The Bluestocking, vol 103: An email is a half-formed thing
Happy . . . Wednesday!
Yes, this week's Bluestocking has come early, for reasons that I will explain in the future. Or not! I'm mysterious. In recompense, here is some half-digested arts criticism, plus the usual links.
Helen ***
Last night I went to the Almeida for its new production of Three Sisters, updated by Cordelia Lynn and directed by Rebecca Frecknall, which I found both beautifully wrought and entirely unmoving.
Don't mistake me. The acting is world-class. The staging is fluid and packed with small, smart details (that perpetually unplayed piano!). The lighting is gorgeous. But after puzzling over it for hours, I think I’ve found my problem. The adaptation takes the text out of Russia in 1901, and moves it to — well, where? There’s a samovar. There are Russian names and nicknames by the buckletload. There’s a white linen suit — but, cleverly, on the youngest sister Irina. There are Northern Irish and Scottish accents among the RP. There are, thankfully, no references to Despacito or The Snapchat. There are photographs, taken with a handheld camera — whose shutter clicks as no modern camera does — projected on to the back wall, as if ready to be dispatched to Moonpig for a novelty birthday card.
The effect is of an awkward half-step between Then and Now. The force of the play comes from its contemporary details: Moscow is a long way away by horse; the soldiers have no choice over their billet; duelling is the way that insults are settled rather than a savage and public unfriending on Facebook; girls cannot manage the family finances, but must defer to their dumbass spendthrift brother. Most crucially, this is a world before divorce was legally unremarkable. Just as the existence of mobile phones ruined horror films for a while — before the obligatory introduction of a character ruefully noting there was “no signal” before wandering into that deserted house— so divorce recasts a whole swathe of Victorian-era theatre. Why doesn’t Masha just leave her excruciating husband?
Of course, people still stay in failed marriages today; there are ways to update everything. Fleabag found one solution: Catholic priests face restrictions on their love as severe as any nineteenth-century marriage vow. Another way is to make the bonds psychological rather than external: perhaps Vershinin stays with his suicidal wife out of guilt (did he drive her to this?) or fears for his children. Perhaps Masha wants the excitement of an affair but needs the security of boring old Kulygin. Her fear of the unknown might be just as crushing a restraint as the threat of social exclusion.
For me, this version of Three Sisters would have been more moving if it were more authentic — to Chekhov’s original intention, rather than to his words and the specific situations of his characters. Twentysomething women still settle: they take jobs they don’t want; they wonder when their lives will really begin; they marry the safe guy because he’s nice enough and they ought to like him, oughtn’t they? Men don’t tell the woman they love how they feel, because she’s already married. They do stay trapped in relationships which have turned sour, refusing to acknowledge the failure, papering over the cracks with by drinking and gambling.
This is a play with universal truths. But it can’t happen nowhere.
***
Is your employer tracking your pregnancy app?
Like millions of women, Diana Diller was a devoted user of the pregnancy-tracking app Ovia, logging in every night to record new details on a screen asking about her bodily functions, sex drive, medications and mood. When she gave birth last spring, she used the app to chart her baby’s first online medical data — including her name, her location and whether there had been any complications — before leaving the hospital’s recovery room.
But someone else was regularly checking in, too: her employer, which paid to gain access to the intimate details of its workers’ personal lives, from their trying-to-conceive months to early motherhood. Diller’s bosses could look up aggregate data on how many workers using Ovia’s fertility, pregnancy and parenting apps had faced high-risk pregnancies or gave birth prematurely; the top medical questions they had researched; and how soon the new moms planned to return to work.
This article is a world of scream. In America, where a tricky birth can rack up a million dollars in medical bills, it's not hard to see the downsides of letting your employer know all the health data from your pregnancy.
Listen up bitches, it’s time to learn incorrect things about someone you’ve never heard of
I have seen threads that would make your eyes water, and in all cases, the responses were not what I personally would have anticipated. Things being what they are, I would have thought that a thread that began like “LISTEN UP DICKHOLES: TIME FOR A RANT ABOUT HOW LAVRENTIY BERIA WAS A TOTAL JERK AND A REAL PERV” would end with an apology and a promise never to do it again, but why would you apologize when you are met with joy and delight? The thing about Buckle Up Twitter, hard as this may be for right-thinking people like me to accept, is that a lot of other people LOVE IT. They absolutely love to be told that they are morons and that all of this is actually Beau Brummell’s doing.
"Buckle Up Twitter" is an extremely niche subculture, but it's one that regularly drifts across my feed. Also, I guess Seth Abramson is the politics version of this phenomenon.
Rebecca Kukla on Moving through and Responding to the World
COWEN: Let me start with a very simple question about feminism. What would be a rhetorical disadvantage that many women are at that even, say, educated or so-called progressive men would be unlikely to see?
KUKLA: A rhetorical disadvantage that we’re at — that’s a fascinating question. I think that there is almost no correct way for a woman to use her voice and hold her body to project the proper kind of expertise and authority in a conversation.
I think that there’s massive — I don’t even want to call it a double bind because it’s a multidimensional bind — where if we sound too feminine, sounding feminine in this culture is coded as frivolous and unserious. If we sound too unfeminine, then we sound like we are violating gender norms or like we are unpleasant or trying to be like a man.
I think that almost any way in which we position ourselves — if we try to be polite and make nice, then we come off as weak. If we don’t make nice, then we’re held to a higher standard for our appropriate behavior than men are. I think there’s almost no way we can position ourselves so that we sound as experts. So oftentimes, the content of our words matters less than our embodied presentation as a woman.
Thanks to Ian Leslie for tipping me off to this podcast with Tyler Cowen and philosopher Rebecca Kukla (a transcript is available). It's full of juice! The stuff on how we talk about pregnancy was obv right up my street, but it's just packed with tasty and nutritious intellectual fibre. Her summaries of Hegel, Rousseau etc will briefly make you want to read Hegel, Rousseau etc. Briefly.
Quick links:
"As Obama did before him, Buttigieg turned his own life story — in which an alienated, closeted teen watches his country change enough to not only accept him, but embrace him — into an argument that America is a place worth being hopeful about." Ezra Klein on why Pete Buttigieg is getting such buzz as a potential Democratic presidential challenger.
"Is everything a MLM?" asks Anne Helen Petersen in her newsletter. MLMs - multi-level marketing schemes - are better known as pyramid schemes. AHP builds a good case that not only is yoga teaching an MLM, but so is academia. Driven by commercial incentives, universities are accepting far more graduate and PhD students than could ever find academic jobs afterwards. To be honest, I could say the same about journalism courses. There are a lot of places that will take £6,000 upwards off you to "train as a journalist", but some of them offer a poor return on investment.
Guest gif: me finding out that there's a musical version of Cruel Intentions at the Edinburgh Festival this year
