? When you can boil down pretty much any male dialogue to “I’m a man, so [bizarre and irrational desire],” it’s hard to think that the TV version of masculinity has much to offer the world other than conspicuous consumption and mindless hate-fucking, with the promise of sudden and terrifying violence if anyone gets in the way of either.
The only area of improvement I’ve seen, at all, is some tiny budging around femininity. Now expanded a teensy bit beyond the role of orgasming into a 6-oz. cup of fat-free yogurt, there are at least a few women on TV who seem to speak in voices within an audible frequency range, and may even say things that are smart, salacious, and funny, some of which don’t even mention shopping for shoes. What’s odd, though, is that, as women take on more recognizably masculine traits on TV, men seem to leave them behind somewhat. All their time is spent reminding the viewer that they do indeed have a penis and not a vagina. Five seconds later, they remind us again that they still have a penis. Thirty seconds later, they once again verify the lack of a vagina. And these are the reasons why they cannot—surprise!—do any of the traditionally masculine things that women are now doing, like being smart, stoical, determined, intelligent, funny, or even desirous of having sex. (TV men seem to use sex exclusively as a way to prove to other men that they, yes, really do have a penis.)
I know a lot of men in real life. (Some of my best friends, etc.) Some men are indeed assholes. Some are violent, cruel, sexist, or thoughtless. Most of my acquaintance are generally pretty nice, good listeners, funny and smart. They mean well. I highly doubt that even one of them, aside from a few freshman boys, would be willing to accept “I’m a man, so…” as the sole reason why they do the things they do, outside of a joke. Most people seem to believe they have free will. Why is it that TV viewers tolerate this absurdly stereotyped automaton of masculinity, especially when it never seems to be used to support a stereotypically masculine “virtue”?
Of course, my experience of TV is extremely limited. I sincerely hope someone will come by and tell me that there’s some great popular sitcom character who’s a guy who is neither stereotypically masculine (and isn’t anxious about it, either) nor stereotypically campy-gay. Is there something redeemable about gender performance on TV?
But I like tea
I’m back from my little trip with my mom. It was fine and mostly uneventful. We watched the Olympics a lot in hotel rooms, as it was raining and my mom’s knees were especially bad.
One afternoon, we went shopping, as I packed one too few shirts for the trip and needed something clean to wear on the way home. We were wandering past a tea shop in the mall and I was accosted by a thin, pink-lipsticked, spiky-haired lady who really wanted me to try their teas. I like teas, so I agreed to take a little tour of their shop. Mom went to sit down on a bench.
She must have invited me to try a dozen different teas. As I sipped each one, we followed a little pattern where I commented on the leaf blend and flavor, and then she told me that it would help me lose weight. This happened for every tea.
Me: I like the white tea in this, but I’m not too fond of berry flavors. It’s a lovely tea though.
Her: And it’s full of enzymes that will suppress your appetite and create a mindfulness about your body.
Me: Uh, OK.
Me: I really like the gunpowder in this, but is there a reason it’s mixed with rooibos? I’m not crazy about rooibos.
Her: You may not know this, but rooibos is the most important tea you can work into your diet. It’s stimulating without caffeine and is effective for weight loss.
Me: Do you sell plain gunpowder tea?
Me: This is a little too sweet for me. I prefer a more bitter tea with a fuller body.
Her: This is an afternoon or evening tea that will really help you with portion control at dinner.
Me: I don’t like it.
So this went on, like a dozen times. Let’s be generous and assume she wasn’t targeting me as someone who needs to eat less. I hate it when my mother gets paranoid about that stuff, and it’s true that this seemed to be the spiel they were all giving to customers. Obviously, this is a big part of their retail training. Make your clientele feel that they will be unhealthy without this tea. Tea is medicine.
It did not remind me at all of my own work in a tea shop, where I was trained to know how to prepare and serve many different kinds of teas, and to advise customers who wanted to impress clients or friends with a lovely tea selection. I was aware of health benefits, in case someone was particularly seeking antioxidants or caffeine-free options, but I was selling a beverage that is particularly interesting for its wide variety of flavors and national rituals. I recommend teas the way I recommend cheeses; I describe the flavor, and then talk about where it comes from, how it’s made, how it’s traditionally served, and how to store and care for it.
This tea shop reminded me much more of how I was trained to sell products and services at the glamorous spa in Soho where I worked when I first came to New York. In a meeting with a sales adviser, we were told that of course everyone comes to the spa to relax and have a lovely time, but that only Midwestern tourists can actually be sold on a service because it’s fun. You have to make a wealthy person feel they need the product or service, that they are unhealthy, low-class, or ugly without it. The instant someone walks in the door, ask them what they’re “struggling” with. Almost anyone over 25 can be shown the capillaries around their nose that have broken, or a small patch of blocked pores. A little dry patch or a slight reddish area can be made into a hands-clasping tragedy that needs to be fixed. Make them feel self-conscious about their cellulite and then say, “Hey, everyone struggles with that.” If she wasn’t struggling before, she’ll start now. The strategy I hated the most was that we were supposed to ask everyone who came in the shop what they used to clean their face. No matter what they said, unless it was our own in-house product or the most expensive one, we were supposed to make a tragic smirk and go, “Ohhhh, I see… You really need to be using [most expensive product within client's projected price range].” I thought it was evil and refused to do it.
But what’s crazy is, customers LOVED it. They adored being told they had to buy this or that, that they had to schedule some elaborate series of expensive procedures. The sales guy kept saying that the issue was not that we were trying to convince them to buy something they didn’t want. They wanted these things; that’s why they came in. They had the money to buy them, or they wouldn’t have come in. All they needed was an excuse to drop the cash, and there was no more effective way than to convince them that they looked unhealthy.
I still buy their in-house facial cleanser because I really like it and it’s not ruinously expensive. This means I have to go to one of their stores, though, which means some twenty-year-old sales girl is going to approach me and ask if there’s something she can do to help my extraordinarily ugly and unhealthy-looking skin. They find it really unnerving when I tell them I used to work there. I ask questions like, “Huh, I see you’re doing a line of foaming cleansers. Five years ago, we were trained to laugh at anyone who said they used a foaming cleanser. What changed?” They have no idea. I am obnoxious. I just want them to tell me about the product, not what’s so hideous about me that I need it.
So back at the tea shop, I finally decided that I did, in fact, need some tea. The sales lady asks me, condescendingly, how I make my tea, in exactly the same tone the spa taught me to ask how someone cleaned her face. She was standing in front of an array of cast iron teapots with animals on them to attract good fortune or thinness or whatever. I said I make Taylor’s of Harrogate Scottish Breakfast tea every afternoon in a ceramic teapot and serve it with warm milk and sometimes a little honey. I smiled to convey that I was happy with this ritual, and that I was not seeking a new one. She frowned, then did a big fake smile and lead me to the counter where she grudgingly pulled a canister of Irish Breakfast off a side shelf, let me smell it, made some comment about “people who drink black tea” seeming to enjoy it, and sold me a quarter pound of it, all the while asking, “But aren’t there health benefits you’re looking for? No health benefits? That you might want?”
I thought about making a joke about insurance, but instead just smiled and said, “No, thank you. I actually just like tea.”
Out of town
I’ll be gone for the next week, on vacation with my mom. Have a good weekend, everyone!
