The Bluestocking, vol 163

when this is over I will have nothing that I want

Happy Friday. . .

Not much to say this week. Lots of links, though.

Helen

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How Dolphin Training Saved My Marriage (New York Times)

We went to a counselor to smooth the edges off our marriage. She didn’t understand what we were doing there and complimented us repeatedly on how well we communicated. I gave up. I guessed she was right — our union was better than most — and resigned myself to stretches of slow-boil resentment and occasional sarcasm.

Then something magical happened. For a book I was writing about a school for exotic animal trainers, I started commuting from Maine to California, where I spent my days watching students do the seemingly impossible: teaching hyenas to pirouette on command, cougars to offer their paws for a nail clipping, and baboons to skateboard.

I listened, rapt, as professional trainers explained how they taught dolphins to flip and elephants to paint. Eventually it hit me that the same techniques might work on that stubborn but lovable species, the American husband.

The central lesson I learned from exotic animal trainers is that I should reward behavior I like and ignore behavior I don’t. After all, you don’t get a sea lion to balance a ball on the end of its nose by nagging. The same goes for the American husband.

I was introduced to this 2006 “Modern Love” essay by the Atlantic’s Annie Lowrey. Every paragraph brings new joy.

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Why Some Liberals Will Secretly Miss Donald Trump (Atlantic)

Trump had fans, but he also had what the sociologist Jonathan Gray—talking about internet communities—called “anti-fans.” Anti-fans are not the same as uninterested bystanders. They are as passionate in their hate as fans are in their love, and they derive a sense of identity from belonging to groups dedicated to the objects of their mutual loathing. Among Trump’s most loyal supporters, grief has already turned to fury with the voting system and the “biased mainstream media.” After all, when you see your opponents as anything from communists to child abusers, it is hard to accept defeat. But we should also talk about the other side of the coin: When the exhaustion clears, some liberals will miss Trump. Or rather, they will miss the moral clarity that opposing him brought.

Me, on American’s #FBPE moment.

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He Built A Life Out of The Ruins of His Life (Men’s Health)

“I can normalize everything. I can make like it’s all normal, like it just is what it is,” [Michael J] Fox says. His hand is tremoring, and he doesn’t attempt to calm it. “And then sometimes I get moments when I think, This isn’t normal. This sucks. But then to have someone say, ‘That’s normal. And I’m okay with that.’ Oh, okay—she says it’s normal, and she’s okay with it. So let me rethink it. It’s kinda like if you’re walking along with someone and you’re wearing a silly hat, and you look over and they’ve got a silly hat on, too, you go, ‘Ah! Regardless of what anyone else thinks, we both think this silly-hat thing works.’ Just to have a comrade. It’s so much more complicated than ‘It’s a great marriage.’ It’s a great understanding. It depends on mutual goodwill and mutual love and mutual concern.

I would like to take this opportunity to say that I am also very lucky to have Jonathan, Silician Defence chat and all.

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Inside The New York Times’s Heated Reckoning With Itself (NY Magazine)

But the most meaningful divide in the newsroom seemed to be by temperament. “The fundamental schism at the [New York] Times is institutionalist versus insurrectionist,” a reporter who identified with the latter group told me. (Almost all of the dozens of Times employees I spoke to for this story requested varying degrees of anonymity; one told me, “You can refer to me as a ‘woke millennial reporter’ or whatever.” (The newsroom noticed that some employees of “Wirecutter,” the most capitalist arm of the Times’ editorial operation, appeared to be the most socialist on Slack.) “I love my job. I like my co-workers. But it has not been my goal since I was 12 to work for the New York Times,” the “woke millennial reporter” told me. “I’m not so blinded by how great the place is that I’m going to ignore the problems.”

One of the things this piece highlights, which is IMO true of the Guardian as well, is how much “insurrectionist” pressure at the NYT is coming from non-journalists in the building, i.e. from sales execs and developers and commercial hires, who have joined what they see as a campaigning left-wing organisation, often forsaking bigger salaries at corporations and tech giants to do so. It’s fascinating that Big Tech’s heel turn has had such knock-on effects on liberal journalism.

Also, this is the most relatable quote I’ve ever heard: “The complainers are always right,” one editor told me. “But, as someone who has complained a lot professionally in my life, the solutions are hard.”

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Other Countries Have Safety Nets. The US Has Women (Anne Helen Peterson, Substack)

My coauthors and I are especially concerned about the mothers who, because they are unemployed or make less money than their husbands/partners, have been left in a position with limited power to demand that their husbands/partners do more at home. In the paper, we talk about a woman named Audrey. Pre-pandemic, Audrey and her husband were trying to have another baby. But when the pandemic hit, Audrey lost her job and her husband had to work long hours, which led to frequent arguments. Because of those arguments, Audrey no longer wanted another baby. Despite Audrey's wishes, her husband (to use her words) sexually assaulted her by not pulling out during sex, and Audrey got pregnant. The pregnancy and the assault have taken a serious toll on Audrey's mental health, leading her into therapy and onto antidepressants. 

Meanwhile, the pandemic has left Audrey without a full-time job, without her own health insurance, and with a toddler and a baby on the way. Essentially, the pandemic has left her in a tremendously difficult situation with very few options for herself and her children.

[…]

Mothers who are struggling to meet intensive worker and intensive parenting norms report feeling like failures, and they sometimes face consequences from others, including criticism from their bosses or snide comments from their mother-in-laws. The title of our first paper, “Let’s Not Pretend It’s Fun,” comes from a mom who was working full-time while also trying to provide full-time care for her toddler in the home. That mom was frustrated with her mother-in-law, who was pressuring her to “cherish these special times” being home with her 17-month-old daughter.

This interview with Jessica Calarco describes sociology as “un-gaslighting”, which is a lovely way of putting it. It’s certainly how I felt about the work of my hero Arlie Russell Hochschild on the “second shift” when researching Difficult Women.

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Quick Links

1. “Meanwhile, you keep plugging away. It's the hardest work you've ever done. You walk out in the white cap and you rant for an hour about stuff that means nothing and the fans scream and wave their signs and you wish you could level with them for once and say one true thing: I love you to death and when this is over I will have nothing that I want.” (Garrison Keillor, Chicago Tribune, 2016)

2. The best election reaction.

3. ‘“We didn’t join a cult,” the NXIVM member turned whistleblower Mark Vicente says in one scene, frustrated. “Nobody joins a cult. They join a good thing. And then they realize they were fucked.”’ (The Atlantic)

4. “It’s only late in the evenings that Vegas visibly becomes what the tourism board says it is: young and saturated with sex—and not the Boyz II Men-sanctioned lovemaking kind, either. Out on the Strip, aging women wear shirts that say “Girls! Girls! Girls!” A man working for a competing strip club has a shirt that says “Orgasim Clinic: Accepting New Patients.” (Sic on that tragic typo.) Single-named DJs pump their skinny arms as women in tight tube dresses and Lucite heels they bought online a year ago straddle mouth-breathing men on VIP couches like they just heard there was an asteroid headed toward earth or just took a handful of Ecstasy; platonic girlfriends decide to make out at no urging at all because we’re in Vegas bitchez! One does not have to go far to feel the erection of a stranger in the rear of one’s jeans. It is in these small, handsy hours of the night that Caesars’ hope for Britney was born.” Taffy Brodesser-Akner on Britney in Vegas, 2014. Heaven. (Medium)

5. Have a read of this transcript of a Frankie Boyle stand-up set from 2012 and marvel with me how much tastes have changed, and the boundaries of acceptability have moved, in less than a decade.

6. Five actors on playing Thatcher. It says something that two of them are men. (New York Times)

7. “One of Turchin’s most unwelcome conclusions is that complex societies arise through war. The effect of war is to reward communities that organize themselves to fight and survive, and it tends to wipe out ones that are simple and small-scale.” (Atlantic)

8. A lot to learn for any aspiring interviewers here.

9. ‘His reluctance to glory in any of his achievements has a particular texture, the modesty of the Brilliant American Liberal, which is not so much false as it is familiar, like a much-practiced pose. It brings an urge to say, in response, “Look, take some credit already!”’ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reviews Barack Obama’s memoir. (New York Times)