"She still loves recording herself and often thinks of her life decisions as things to debut on a platform...."

"But the memoir ends with a declaration of intention to protect, if not necessarily her privacy, then perhaps her interiority. 'I’m trying this new thing where I keep certain things to myself,' Ms. Mulvaney writes. 'Little yummy womanly moments just for me.'"

From "Dylan Mulvaney Dreams of Privacy. Really. Her bubbly video diaries about her gender transition were once a study in oversharing. Now on the other side of a nationwide boycott, she sees the value in keeping some things to herself" (NYT).

What are you doing, just for you? Is it manly/womanly... and how would you know? Is it yummy? Is it bubbly? When you're in there, in your interiority, can it be bubbly?

How is your interiority? It's the NYT writer, Maggie Lange, not Mulvaney, who's using that word. I was moved to ask Grok: What kind of people use the word "interiority"? 

I'm told: "Writers, especially novelists and literary critics, use it a lot when dissecting characters or narratives—think folks analyzing Dostoevsky or Woolf for their deep dives into the human psyche."

And maybe also NYT writers helping very lightweight pop culture figures promote their memoirs. 

"Interiority" is showily contemplative. "Everyday people don’t typically say 'interiority' unless they’re parroting something they read or heard in a niche context."

I wondered if — in the 21 years of this blog — I'd ever used it. Quick search. I see it appears 5 times, but each time, I'm quoting someone else: 

"What was unique about the Cornell situation is they rapidly turned in a response that was a 'hard no.'"

"There was no level of kowtowing. It was a very firm defense of what it means to get an education."

Said Alex Morey, the director of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, quoted in "Should College Come With Trigger Warnings? At Cornell, It’s a ‘Hard No.’ When the student assembly voted to require faculty to alert students to upsetting educational materials, administrators pushed back" (NYT). 

The student assembly voted unanimously that it "implores all instructors to provide content warnings on the syllabus for any traumatic content that may be discussed," and the university president Martha E. Pollack, vetoed the resolution, the first use of this veto in more than 20 years.

The students' use of the word" implores" makes it sound like a mere request, but there was also the resolution that "students who choose to opt-out of exposure to triggering content will not be penalized, contingent on their responsibility to make up any missed content."

Celine Liu edits herself into old photographs of celebrities...

"I think people who show up on the screen are glorious.... So this series was created to fulfill my childhood wish, which was to become an icon by standing with the stars," she said. So we see her with Grace Kelly and Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe. And she also puts herself on the scene with intellectuals — Albert Einstein, Frida Kahlo, and Simone de Beauvoir.



Did you think Simone de Beauvoir would shoot a gun... like that?

IN THE COMMENTS:

Example: Alex said:

Kirby Jenner, the "Fraternal Twin of Kendall Jenner" is a brilliant parody Instagram account where he pastes himself into photos of Kendall. I couldn't care less about the Kardashians but I am fascinated by the fashion and Photoshop skills on display.

Ha ha. Great! So much more fun than Celine Liu. I enjoyed them all — here — but let me pick out one.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Kirby Jenner (@kirbyjenner) on Sep 27, 2017 at 10:07am PDT

AND: Well, you can probably tell I picked that one because of my longstanding "men in shorts" theme. So let me give you this one too, because it has another one of my themes:

View this post on Instagram

Every good dog owner knows that 1) dogs love to be petted 2) all dogs go to heaven and 3) the longer the tail, the smarter the dog. Well my dog Andrew has the longest tail I’ve ever seen so he must be one friggin smart af pup!! He also loves biting, running away and hiding under the couch. haha smdh freakin Andrew! Kendall’s dog is cute too tho. #Andrew #AdoptDontShop #FoundHimByArbys #DogTwins

A post shared by Kirby Jenner (@kirbyjenner) on Feb 8, 2018 at 9:16am PST

"It’s hard to grasp now just how intoxicating it was as a young girl to hear Gloria Steinem tell us we could be anything we wanted to be."

"Or to read, during freshman year at my surprisingly progressive all-girls Catholic school, Betty Friedan’s 'The Feminine Mystique,' eight years after it was published, saying we could find meaning outside the home."

All this seemed possible because the pill had just become widely available, and for the first time women had control over whether and when they had a child. (I will never forget finding that oddly shaped, Pez-like dispenser in my mother’s bedroom right after the birth of my youngest sister; my mother called her “That’s It” for weeks before giving her a name.)

From a long WaPo article by Elsa Walsh titled "Why women should embrace a ‘good enough’ life." The quoted part describes the author's mindset, which later changed. I chose to quote that because: 1. Her mother sounds so cold, calling an infant "That's It." (A child called "It"!) and 2. The author makes her college age self sound like a nitwit. She says she was 15 when Roe v. Wade came out, so I figure she was born in 1958. I was born in 1951, and I always thought the Gloria Steinem presentation of women's liberation was a women's magazine pep talk. Friedan's book begins as a rant about the bullshit in women's magazines. If you had a brain at the time, you didn't take this stuff at face value. I don't accept Walsh's assertion that oh, if you were only there back then in the 1970s, you'd have been thoroughly intoxicated.

There were other feminist writers back then, and there were plenty of readers interested in feminism who didn't like Steinem and who didn't bother going all the way back to Freidan. When I went to college (circa 1970), the new books young women get excited about where "Sexual Politics" and "The Female Eunuch," and the older book we went back to was "The Second Sex." These books had some critical edge and were not simply cheerleading women about having a conventional middle-class life modernized with the addition of a great career and planned, delayed reproduction.

Walsh is working off a false premise about what life was like back then. She has a book to promote, and I can understand the urge to write a book that acts like it's discovered something new. But, really, the problem with the idea that you can't really "have it all" has been well-known all along.

Christopher Hitchens explores the history of the...

... blowjob. ("The three-letter 'job,' with its can-do implications, also makes the term especially American.")

And here's his classic "Why Women Aren't Funny." ("Women have no corresponding need to appeal to men in this way. They already appeal to men...")

And here's that time he subjected his body to all manner of fancy spa treatments. ("I also take the view that it’s a mistake to try to look younger than one is, and that the face in particular ought to be the register of a properly lived life.")

All of these links come from this collection of Hitch-links at Vanity Fair.

It's so sad to have lost Hitchens! From that 3d link, above:

[M]ost of my bad habits are connected with the only way I know to make a living. In order to keep reading and writing, I need the junky energy that scotch can provide, and the intense short-term concentration that nicotine can help supply. To be crouched over a book or a keyboard, with these conditions of mingled reverie and alertness, is my highest happiness. (Upon having visited the doctor, Jean-Paul Sartre was offered the following alternative: Give up cigarettes and carry on into a quiet old age and a normal death, or keep smoking and have his toes cut off. Then his feet. Then his legs. Assessing his prospects, Sartre told Simone de Beauvoir he “wanted to think it over.” He actually did retire his gaspers, but only briefly. Later that year, asked to name the most important thing in his life, he replied, “Everything. Living. Smoking.”)

By the way, Jean Paul Sartre was way funnier than Simone de Beauvoir.

From "her inwardness is violated" to: she "is like a raped interiority."

Virginia Postrel, noting the "needlessly ugly and opaque the prose" of academics, quotes Francine du Plessix Gray's review of the new translation of Simone de Beauvoir's "Second Sex":

Writing about the aggressive nature of man’s penetration of woman, [earlier translator] Parshley felicitously translates a Beauvoir phrase as “her inwardness is violated.” In contrast, [new translators] Borde and Malovany- Chevallier’s rendering states that woman “is like a raped interiority.” And where Parshley has Beauvoir saying of woman, “It is she who defines herself by dealing with nature on her own account in her emotional life,” the new translators substitute, “It is she who defines herself by reclaiming nature for herself in her affectivity.” In yet another example, man’s approach to woman’s “dangerous magic” is seen this way in Parshley: “He sets her up as the essential, it is he who poses her as such and thus he really acts as the essential in this voluntary alienation.” But in Borde and Malovany-Chevallier, “it is he who posits her, and he who realizes himself thereby as the essential in this alienation he grants.” Throughout, there are truly inexcusable passages in which the translators even lack a proper sense of English syntax: “Moments women consider revelations are those where they discover they are in harmony with a reality based on peace with one’s self.”

You may wonder who will read writing like that, but the book will be assigned in courses... that you'd probably be wise not to take. So the good news is: repellent writing is a good thing. Like evil-tasting poison.

The unnatural complexities of marriage and motherhood.

A new translation of Simone de Beauvoir's "Second Sex" is reviewed by Francine du Plessix Gray. Here's a paragraph about marriage and motherhood:

Wedding nights “transform the erotic experience into an ordeal” that “often dooms the woman to frigidity forever.” It isn’t surprising, she adds, “that ‘conjugal duties’ are often only a repugnant chore for the wife.” “No one,” she argues, “dreams of denying the tragedies and nastiness of married life.” Conjugal love, in Beauvoir’s view, is “a complex mixture of attachment, resentment, hatred, rules, resignation, laziness and hypocrisy.” Even marriages that “work well” suffer “a curse they rarely escape: boredom.” Already alarmed? Wait until you come to the discussion of motherhood. A woman experiences the fetus as “a parasite.” “Maternity is a strange compromise of narcissism, altruism, dream, sincerity, bad faith, devotion and cynicism.” “There is nothing like an ‘unnatural mother,’ since maternal love has nothing natural about it.” It is significant that the only stage of a woman’s life Beauvoir has good things to say about is widowhood, which, in her view, most bear quite cheerfully. Upon losing their spouses, she tells us, women, “now lucid and wary, . . . often attain a delicious cynicism.” In old age, they maintain “a stoic defiance or skeptical irony.”...

[A] pivotal notion at the heart of “The Second Sex” ... is her belief that... “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” This preposterous assertion [is] intended to bolster her argument that marriage and motherhood are institutions imposed by men to curb women’s freedom....

De Beauvoir herself, did not marry. But her longtime companion Jean-Paul Sartre did propose to her. She told him he was being "silly."

Two great faces, gone.

Goodbye to Betty Friedan and Al Lewis:

They kind of look alike, don't they? I remember the first time we saw Officer Leo Schnauzer on "Car 54, Where Are You?" Al Lewis looked and sounded hilarious from that first second. He didn't have a big role on the show, and we always whooped with glee when he showed up in a scene. Later, he played Grandpa on "The Munsters." But that was so long ago. He was an old man back in the 60s, it seemed, but he was only 83 when he died, so he was only in his 40s then. Thanks for all the laughs, Al.

Betty Friedan, I must say, I didn't follow. I never read "The Feminine Mystique." It was a little before my time. I could have read it as a classic, of course, but it always seemed to me to be addressed to the women of the 1950s, and I was a child in the 1950s. The women my age all read Kate Millett's "Sexual Politics" and Germaine Greer's "The Female Eunuch." (Those were the first two books I bought in hardback.) For a feminist classic, it was "The Second Sex," by Simone de Beauvoir. And then women avoided Friedan's book, for reasons described in the obit that I won't belabor. I'll just call attention to this paragraph:

"That great head, the hooded eyes, the broad features of a woman the French might describe as une jolie-laide , which refers to a magnificent kind of ugliness that can be attractive, even beautiful," wrote Washington Post reporter Megan Rosenfeld in 1995. "The head, looking sometimes like a snapping turtle and at others like a lion with a white mane, sits atop a surprisingly short body, out of which comes the voice of a foghorn in heat. She is always carefully dressed in a New Yorky, nouveau-Bohemian style, with lots of interesting jewelry and spunky little shoes."

Yes, a truly "magnificent kind of ugliness." The world needs more grand faces like that.