"It's tricknological, when white people invoke the holocaust. allows them to step out of their whiteness and slip on fake oppression."

Wrote Doreen St. Félix, in an X post screencapped in an Instapundit post by Ed Driscoll.

St. Félix published an article — in The New Yorker — about the Sydney Sweeney jeans/genes foofaraw. I'd skipped that article — I was Sweeneyed out by the time it appeared — but I see from the excerpt at Instapundit that it contained lines like "Interestingly, breasts, and the desire for them, are stereotyped as objects of white desire, as opposed to, say, the Black man’s hunger for ass." The desire is the object of desire? That's defective writing, and The New Yorker got its lofty reputation in part because of its punctilious word editing. But St. Félix is in The New Yorker, thus making her statements conspicuous and goofier than they would be somewhere else, like X (or a blog). 

Hey! It says "Black man’s hunger for ass" in The New Yorker.

The screencappers of X plunged into St. Félix's X account, homing in on posts with the words "hate" and "white people." Go to the Instapundit link to see what they found. 

What calls me is that new word: "tricknological." The adjective is, apparently, formed from the word "Tricknology," which is in the OED and traced back to 1938. It's marked "U.S. disparaging." It means:

"It’s the people who aren’t artists who sacrifice. Artists somehow stumble onto the best life in the world, and I have no complaints."

Said Gena Rowlands, asked about any "regrets about having sacrificed her life to her art."

Quoted in "Gena Rowlands, Actress Who Brought Raw Drama to Her Roles, Dies at 94/Known for playing on-the-verge characters, she twice earned Oscar nominations for her work in films directed by John Cassavetes, her husband" (NYT).

She sometimes said that if she had not married Mr. Cassavetes, her career might have taken a very different turn: She could have been the blonde in romantic comedies. But, she contended, physical beauty was so common in Hollywood that it was irrelevant. When People magazine named her one of the most beautiful people in the world (she was 69) and asked for beauty tips, she suggested: “Sunglasses are the secret. Sunglasses and a little lipstick will take you to the market.”

Virginia Cathryn Rowlands was born on June 19, 1930, in Madison, Wis....

ADDED: Here's the clip from "A Woman Under the Influence" that I blogged when Peter Falk died in 2011: 

And here's something Mia Farrow wrote that I blogged about in 2009:

One workday, while we were waiting to shoot, Roman [Polanski] was discoursing about the impossibility of long-term monogamy given the brevity of a man's sexual attraction to any woman. An impassioned John Cassavetes responded that Roman knew nothing about women, or relationships, and that he, John, was more attracted than ever to his wife, Gena Rowlands. Roman stared at him and blinked a few times, and for once had no reply.

"Jeremy was competitive while young and felt immense pressure to demonstrate gifted achievement every day."

"'I could only work in fear. Only the fear of failure made me work in the end,' he said. As a young adult, he was paralyzed by the number of life options in front of him. He went into medicine and spent about 13 years as a medical student and doctor but eventually was hit by depression so severe, he couldn’t function. He wound up as a musician — not celebrated but enjoying himself and paying the bills...."

Writes David Brooks, in "What Happens to Gifted Children" (NYT).

"When the daughter with visibly brown roots insists that having blond hair as a child makes her a natural blonde, she is saying something I have heard countless people say."

"I have always been puzzled by it. What could be so important about a genetic trait that someone would use it to describe herself long after the trait’s phenotypic expression — light hair — no longer exists? It makes literal sense only if by blonde she is referring to something more than hair. Being a natural blonde must confer honor, esteem and power to those who can legitimately claim it. Guess how we define social status? It is as a role or identity that confers honor, esteem and power to those who legitimately hold it.... People who were born blond and now have dark hair were among the angriest. They insisted that being a 'natural blonde' should matter more than their actual hair color. When pushed on what makes that matter, they got even angrier.... That is the thing about status. We all want it, but, should we acquire it, we don’t want it to mean anything...."

Writes Tressie McMillan Cottom in "The Enduring, Invisible Power of Blond" (NYT). The author, a sociologist, is black. Here's her TikTok that made people mad:

What is a blonde?

Here's something from 1963 in the NYT that I chanced into as I was looking for the review of the new Netflix film titled "Blonde":

 

Who knew there were women's groups back then taking aim at such minor intrusions on female freedom? It seems more like something that would come up today.

"Caucasians are able to jump around, and it’s not a big deal for them to be blond, a redhead or brunet, whereas those same rules don’t apply to us"

"It would be so empowering to be able to just try anything the way the rest of the world seems to be able to without any problems.... Maybe this is one part of unlocking the standards we’ve been imprisoned by... It may seem like a silly, frivolous act, an act of vanity, but Asians and Asian-Americans have a history of being marginalized and ignored, so whatever the political statement is, maybe by having blond hair, it’s a very simple declaration: 'Here I am. Pay attention to me. See me.'"

Said Greta Lee, an actress, quoted in "Why So Many Asian-American Women Are Bleaching Their Hair Blond" (NYT).

Why is blond hair so important? I googled that and ended up in the obvious place, Wikipedia, which has a really long article on the subject. Excerpt, under the heading "Sexuality":

In contemporary popular culture, blonde women are stereotyped as being more sexually attractive to men than women with other hair colors.... Some women have reported they feel other people expect them to be more fun-loving after having lightened their hair. The American novelist and screenwriter Raymond Chandler offers an appraisal of the blonde as social criticism in his novel The Long Goodbye (1953):