Reading Rainbow: A Tuesday Roundup

I haven’t posted in awhile because work has had me just glued to my desk just kidding I’m freelance and work in my pajamas the couch, where I’ve been trying to craft nuanced, sparkling prose for the people who have kindly taken a chance on commissioning me play as many rounds of Puppy Showdown as I can. I’ve also been catching up on all of the buzzy books from last year, so reviews of Room by Emma Donoghue, Freedom by Jonathan Franzen and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot are forthcoming; other recent reads include Angela’s Ashes, Travels in Hyper-Reality by Umberto Eco and… the Anne of Green Gables books. Reviews will come as soon once someone finds a way to block Puppy Showdown on my computer.

But in the meantime, there’s been a wealth of sweet book-related things floating around the Internet–and here are some of the best ones.

• Remember those Scholastic book club mailers? Here’s a collection of them. I miss ordering books via tiny shitty pieces of paper and then coming into class one day to find a shrink-wrapped bundle of Encyclopedia Browns on my desk.

• This ad campaign (left) for a Lithuanian bookstore is awesome (thanks David!). Reminds me of this more extensive project.

• Penguin releases gorgeous, hand-sewn book covers for Black Beauty, Emma, and The Secret Garden. Actually if you buy them they’ll just be “sculpt-embossed” to mimic the original, but, you know, that’s the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.

• Insulted By Authors, a project where this guy Bill Ryan who goes to a lot of book signings asks authors to insult him instead of just doing the “Best wishes -scrawl” thing. The link takes you to my favorite by Amy Sedaris, who wrote “I’d call you a cunt but you lack the warmth and depth.”

• The Glamour magazine cookbook is titled: 100 Recipes Every Woman Should Know: Engagement Chicken and 99 Other Fabulous Recipes to Get You Everything You Want in Life. “Engagement chicken” is this roast chicken that apparently has the magical effect of making your boyfriend propose. The back cover blurb features a quote from Ina Garten: “That’s the best reason I ever heard of to make a roast chicken.” I’d definitely say the worst, but–different strokes. The recipe book features gems such as “Get Skinny Dip,” “Prove to Mom You’re Not Going to Starve Meat Loaf,” “I’ll Take Care of You Mashed Potatoes,” “Hook Him Apple Pie,” and “Impress His Family Cake.” I spent a good amount of time trying to figure out if that list of recipes was a parody, but it’s not. In conclusion, Glamour markets extremely well to women who get depressed when their friends lose weight or get engaged, but they’re not quite on track with my idea of “Everything You Want in Life” or they’d have included “No One Fucking Cares if You Eat This Whole Thing of Pasta Pasta” and “I’m Hungover and Want to Pass Out Grilled Mac & Cheese + Brisket Sandwich.” The latter is real and it’s better than you could ever imagine.

• And the final link: a website devoted to bookshelf porn (thanks Sean!). I’m a huge hypocrite because if there was a magical recipe to make my boyfriend build me one of these, I’d be in so fast.

Bossypants, by Tina Fey

I’m not big on role models, but I suspect that I’m highly typical among outspoken females in counting Tina Fey as one of mine (if you’re curious, the complete list includes Maeby Funke, Amanda Blank at 4:04 of that song, and… cannot think of any more). I’ve been a big-time fan of Miz Fey’s ever since I bought this fat history of SNL in 2002, and even more so since I found out that she was part of the lovingly, painfully nerd-face theater group I was lucky enough to partake in at UVA. So obviously I pre-ordered her book and signed up for Amazon Prime just to get the free two-day shipping so that this book could arrive yesterday and I could spend an unsatisfyingly short three hours in bed devouring it. I laughed out loud in an empty room about twenty times. Bossypants is funny, perceptive, and perfectly self-deprecating–exactly what you’d expect from one of the few current female celebrities famous for being talented rather than going to the gym a lot. Some critics have been complaining that it’s not quite a memoir and that it lacks some expected juicily emotional depth, but to me that’s why this book was so enjoyable: it’s about work, it’s not gratuitous, it’s there to tell you the things about Tina Fey’s life that are 1) funny and 2) actually interesting, and it’s not there for anything else.

Slate called Tina Fey’s attitude “tough girl feminism“–the kind where someone yells “Nice tits” and you yell back “Suck my dick”–and this is so agreeable to my mode of operation that I’m having a hard time imagining what else you’d do in that situation. As Mick Foley said on Fox News, the world may get an F with women, but we’re getting a C-minus and bragging about it; what else can you do with that other than take no shit and use the language of the shitters? Fey talks about being at a seminar with 200 women who were all asked to pinpoint the moment where they first “knew they were a woman.” Nearly all of them talked about the first time they were harassed, which rings true to the time I was at evangelical Baptist camp when I was eleven and some thirteen-year-old suggested I stick whatever I was holding “in my pussy.” On a semi-related note, I’m not sure too many men would buy this book, because it’s a lot more frankly feminist than everything else that will sell over 10,000 copies, but they should, because it’s funny. And anyway if Tina Fey’s very reasonable gender-equality slant is too much, then we really in trouble.

Some highlights from Bossypants:

On how beauty ideals have diversified admirably since the 70′s, with JLo bringing the butt and Beyonce the “leg meat”: “And from that day forward, women embraced their diversity and realized that all shapes and sizes are beautiful. Ah ha ha. No. I’m totally messing with you. All Beyonce and JLo have done is add to the laundry list of attributes women must have to qualify as beautiful. Now every girl is expected to have Caucasian blue eyes, full Spanish lips, a classic button nose, hairless Asian skin with a California tan, a Jamaican dance hall ass, long Swedish legs, small Japanese feet, the abs of a lesbian gym owner, the hips of a nine-year-old boy, the arms of Michelle Obama, and doll tits. The person closest to actually achieving this look is Kim Kardashian, who, as we know, was made by Russian scientists to sabotage our athletes.”

Responding to an Internet bodybuilding forum where someone posted “I’d stick it in her tail pipe”: “Thank you so much for your interest! Whether you meant it in a sexual way or merely as an act of aggression, I am grateful. As a ‘woman of a certain age’ in this business, I feel incredibly lucky to still be ‘catching your eye’ ‘with my anus.’ You keep me relevant!”

About this UVA douche bag who invites her on a mountain hike just to talk to her about another girl the whole way: “He had to stop and smile at the adorableness of this–Gretchen had asked him to tear the piece of Trident in half because it was too big for her. ‘Can you believe that?’ he marveled. A girl so feminine and perfect that half a piece of Trident was the most she could handle. I tried to process what this meant for my evening. ‘So… you and I will not be dry humping, then?’… As I crawled into my bottom bunk, I thought about how I had climbed Old Rag. I thought about Gretchen, the girl who could only accommodate half a piece of gum. ‘I hope you marry her,’ I imagined saying to HRW, ‘and I hope she turns out to have a cavernous vagina.”

Why We Travel, Why We Don’t

Prompted by the Paul Theroux New York Times article “Why We Travel” and a few related essay contests, here’s something I wrote the other day. I’m not quite as melancholy about Peace Corps as this essay might imply, but I find blissful, epiphanic travel writing kind of half-baked and it is an adjustment to live a life of sunny ease and apple muffins rather than one of wild transcontinental hassle. Photo courtesy of my boyfriend.

The stationary life often consists of a series of small attempts to bolster confidence, properly amass and discard objects, maintain ourselves and plump up the base from which we claim the right to say things like “stable” and “in a good place.” But traveling usually entails the opposite. As Paul Theroux said, travel of the non-Waikiki sort is a shocking enrichment; its unpredictability and inconvenience provide an essential lesson in humility.

The indiscriminate pursuit of this sort of travel has led me to a series of odd experiences: falling off a boat in the black seas of northern Croatia; filming a reality show on a three-mile island in Puerto Rico; receiving a marriage proposal from a cross-eyed naval officer in Venice; blearily pissing on the Slovakian border at midnight; getting pummeled in a game of orphan baseball in the Dominican Republic; and most recently, living and working in the violent, starkly beautiful villages of Kyrgyzstan for a stint in the Peace Corps.

There, my first months of service were marked by a revolution and a wave of horrific ethnic violence. When I talked to people about it, they always said, “This is why you should’ve tried to go to Jamaica,” shortly followed by “I could never do what you’re doing,” to which I’d respond, “But you could. Anyone could do it. It’s just a matter of wanting to.”

I’ve always craved the education of travel for the same reason I crave literature. I’ve always felt that my only shot at an ethical life involved witnessing a panorama of others. Adventurous travel requires less boldness than it does simple desire, something which I never found lacking.

But now, having been sent home early because of escalating episodes of sexual harassment, I feel a little bankrupted. I’m exhausted from the experience of being a 22-year-old woman whose looks blended her into the Kyrgyz population (a group among which one in three marriages is the result of a non-consensual bride kidnapping). I could do without the minor epiphanies of travel, the markets, the targeting and stares. Maybe more than anything, I’m tired from seven years of constantly cobbling together research funding and unpaid internships to “enrich” myself in a way that’s culminated in part-time employment and a nagging dissatisfaction with the consumerist insularity of American life.

In short, I’m not sure what sort of enlightenment I received from this, the most vivid and immersive trip I may ever take, but for the first time, I understand why people wouldn’t want to venture into the tangle of non-luxurious adventure travel. The cumulative effect of bouncing from street fights to festivals to the solitude of desolated landscapes is a physical and emotional minimalism, an inward receding that occasionally feels as potent and stripped as heartbreak.

But sometimes I daydream about my life in Kyrgyzstan, about walking out my front door and ascending, alone, straight up into a wild vista of gold-studded, flowering mountains that touched the sea-large sky. As time passes, I begin to remember more and more how lovely it is to be untraceable; how great, the skill of adaptability; how crucial it is to let travel teach you that seeing something triply mediated through a screen, a platform, and someone else’s perspective is ultimately nothing compared to the raw, innocent bravery of uninhibited wandering, where all you have is your diminished self.

Wanna Be A Victim: A Discussion on Sluts

So, 16 Yale students and alumni have filed a Title IX lawsuit against the university for their lack of disciplinary action against the people responsible for the following: DKE pledges publicly chanting “No means yes! Yes means anal!”, ZTE pledges surrounding the Women’s Center with “We Love Yale Sluts” signs, more frat members stealing shirts decorated with personal stories of sexual assault from a Clothesline Project anti-violence demonstration (better to crush someone’s spirit than drink a bunch of soy sauce and die), and the general bureaucratic hushing-up and shaming involved during the small percentage of sexual assaults that women on campus actually reported.

A reminder: 1 in 4 college women is sexually assaulted during her time in school and 80% of those assaults are committed by acquaintances. But of course, 2 in 5 college women dress like sluts when they go out (3 in 5 on Halloween or any sort of theme party, 5 in 5 at the good frats) so what are we even talking about here?

On the word “slut,” I have mixed feelings. One cop in Toronto gave some safety tips to women on how to avoid sexual assault; although the only valid nugget of advice on this issue is “don’t be a woman,” he suggested to the public that they don’t dress like sluts. And while that’s clearly ridiculous, there’s a massive undercurrent of thought about sexual assault that it’s connected in some way to how the girl looked and how she was dressed. Think about the Times gang rape piece, blaming the 11-year-old for wearing makeup, or the thousands of times you’ve heard someone say “She was asking for it.” Or the way people react to a man raping 200 elderly women primarily with surprise that he could get it up!

I don’t agree with the way that “slut” gets thrown around, and I don’t like the nasty hint of approval in both that word and the “she was asking for it” line, although it does get straight to Jezebel‘s point: that women are somehow supposed to be sexy from the moment they put on an Abercrombie padded bikini top at the age of 8 until the day that Botox and Pilates are finally not enough–but they’re not supposed to be sluts. Or, as Coop says in Wet Hot American Summer, they’ve gotta be the right kind of slut.

But I love that movie, and, more to the point, I think that there’s something to be gained by not dismissing the word “slut” as meaningless just because it’s mostly deployed by idiots. As it stands, “slut” is used for females of all kinds: girls who like sex, girls who don’t want to have sex but have the audacity to show off their bodies anyway, ugly or fat women who presumably do slutty things to make up for their less desirable qualities, pretty women who go just over the line in performing all the self-beautification acts that the beauty-industrial complex asks them to do, pretty much anyone who’s giving too much access or not enough access to their God-given T&A, which is pretty much everyone.

But I’m going to take a stand on this word. A slut is someone who bases the entirety of her (or his) self-worth on being as sexually attractive as possible and then acts accordingly: in other words, someone who’s been fooled by the machine!

Now of course, sluts are made, not born, and they’re not to be faulted. The gamut of consumer choices available to little girls runs from the apparently innocuous (princess gear, the consumption of which is a preview to the absurd $161 billion American wedding industry) to the obviously disgusting (nipple tassel baby T-shirts, or ones that say Future MILF and Future Trophy Wife). Snooki made a video for AOL giving an 11-year-old a Jersey-style makeover, with the tag line “You’re never too young to look bangin’.” Girls are socialized from birth to base their self-worth on men and looks and sex and slutty attributes.  The winning-est women in America are those who appear on (as the 30 Rock joke goes) the Maxim “I’d Rape That” 100: women who are idolized for the very qualities that make them, according to police officers and male college students, worthy targets.

Take Katy Perry. She’s awesome, she shows her tits all the time, her tits are awesome, her music is catchy, she rocks! Sluts rock! That song she made with Kanye about aliens came on the radio today and I stayed on the station for long enough to hear the line “Take–me–t-t-take me, wanna be a victim”–and then I just got so sad. Not because of the line itself, but rather, because it isn’t shocking in the least. Even when taken out of its very insightful alien-metaphor context, “wanna be a victim” is so unremarkable, so run-of-the-mill as far as today’s aggressive, porny brand of objectification goes. Sometimes it seems to me that loosened standards for female sexual freedom are resulting in a blunt, dangerous creep factor on all other sides: that women said “I’m going to own this” and men replied, “Oh bitch I’ll show you who owns this.”

Back to Snooki for a second. Rutgers paid her $32,000 for a speaking engagement. They paid Toni Morrison $30,000. So, economically speaking, being a Snooki when you grow up is just as good if not better than being a genius and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist.

How to navigate this system? College girls will be called sluts anyway, so they’ll continue go out every Wednesday through Sunday aiming to look just as hot and rape-able as the girls at the very top of the either unspoken or brutally public list of frat’s most wanted–and then they’ll be blamed for it when assaulted, which (never forget) 1 in 4 of them will be. If I was a Yale student drawn to wealthy misogynists the same way that I’m drawn to jean shorts and cinnamon-sugar doughnuts, I’d have played the game too–maybe I’d have believed that my assets were all external and in existence primarily for male consumption, which is the primary tenet of sluthood.

I’m not arguing for the use of the word “slut” or for the right to put people in categories. You can’t judge a slut by her cover, either; a girl certainly has the right to throw her tits out there, get hammered and go home with a stranger just for the fun of it. And, you know, there are a lot of ways to be a terrible human being! It’s just that this one is just so obviously remediable. It can’t be that hard to refuse to buy into the mindset that the best a woman can be is a trophy at the top of the list.

Believing this, or acting like you do, is equivalent to becoming part of the Slut Creation Machine: an awful assembly line turning out young women who neglect to cultivate their personalities because of an accurate assessment that personalities don’t matter to the poon-seeking future leaders of America. We don’t need any more forces contributing to the sizable portion of girls who won’t report their sexual assaults because they believe that blacking out and getting anonymously plowed is the best they can do for a weeknight in college anyway.

So let’s all do our part by recognizing that this is a real problem. Next time you hear someone say “slut” or “slam piece”, suggest that they acquire a husky dog and train it to say “I love you” instead. Happy Friday everyone!