"In earlier writing, [Lindy] West presented her union with the musician Ahamefule Oluo... as a kind of feminist fairy-tale ending."

"'My Wedding Was Perfect — and I Was Fat as Hell the Whole Time,' said the headline of a 2015 column she wrote in The Guardian. But if the wedding was idyllic, West reveals in 'Adult Braces,' the marriage was not. Almost from the beginning, she writes, Aham conditioned their relationship on his being able to sleep with other women. She gave in because she was desperate to keep him, but his dalliances made her intolerably insecure. Because West lived in a left-wing milieu in which nonmonogamy is common, she felt an extra layer of shame over her inability to accept Aham’s extramarital sex life. ('At the time, being cool about polyamory felt like a growing imperative in progressive circles,' she writes.) Her anguish was exacerbated by an excruciating degree of bodily self-hatred, which, as she knows, contradicts the persona she’s built her career on. 'Do you think I have ever felt like I deserved to demand anything from men?' she asks.... [Aham] used her politics against her; West reports that Aham, who is half-Nigerian, 'believed that monogamy was, at its root, a system of ownership.'... [At the end of 'Adult Braces,' West writes] 'If you think I have been brainwashed and I am secretly miserable, I simply do not know what to tell you.'"

Writes Michelle Goldberg, in "She Was a Famous Millennial Feminist. Her Polyamory Memoir Is Heartbreaking" (NYT).

Heartbreaking? Really? It's dangerous bullshit from West. I don't regard this as another occasion to summon up empathy.

"That's the precise point, 1 minute and 10 seconds in, where I clicked off the audiobook."

I wrote, 2 days ago, in what I called "a short, enigmatic blog post." I said, "I think anyone, using AI, can now easily discover what book is being talked about."

Shortly after posting, I tested AI and added the story of how it failed to identify the book. The problem was that the language I found so off-putting — "For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land" — wasn't written by the book's author. It was the book's epigraph, a quote from "Moby-Dick," a quote that at least 2 other authors have used. AI never found the book I'd been listening to. 

At that point, I became curious enough to go back to the audiobook and I listened to the whole thing. It was a book I'd blogged about last Tuesday after reading a NYT column about it. The column was called "She Was a Famous Millennial Feminist. Her Polyamory Memoir Is Heartbreaking." I have a long-running problem with the word "heartbreaking," and I blurted out "Heartbreaking? Really? It's dangerous bullshit from West. I don't regard this as another occasion to summon up empathy."

West = Lindy West. The book is "Adult Braces: Driving Myself Sane" (commission earned). And I'm going to stand by my blurted-out opinion: It is not heartbreaking. It's dangerous bullshit. 

Let me quote from page 123, where the author call herself a “people pleaser" and calls "people pleaser" "a hideous misnomer for a hideous behavior." Boldface added:

“People pleasing” is never about pleasing people—it’s about the pleaser avoiding discomfort, confrontation, accountability. It’s a manipulation, a rot that threatens all my relationships, not because it makes me “too nice” and vulnerable to exploitation, but because it makes me a liar who isn’t willing to do the hard work of love.

"One of comedy’s defining pathologies, alongside literal pathologies like narcissism and self-loathing, is its swaggering certainty that it is part of the political vanguard..."

"... while upholding one of the most rigidly patriarchal hierarchies of any art form. Straight male comedians, bookers and club owners have always been the gatekeepers of upward mobility in stand-up, an industry where 'women aren’t funny' was considered conventional wisdom until just a few years ago. The solution isn’t more solemn acknowledgments from powerful male comedians. We have those. The solution is putting people in positions of power who are not male, not straight, not cisgender, not white. This is not taking something away unfairly — it is restoring opportunities that have been historically withheld. And if we address the power imbalance in comedy, in this art that shapes how people think, what jokes they repeat to their families, who they believe deserves to hold a microphone and talk out loud, other imbalances might follow."

That's from a NYT op-ed by Lindy West, "Why Men Aren’t Funny," which makes me think: Why Nothing Will Ever Be Funny Anymore. West's solution is truly dispiriting, even if her analysis of the problem is pretty accurate. I think you have to break through the problem with better funniness, not funniness gatekeepers. The gate should be opened by laughter, but maybe no one will laugh anymore as the culture of That's Not Funny is enforced by putting people in positions of power who are not male, not straight, not cisgender, not white.

I mean, first of all, West has no ear or she wouldn't have gone with quadruple alliteration when she was trying to be dead serious: putting people in positions of power.

But more important: Who's doing the putting? I guess the comedy club owners are suddenly — to save their own skin? — supposed to embrace affirmative action and hand their power over to people who don't merely deplore the masculine "pathologies" that dominate American stand-up comedy, but deplore it because of the identity group they belong to.

"I am not concerned with whether or not fat people can change their bodies through self-discipline and 'choices.'"

"Pretty much all of them have tried already. A couple of them have succeeded. Whatever. My question is, what if they try and try and try and still fail? What if they are still fat? What if they are fat for ever? What do you do with them then? Do you really want millions of teenage girls to feel like they’re trapped in unsightly lard prisons that are ruining their lives, and on top of that it’s because of their own moral failure, and on top of that they are ruining America with the terribly expensive diabetes that they don’t even have yet? You know what’s shameful? A complete lack of empathy."

Wrote Lindy West, quoted in "Farewell to Shrill: truly radical TV that laughs in the face of fatphobia" (The Guardian).

West wrote that in 2011 in a piece titled "Hello, I Am Fat" (Stranger). The current TV show — "Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman" — is based on it. According to the article in The Guardian, "Shrill encapsulates the constant politics of being a fat person."

"There was talk, at one point, of calling Aidy Bryant's show 'fat bitch'... the studio and network were like, 'Uh, no'...."

"But being fat is part of what the series is about. 'Shrill' is based on Lindy West’s memoir, sparked by her viral 2011 column, 'Hello, I Am Fat'... West’s story resonated with Bryant.... 'It is a descriptor and, like, I am fat,' says Bryant, 33. 'To me, it’s like taking the power out of it. It doesn’t have to be so loaded. It’s just true, and sitting with that, it makes it easier for me. It just feels a little less frightening.'... Will 'Shrill' leave a lasting impact on how fat people are treated in comedy? [Producer Lorne] Michaels was reminded of several popular, old SNL bits, including John Belushi gnawing on a chicken breast while playing Elizabeth Taylor and Chris Farley’s shirtless Chippendales dance. The late Farley’s sad description of his style was often 'fatty falls down.' 'How things change is really who’s doing the talking,' Michaels says. 'If it’s someone they trust as much as they trust Aidy, I think they’re much more willing to take what she says seriously. And that’s a good use of a comedy platform.'"

From a WaPo article about Bryant's TV show "Shrill." 

As I've said for many years, "fat" should not be treated as a bad word. We call people "skinny" — often as a compliment — and "fat" is the corresponding word on the other side of "normal." I know, you can attack "normal," but I'm thinking of those BMI charts that show a range called "normal," meaning that's what you ought to shoot for if you want your best health. 

Anyway... there's a long history to the comedy of fatness. There's good reason to have characters who just  happen to be fat and don't do much if anything comical with their bodies. But the body is an instrument that can be deployed comically, and there are special things that can be done with a fat body. Here's Fatty Arbuckle: 

(To comment, you can email me here, and I might publish what you write in an update to this post. Pithy, interesting comments that add something new to the conversation are most likely to make it.)

"I used to write a comedy show. The letters I got were pretty awful — sexist, violent, rude."

"Some of them I still remember word for word. I wrote back to every person and responded very nicely. I asked them if they wanted to write an episode, and I said I would be really happy if they did and I would work with them. It was amazing how my putting a human face on the correspondence changed the tenor of it. Many responded to me. Some apologized. All were sheepish."

That's a letter from SAS in Newton, Massachusetts that the NYT received in response to its article — which we discussed here — about 2 women sportscasters who'd made a video of themselves listening to men reading their hate mail to them.

SAS's response reminds me of an episode of This American Life: "If You Don't Have Anything Nice to Say, SAY IT IN ALL CAPS."

So I did what you're not supposed to do. I fed the troll. I wrote about [him on line].

The morning after that post went up, I got an email. "Hey Lindy, I don't know why or even when I started trolling you.... I think my anger towards you stems from your happiness with your own being. It offended me because it served to highlight my unhappiness with my own self....

I'm done being a troll. Again, I apologize. I made a donation in memory to your dad. I wish you the best."

The episode continues with a phone conversation with the apologetic former troll, who says, among other things: "You know, it's like you stand on the desk and you say, I'm Lindy West, and this is what I believe in. Fuck you if you don't agree with me. And even though you don't say those words exactly, I'm like, who is this bitch who thinks she knows everything?"

"For almost everyone, writing books is a low-paying job! For most it pays literally nothing!"

Lindy West gives us a striking example of working very hard to get publicity for a new book and barely selling anything. Is this a specific example of female readers repelled by the author's finding a way to stand by her polyamorous husband or something much more general in book publishing these days: