2. Recently, Lena Dunham described her experience at the very swanky Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Gala sitting at a table next to the talented, attractive football player Odell Beckham Jr. She said: "And it was so amazing because it was like he looked at me and he determined I was not the shape of a woman by his standards. He was like: 'That’s a marshmallow. That’s a child. That’s a dog.' It wasn’t mean. He just seemed confused." Again, we see something in quote marks with a to-be-like intro: "He was like." He didn't actually say those words. Dunham was simply performing her subjective ideation around what he might have been thinking about her. It's comical and she's a comedian. It has the advantage of being self-deprecating. But it attributes mean thoughts to him. He never said those things, and it's not that hard to tell that the quotes are not real quotes. But it takes a liberty with another person's mind.
3. I'll be looking for things to add to this list. I just noticed #1 today, and it made me think of #2. Send me suggestions. I'm especially interested in the "He was like" usage to grab the female privilege to present mind-readings of men. I'm not totally condemning the belief in and use of this power of women to read the minds of men. Figuring out what's really going on in other people's minds is one of the highest levels of human thought. It is what great novelist do. The key is doing it well and doing it ethically. Like a great novelist. Or a great comedian. Or great feminist scholar. But you have to work on that power, and it's not easy to be great, and even when you are great, you're going to annoy and outrage a lot of people, and they're not all going to bow down and acknowledge your greatness.
IN THE COMMENTS: I went first with:
An award will be given to the first person to make what I believe is THE most predictable comment.After a number of incorrect efforts, I wrote:
Prize not yet won.When I posted that, I read a couple more comments including the winner, by campy:
Thanks.
Predictable comment: there are no great feminist scholars.The prize is front-paging. Congratulations, campy. And I appreciate that you put your award-winning comment in the voice of someone else making the wisecrack that pre-annoyed me and not as your own disparagement of feminist scholarship. Huzzah!
Posts
82 comments:
An award will be given to the first person to make what I believe is THE most predictable comment.
Are we going to pair this with the power of black people to read the minds of white people?
This is what you predict:
Hillary is simply lying.
What did I win?
Of course women can read the minds of men. Why else would they finish our sentences?
(Do I get the prize?)
What's to doubt about women's use of Psychic Power. That is as old as religious practice itself.The test should be their batting average. Most psychic women are wrong to many times to qualify as trusted sources.
Call for Scott Adams, call for Scott Adams.
I don't mind my wife reading my mind. After 20+ years she really know the story lines pretty well and seems wryly amused by the sophomoric humor bouncing around in there.
But I do wish she'd stop overlaying Apple Maps routes on my Google Maps directions.
Seriously.
-XC
PS - If that is the most predictable response I'm going to run out and buy a lottery tix.
Well I believe the predicable comment is to link this post to your note about Trump, reading the body language of those offering him a secret national security briefing. "They were all, like -- you don't deserve this but we were ordered to ..."
So it's not a woman thing.
I remember reading about the Dunham incident and don't know if it was covered on this blog. Maybe Dunham was going for "jokey" but she came across as if no man can ever win in her estimation--pay attention to her, it's because you want sex (from overweight, tattooed annoying women I guess), and don't pay attention to her, it's because she doesn't fit your typical gender norms (wearing the tuxedo). Depressing that people like that aren't more reviled than they are.
I think it's worth pushing back on Hillary's claims--did anyone actually say anything nasty to you, or did you simply decide that's what they must have felt?
Predictable comment: there are no great feminist scholars.
"...and even when you are great, you're going to annoy and outrage a lot of people, and they're not all going to bow down and acknowledge your greatness."
I deal with this burden every day.
Do I win the prize?
I am Laslo.
Prize not yet won.
Thanks.
Prize won while I was writing "Prize not yet won."
The prize is front paging. Congratulations, campy.
"We see the usage "were like" followed by statements a magazine (New York) put in quotes, but it's not quite an assertion that these words were said. It's more of a dramatization of what Hillary felt at the time." Right. So, to engage in predictable male generalization (what's my award?), women dramatize what they feel by falsely attributing speech and thoughts to men, which they view as evidence of their "power to read men's minds."
Of course, these particular women don't read "the minds of men." They spin stories that serve their own purposes, trying to fit men into their own, umm, narrative, served up for the eager consumption of other women.
LOL! So we're not as predictable as we fear we might be?
To be fair to John Hinderaker the point of his piece was that Hillary was lying - again! - about the facts of what happened at the LSAT. The draft had ended when she took the LSAT. Hinderaker's "was like" convention was a fair inference from the facts and that Hillary wants to falsely portray herself as a victim. A feminist icon.
Ann Althouse said...
Prize not yet won.
Is this because Althouse can't read our minds like she thought she could?
Otherwise the Predictable would be predictable. I think.
I am Laslo.
BTW, I would have made my comment even without a contest.
My wife and I can read each others minds, but that comes with decades of experience. We can easily guess what the other is going to say.
Great novelists arent reading minds. I bet most would make lousy negotiators or salesmen or police detectives. They imagine minds, and describe minds, but thats another set of skills.
The women in these cases are being a bit neurotic, as a result I think of poor social skills due to inexperience with male company.
"were like" is used when you are paraphrasing someone rather than quoting them directly.
I was like "blah blah blah" and then he was like "yadda yadda yadda." This is common conventional usage. And it's unmistakably clear from her story that people were actually yelling at her, not just glaring. You could argue the story itself is a lie, if you're one of those people who thinks Clinton lies a lot, but within the narrative of the story, it's clear what she is describing.
To be pedantic, the female privilege here isn't the ability to "read the minds of men" it's the ability to get away with making shit up in a political context.
There's nothing uniquely feminine about putting words in someone else's mouth. Great novelists and comedians and scholars aren't all female.
What sets this apart is the political context in which a woman can imagine men hate her, and somewhat successfully garner support for her insecurities. Her statements likely reflect more about how she really thinks than how anyone else in room thought, but people will take her at her word. But even that's not really a unique female perspective... it's just rote identity politics. You could rewrite the scenario to feature any minority group you wished...
My original comment was prophylactic.
It kind of means: Don't say that smart-ass thing you're about to say.
Or I set it up so that when somebody said it, it would already have been taken care of and a source of new fun (rather than annoyance).
Everybody wins.
OK, Camille Paglia.
But I can't think of another. Anyone?
I thought of Paglia, Sexual Personae.
I'd come up blank beyond that. Great feminist scholars are naggers, beyond early Paglia.
There are okay feminists, call them feminist philosophers, for instance Vicki Hearne.
There are woman scholars, but they're not feminist scholars.
"The women in these cases are being a bit neurotic, as a result I think of poor social skills due to inexperience with male company."
Hillary! had just spent her formative college years at the all-female Wellesley College which provided an excellent education but no experience dealing with men on a regular basis.
The cavernous room described as the location of the LSAT exam was probably Harvard's Memorial HalL.
I took the MCAT exam there the next year. I too was a Wellesley student. Women taking that test were definitely outnumbered by the number of men taking the test.
But in the sixties there was no affirmative action for female law or female med students.
Women taking those exams were perceived more as a curiosity than as a threat.
My small cohort of women were treated appropriately.
I think paranoid people hear voices in their heads, rather like religious fanatics.
All rape is sex. They get it backwards. Bad venn! Venn is like karma in a women's universe.
Men don't know what women are thinking, and neither do women.
Women acting like they can read men's minds is fine for the comedic/political reasons Dr. Althouse noted. What's not OK is adopting trumped-up outrage over the reading, which may, after all, be anything from lacking in nuance to pure projection.
Feminists like Hillary have to assume lots of badthink from other people with zero proof in order to justify their politics.
I really thought the Winner was going to be something along the lines of:
"But Lena IS a marshmallow."
Etc Etc.
I am Laslo.
Do they know what Muslim men are thinking?
No, Laslo, she's a dog. Bow Wow!
Remember that men use breasts to keep track of where the women are in the room. It's nothing personal.
"There are no great feminist scholars."
It may be "smart-ass"; it's also not true. I mean, in my own field of musicology alone ... well, there are certainly great women in the field, and I don't know how many of them are explicitly feminist, but two of my Berkeley ex-colleagues, Katherine Bergeron and Elisabeth LeGuin, obviously qualify. (The former was a visiting professor, the latter a fellow student.) I can't gauge whether, say, Carolyn Abbate or Laurel Fay or Ellen Rosand are/were feminists, but all have done great and important work.
But all these need to be distinguished from people whose work is specifically about feminism and music. Suzanne Cusick I like very much (I edited one of her pieces for our student-run journal once; it was about how performing Bach's Canonic Variations on "Von Himmel Hoch" resembled lesbian sex, IIRC, but don't judge it by that). Marcia Citron and Susan McClary, OTOH ...
I took the LSAT next to a guy who looked like he slept outside the night before, asked me for a pencil, said he was forced to take the test by his family and coughed the entire exam.
Even the proctor noted the strange behavior in his notes.
Hillary is talking = Hillary is lying.
"Figuring out what's really going on in other people's minds is one of the highest levels of human thought. It is what great novelist [sic] do. The key is doing it well and doing it ethically."
No, "figuring out what's really going on in other people's minds" is what psychologists do. Great novelists imagine what's going on in other people's minds, and it has nothing to do with ethics. No one was hurt in the making of "Lolita."
Great feminist scholars, on the other hand, imagine what's going on in other people's minds, and then pretend they've really figured something out.
If I were seated next to a supermodel and there was a NFL player at the same table, I don't think the supermodel would be hanging on my every word, and this despite the fact that I could probably post higher LSAT scores than many NFL players. This is proof positive of the venality and sexism in the supermodel community. These are the issues we should be discussing.
@MDT,
it was about how performing Bach's Canonic Variations on "Von Himmel Hoch" resembled lesbian sex,
Now that is the silliest thing I've ever heard! Every reputable Bach organist knows it's performing Toccata & Fugue in F that resembles lesbian sex.
I try to picture women like Margaret Thatcher or Golda Meir whining about some imaginary male insult, but I just can't.
Hillary makes up bullshit about being put down and dismissed because she's a woman. Like the lie about women who support her but just can't bring themselves to vote for a woman. Or this lie about her LSAT experience. It's all 100% victim bullshit. The sad thing is that Hillary thinks being put down for being a woman is some mark of qualification. There is no end of people who will enable this for her, too. Oh yes, she has to be twice as good because she's female, and all that crap. It's to hide the fact that she's half as good, and twice as dishonest.
Only liberals have the power to read what is in the hearts of strangers simply by looking at their faces.
A sentence I've told my kids: What do you care what other people think?
Why is Hillary bothered that others might not want her around? Why is Lena bothered that a man might not find her sexually attractive?
It makes me think these women are living their lives trying to please people -- and then I think that Hillary is probably still trying to please Bill the un-please-able.
Go through life doing good things, being mindful, and doing what you want. Ideally, there's a happy intersection among those three.
"the wisecrack that pre-annoyed me . . . Don't say that smart-ass thing you're about to say." But you are not assuming, "reading" the minds of actual male commentators, that any of us actually care, do you, and you do know, don't you, that since at least middle school male smart-assiness is just a way to annoy women by faux-confirming their silly preconceptions, a source of juvenile but nonetheless (therefore!) genuine amusement?
YoungHegelian,
Ah, I looked up the paper, and it's not the one on the Canonic Variations; it's on Jessye Norman's "resistive" performance of Frauenliebe und -Leben. Amazing what you forget after twenty-plus years. (A lot of what she considered "resistance" I mostly thought of as labored technique, but that's just me.)
I did hear her deliver the other one, though. Something about how the hands cross, and the feet, how lines curve over and under each other and intertwine. How the body can't ever be quite in balance, because of the quick succession of moves and the need to keep going. Cusick is an organist, and does know whereof she speaks.
Hillary! is disliked because she is Hillary!, not because she is female.
As for scholars, there are, and always heve been, great scholars who were female, but great feminist scholars is kind of a contradiction in terms.
I have no informed opinion of music, but Bach always struck me as the most cerebral and least sensual of the great composers. His music seems crystalline rather than organic. Has any of his music ever been used as background music in a love story?
"His music seems crystalline rather than organic" With Bach it's and-and.
"Has any of his music ever been used as background music in a love story?" Maybe not. Then again, the cantatas are a love story from beginning to end.
@William,
Has any of his music ever been used as background music in a love story?
Yep.
The Prelude to the 1st Suite in G for unaccompanied cello also shows up everywhere.
Mozart gets used a lot. Mostly to show how classy the lovers are. Not much nudity when Mozart is on the soundtrack. When Bolero starts playing, however, full frontal nudity is not far behind.
Then again, the cantatas are a love story from beginning to end.
In part, they are. In part, they are a graphic and humiliating portrayal of the human sinner. You ought to read Richard Taruskin's piece (it was in the NYT originally, but reprinted in Text and Act) about the darker parts of the cantatas; it brought in more hate mail than anything he's written about apart from Shostakovich, which is saying something. How dare anyone say Bach wrote anything to be deliberately ugly? But he did.
My own example is "Vernuegte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust," because it begins with one of the most blissful arias in all the cantatas, and then proceeds almost directly to an atrocious vision of Hell, a vast abyss with nothing to carry you over but this one unison violin/viola line and no bass, a line that changes direction over and over again and moves to any number of keys. Listening is harrowing enough, but playing it (as I have done) makes me break out in a cold sweat just remembering it.
Althouse said,
. . . ."3. .. . . I'm not totally condemning the belief in and use of this power of women to read the minds of men. Figuring out what's really going on in other people's minds is one of the highest levels of human thought. It is what great novelist do.
Whoa, whoa whoa there. Novelists, great or otherwise are not "reading the minds" of others They are inventing dialog (internal or fictionally orated. There's no real man-person on whom to perform this clairvoyance" So, this is just physically, spatially, temporally and logically impossible.
further: . . . ". . . .The key is doing it well and doing it ethically."
Derivative of above - I'm not sure how "ethical novel writing" goes, but I'm pretty sure that there is nothing unethical about imagining what your characters are thinking or saying. I'd say that's more of a job requirement as opposed to a behavioral benchmark.
@YoungHegelian. I'm not familiar with all the movies on the list, but of those I know I think Bach's music could be used to demonstrate the alienation and coldness of the characters involved and not their romantic attachment.
Would Althouse consider herself a feminist scholar?
Serious question.
The changing shape of feminism over the past decades is a theme that runs through many of her posts.
This, in context of her analysis of the American Psyche as narrated through various sources, and the inevitable intersection with Law, built over thousands of posts of various illumination.
I would posit that Althouse is a much greater thinker than any of the women writing for Major Media.*
(*leaving men out on purpose for this 'feminist scholar' context).
I am Laslo.
I feel certain that the men in the room when Hiilary was taking the LSAT were all mountaineers. And they were ridiculing Hillary because she was unworthy if her famous namesake, Sir Edmund Hilary.
My kids say ", then she was like..." as an exact synonym for ", then she said, '...'". Drives me crazy, but that's the language these days.
Hillary; "ISIS leaders are like, 'We totally want Donald Trump to be president.'"
Q for Ann - do you think the LSAT story happened substantially the way HC describes it? Or do you think it is fiction (ala landing under sniper fire)? I bet I know your answer.
On the sniper fire, do you think HC intentionally lied, or that she confusingly actually remembered it happening even though it never did? Do you think she might be actually mis-remembering the LSAT story because it fits her narrative and may comport with other stories she has heard?
I think she HC is a habitual liar, but I think the sniper fire stuff she actually and falsely remembered happening (Reagan suffered from similar false memories).
William: re Bach and sensual music, don't know if it's ever been used in a film, but would offer for your listening enjoyment the double violin concerto -- in my estimation about as sensual a piece of music as that period of writing ever produced.
As for Hillary's LSAT tale of woe I call BS, pure and simple. I took the LSAT in 1971 in a far more conservative area of the country (deep South) than the Northeast Corridor and experienced absolutely no negative behaviors from my fellow test-takers (overwhelmingly male, as you might have expected given the time-frame) whatsoever. We all pretty much ignored each other and concentrated desperately on surviving the experience without crashing and burning.sn The LSAT isn't about getting into a particular school and isn't even a zero-sum competition, so trying to beat down someone else's ego to raise your own chances is pointless anyway. Had she been snivelling about the first day of actual law school, which IS a highly-competetive enterprise, some intimidating comment by classmates might be more rational (I fielded a few myself, from men who in fact later became my friends) but not at the LSAT. Makes no sense at all.
I will break the hearts of women and minorities everywhere by saying that we white men spend far, far less time thinking about you than you believe.
I consider Paglia and Sommers to be great scholars who happen to be feminists.
Did Wellesley have a law school? Why wouldn't the relatively few women be accommodated easily at the Harvard testing room? Was she afraid of men? Did this "incident" turn her against men?
You can tell Hillary's spent a *lot* of time working up a story about why it was unfair that she failed the bar exam. This LSAT thing feels a sort of trial balloon for that. The same draft mechanic can't apply, but maybe, sort of, it feels like sexism that made her fail (and then not try again - and she certainly would have succeeded, but wouldn't have been able to hide it if she'd stuck it out). If I may mind-read a little.
I can't believe she is playing the gender card regarding her LSAT exams! She was hardly a pioneer in the field.
To paraphrase GB Shaw, Those who can, do. Those who can't, cry discrimination.
Gahrie,
Yes, but are they feminists who other feminists consider feminists? That's the real question here, and my guess is "no," all evidence to the contrary.
How about I offer some facts. I went to night law school on the GI Bill in the late sixties. Women were a very small minority in my class. Both the male students and the male professors blatantly discriminated against the female students. Let me repeat that: Both the professors and the other students actively discriminated against the female students. How?
Laughing loudly when a female student stumbled when she answered a legal question. In Criminal Law, when rape was the issue, it was always a female asked to discuss the issue of penetration, etc. Catcalls were common during her comments. No male spoke to or socialized with female students. If the female students complained they were told that the law was a tough world for women and they had best get used to it before wasting their time and money getting into it. Think how a woman trying to become a Seal might be treated.
Personally, I remember believing that the female students had no day job so that they could study more than their male competitors - Daddy or a husband provided the daily bread and tuition. I believed that they should attend day classes and compete with the day students.
I don't feel guilty. Those were different times. If the women could not "take it", they were well advised to seek another career. Plenty took it and earned the admiration of their male classmates for doing so. They went on to break barriers and open things up for the cupcakes of today. I know who I would hire to defend me and it wouldn't be the cupcake. The few women who graduated with me were special.
Well, as a guy, I would wager Hillary's story about the LSAT is bullshit. People taking high stakes tests are, with few exceptions, too damned stressed to worry about shit that Hillary seems to have claimed they were worried about.
However, I think Dunham was probably right- the guy looked at her and wasn't sexually attracted. He might even have given her enough visual cues to pick up on that. That is a plausible story.
"I feel certain that the men in the room when Hiilary was taking the LSAT were all mountaineers. And they were ridiculing Hillary because she was unworthy if her famous namesake, Sir Edmund Hilary."
Think of the liberals who can make of Trump's daughter Tiffany for thinking that she wants to be a lawyer.
"While her dad runs for president, Tiffany Trump’s boning up to become a lawyer.
Tiffany, 22, and mom Marla Maples were spotted at a Fashion Week event for Tiffany’s pal Andrew Warren’s Just Drew line — where Maples was telling pals, spies said, that “Tiffany is studying for her LSAT . . . She thinks she wants to be a lawyer.”
One guest joked to Donald Trump-ex Maples, “You can always use more lawyers in your family,” a source told Page Six. “Marla just laughed and rolled her eyes.”"
http://pagesix.com/2016/09/09/tiffany-trump-gearing-up-for-the-lsat/
"but perhaps Hillary is relaying only her sense of what they must have been thinking."
As "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen" plays softly in the background.
Bach Brandenburg Concerto for piano 4 hands, transc. Max Reger, amazing for how good it is. Two babes playing it.
I used that transcription to put the pieces on the A/D converter of a PDP 11/40 in 1980, over several weekends.
I still have the sheet music somewhere, not in the piano music shelves though, because it's way oversized, widthwise. I wonder where it is.
I don't believe Hillary's LSAT story for a second. I took the LSAT at in 1969, one year later, and no one said a word to anyone else. Everyone was grimly focused on doing well on the test. I can't imagine any white guy humiliating himself by shouting out what she alleges.
rhhardin, all 1pf4h scores are more or less like that. You can generally turn them on their spines. Though it's true that some Peters scores (this is Peters, right?) are oversized beyond that.
Which Brandenburg was it?
I am the age of Hillary, and must defend her.
Back in 1967, when I started medical school, I had many similar comments made to me about taking the place of a man. The reason was that back then, often women would drop out when they got married or got pregnant, to raise a family. (Indeed, my roommate dropped out when she married). So you were essentially wasting your education, and keeping a man (who would stay married in those days) from getting an education to care for a family.
Remember, this was before Birth control pills made contraception reliable, and the "overpopulation" propaganda made babies the enemy.
Being a lawyer, or being a doctor, requires toughness, so I am not sure why she was such a snowflake to be upset at a bit of opposition.
FYI: My answer was: Well, I am three years younger than most of the other students, and the life expectancy says that I will live four years longer than a male student, so I can drop out for 7 years to raise kids and still work as long as any male student.
This didn't really convince them logically, but it meant that I was not a pushover so I was respected.
The problem with Hillary's story is that it is a lie ( shocking, I know). According to the Congressional Quarterly Library "The Johnson Administration Feb. 16, 1968, abolished draft deferments for most male graduate students and men in “critical” occupations." So when HilLIARy took the test that Fall, that was not an issue. And I am sure all those budding lawyers knew that.
Nancy Reyes,
Birth control pills came into use in 1960, so they were presumably already on the market when you were in high school, never mind med school. And your choice to have a baby -- or not -- didn't have squat to do with what Paul Ehrlich thought about it. Still doesn't, as it happens, and yet we still get the identical "!!!ZOMG we're going to all be inundated with kids if someone doesn't shut off the spigot!!!" ... ummm, crap. The people receiving the propaganda are all reproducing at (us) or below (all of Europe) replacement levels. Japan is worse. Russia, I think, is worser. China has eased off its one-child policy, which means that it will be inching back towards replacement level. India's a patchwork, some strict regulations and some lax, but not a history of large families anywhere.
The people reproducing at well over replacement levels are everyone else, which includes recent legal and illegal immigrants to the above (not including Japan, which basically doesn't have immigrants at all), plus most of Africa and the Middle East, and most of Mexico, Central, and South America. (I have no idea about Indonesia.) Who are exactly the people the above message is never, ever preached to.
But you see it about once a week in the SF Chronicle anyway.
"Dunham was simply performing her subjective ideation around what he might have been thinking about her. It's comical and she's a comedian."
Dunham is no comedian. She's as much a "comedian" as she is a brain surgeon. She's a self-centered, ego-maniacal solipsist, convinced that she alone exists and that everybody else revolves around her. To be sure, this is a common fallacy, but most people outgrow it at age 6.
I took a few exams in Mem Hall, and I am not embarrassed to admit I got so stressed out that my field of vision narrowed to the size of a blue book page. I could not have told you whether the person sitting a few chairs to my left or to my right was a man or a woman or an extra-terrestrial. I was focussed like a laser on the exam, not the gender balance of the other test takers. Ditto when I sat for the CPA exam, 2 x 8 hours of intense concentration. I have no recollection of looking around to see who else was in the room. This was WAR and I was battle ready.
My wife is getting worried.
It's not that I'm losing my memory, it's that she can't read my mind any more.
There was lots of mind reading and/or projection in Sunday's Doonesbury strip. About Trump's thoughts while receiving a national security briefing. Is Trudeau a trans woman?
Post a Comment