1: My entire thought process watching that was: "Ooh, Neat. Ooh, many moving parts. WILL BREAK. And probably outside of warranty."
Cool, but requires a level of tidiness that's easier to aspire to than to attain.
And probably outside of warranty.
It allegedly all comes with a lifetime warranty, but yeah, breakage seems inevitable.
3: But then they said "lifetime warranty"! And then I wondered how long the company will be around.
Also, there's an irreducible amount of space that books take up, and it's hard to shrink a usable kitchen beyond a certain amount. Seemed like this was almost all about bed/sofa/desk space. But still, kind of appealing.
I bet pretty, rich people wouldn't break it. Just us shlubs.
I guess in the home of the future we won't have books, just iPads.
The shelves that stay vertical when the murphy bed unfolds!!!
Seemed like this was almost all about bed/sofa/desk space.
True, but that's a lot of space.
I bet this stuff would be awesome in a (freakishly neat) dorm room or an (unbearably hip) office.
Few people are as short of space as the wealthy with minimalist tastes.
Obviously this would only work for a person who was obsessively tidy, but I am such a person, so I'm fascinated by the possibilities.
You only need to be moderately tidy: the shelf stays horizontal when you lower the murphy bed!1!
Few people are as short of space as the wealthy with minimalist tastes.
Or people who live in, say, Hong Kong. Check the video in 2!
15: I had seen the video in 2 and would have linked it had you not. I endorse it. Neat.
It's not just tidiness. You'd have to discipline yourself to live with that stuff - nothing above a particular height on a particular shelf, nothing in front of a certain wall, etc.
I had also seen the video and 2 and not bothered to link or post it. In fact, I'm just pretty sure it's the video I'm thinking of; I'm too arrogant to click and make sure.
I like how movable shelving has been transformed into a futuristic moving wall set-up. That place is cool, but I'd hate to live there.
I just heard about this amazing product.
You know who's really good at minimalist living? Hobos, that's who.
Apparently most hobos in the 1930s were under age 21. Or so I recently read.
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8:ATT ends unlimited downloads on iPhone amd iPads 2G per month.
Beautiful furniture.
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From the link in 23:
AT&T is the first carrier to press ahead "with what is likely to be a rapid industrywide transition to tiered pricing for wireless data,"
So I guess the US is catching up to Canada. Although I think you can get the iPhone on more than one carrier up there now. Not much help to me, with my multi-year contract.
God, I love this stuff. The shelf that stays vertical is amazing. I would seriously save up to buy one of those beds for my tiny-ass guest room -- with the bunk bed, I could host visitors all the time.
Why do you have to be super-tidy? I mean, if you don't fold up the Murphy Bed in the morning, the bed stays open and looks messy, but that's no worse than any other mess that you would be leaving in the equivalent amount of space.
Built-in furniture that folds or tucks into walls was a big part of the California Craftsman movement; my old house has built in, space saving bookshelves, cabinets, and closets, and lots of smaller bungalows have Murphy Beds and jump-seat like things that fold down from the walls. So, so cool.
Murphy Beds
Let's go with "Murphies bed" just to piss off the prescriptivists in a weird way.
I don't have any good excuse for the bizarro capitalization. I'm not even using my Iphone. Maybe I have some inner German doing battle with my inner American.
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Ok wow. LvT's Antichrist on IFC tonight. Wow.
Anyone who finds this kind of symbolism banal is just
running from the power of symbols. A tree, a crow, a fire:amazing.
Art makes life worth living. Barely.
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21: You know who's really good at minimalist living? Hobos, that's who.
Also, Ivan Denisovich.
there's an irreducible amount of space that books take up
Also with that one shelf, the guy was telling how you could keep your books or your knickknacks on it, "up to 40 pounds!" And I'm thinking, guy, that's not all that many books.
33: Ayup. Just my thought. I've reformed substantially, but during my bookoholic phase I could have overloaded that shelf by a factor of ten without even having to dip into the giant pile of sci-fi pulp.
Now I'm down to probably less than two hundred pounds of books, and those are all either ones I know I'll want to read again, reference works, or books that I haven't read that sit in little stacks near the bed, judging me.
Conceptually a lot of those pieces are really clever, but the materials and mechanical elements just look flimsy to me. Even in the demo video, where they are presumably showing their best face, there are pieces that wobble a little. The hinges look like the standard plastic bushing plain bearing type that typically last for about two years of regular use and the sheet metal is clearly quite thin.
12: For example, Lee Child http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703866704575224283775143058.html?mod=WSJ_latestheadlines
You read through the article thinking -- wow, a rich best-selling novelist with nearly no possessions! What a minimalist!
And then, it turns out he has another apartment in the same building filled with stuff. And he has two other houses where his wife lives.
Now I'm down to probably less than two hundred pounds of books...
At one point, I had more than two hundred pounds of books in the bathroom. Now I'm married, so I can't do that, but we probably have a couple thousand books without counting the stupid little cardboard ones for babies to chew.
I lived in a teeny studio for three years. I didn't have any of this built-in stuff, of course, but my main piece of furniture was a futon in the very middle of the room that I made into a bed every night and back into a couch every morning. It gets rather tiring to have to move your space around that way. I was constantly putting things away in that apartment; anything you used would be taken out of its very specific place, used, and then had to be put back in order to make space to do anything else.
35: Or like that recent interview with the guy who plays Peter Campbell on Mad Men, in which he's talking about how he lives such an austere life that he doesn't even have a bathroom. Whereas it turns out to be more like he's taking his own sweet time remodeling, and using his neighbor's bathroom in the meantime.
...using his neighbor's bathroom in the meantime.
I usually pee off the back of the patio. Less walking and saves water.
I usually pee off the back of the patio on the laurel bush.
It's more of a kind of ivy-covered retaining wall with maple trees behind it.
The link in 41 was before I started reading here. But, obviously, the problem there was that the guest was pissing on the bushes at someone else's house. It's my own patio.
I really, really love the library-stacks appliances and shelves in 2.
I suppose you subscribe to the "trickle down" theory of macroeconomics?
The moles got into my wireless again.
I like the look of the stuff in the video in the OP, but I watched it with my sound off because I'm at work. Hope I didn't miss too much.
Intellectually it seems like I'd be perfect for that kind of living(1) and yet I've just never done it. I use cardboard boxes both for storage and as tables(2), I guess, but that's as close as I come. The bed is flat on the floor, the furniture only has one single use, and the bookshelf and shelves for clothing are modular but only actually get folded up when I'm moving. If I ever reinvent my life from the ground up - in a midlife crisis, say, or moving two thousand miles away for some awesome new job - I hope I remember this video and look for stuff like it, but until then there's always too much carryover from the last home and job and set of hobbies.
(1) I'm pretty minimalist and keep things simple. I like cool, modern stuff. Most importantly, I'm a bit disorganized but not so much that I couldn't do better, especially with foldup furniture forcing me to.
(2) Not tables to eat on; tables to store stuff for display or easy use on, like books or cards, the equivalent of coffee tables.
i dunno if this is superb or idiotic. really, all is war against clutter, but this is like those all white interiors i get in my rrs feeds because i like hypermodern artictect. but i've never susccesfully lived orginzedly.
You know who's really good at minimalist living? Hobos, that's who.
Also, Ivan Denisovich.
Comrade, please. Ivan Denisovitch is the opposite of a minimalist. The guy spends the entire novel obsessing about material possessions and consumption. His entire measure of whether a day's been a good day or not is whether he's managed to acquire any more material goods. It's like the Soviet version of American Psycho.
Or Zeks and the City.
Can I just say that things like Murphies bed don't actually make it feel like you have more space than you do when you're in a tiny studio? I go around saying that they do, because I would like it to be true. "I fold it up and it's like I have a living room! I practically live in a 1-bedroom!"
No, you fold it up, but there's always kind of a phantom bed there, and you fold it down and it almost hits the sofa. This stuff is nice but even if it were a lot cheaper than I suspect it is, no amount of folding changes the financial impossibility of living unlike unto hampsters in this town.
(I know, I know. This is not a great tragedy. I still get to live here and go out for weird emasculating plum cocktails. But once in a while I fantasize about moving to Edna, Texas and not being able to reach out for a glass of water from the kitchen sink while lying in bed anymore.)
In grad school I took a class with a very, very elderly professor (it was a Sophocles class; we called him "the last native speaker"). We met in the evening in his studio apartment and at the end of class, one young woman, who was sort of handmaiden to his body, would pull down his murphy bed, make it up with pillows, and then hand round glasses of warm gin to us all. It was kind of odd. (Eventually the class was moved to a regular classroom, which I, surprising myself, preferred.)
Based on that description, being an extremely elderly classics professor with a small apartment doesn't sound that bad.
54: He had a wife (his 4th?) in another city who was more than 50 years his junior. He was something else.
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This probably belongs in the iphone thread, but this one is more active, so I'll post my pet peeve/ question here.
I've recently been dealing with some professional guardians who are mostly lawyers. Some of them refer to themselves as Atoorney John Smith in their voicemails and return calls saying, "This is Attorney Smith..." I find this super irritating. (Esq. on letterhead doesn't bother me so much.) I always refuse to call them this--and nobody in my office would care--generally responding with. "Hello Mr. Smith, thank you for returning my call..."
Is this common? Are these people just trying to puff themselves up? I find it kind of condescending, but I also tend to find it condescending when doctors refer to themselves as Dr. So and So but then address me by my first name.
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56: Are you sure they actually want to be *called* that and aren't just identifying themselves on a phone message?
"This is Attorney Smith..."
I have never heard that usage in my life and it must be stopped like a roach on the kitchen counter. Kill it now.
Also, using "chef" like you might use "sergeant" is really fucking stupid.
Yeah, identifying oneself as Career + Surname* sounds like something out of cack-handed dystopic scifi. Or the Smurfs.
*I suppose "doctor" and "professor" excepted, although all my higher ed. took place at schools where each was deprecated.
50: Ok. The dead guy in Ivan's barrack is an expert in minimalist living.
I've never heard the "Attorney Smith" locution before, and consider it weird and unpleasant. The only thing close to it is that when you're actually in court in front of a judge, judges will often call you 'Counsel', or refer to the other lawyer as 'Counsel'. But not 'Counsel Breath' -- it's not an honorific, it's just so they don't have to keep track of lawyer names.
re: 56/58/60
They do that in the Czech republic. It's standard there. And also usually distinguish in the form of the 'Dr' salutation which type of doctorate you have: engineering, law, etc.
57: I'm not sure, but I think so, because that's how he identified himself when returning a message, in the same way that a physician says, "Hi, this is Dr. Kulick..."
It seems kind of like a marker for low-end legal talent, and most of the people doing this work aren't at high-end firms or even mid-sized ones. But you know, I'm a snob.
It may be a way of saying, "You know, I'm not family--just a professional." Some of them fulfill their basic responsibilities. Others just get paid to rubber stamp documents.
64: It seems kind of like a marker for low-end legal talent...
That would be my guess. But, they should still learn to say something like, "This is Mr. Jones, the attorney for Mr. Smith."
And not even the cool kind of low-end legal talent that gets on the back of the phone book to remind you that drinking and driving is bad, but that if you happen to drink and drive, you should call them when the cops find you.
The big name lawyers I've known always said, "This is nickname lastname." If they were older and referred to as Mr. Lastname by staff or me, that was how it went, but they never said This is "Mr. Blah blah." My grandmother called her lawyer "nickname," but she was older than he was and had known him for 35 years or more. I've always seen saying "This is Mrs Blank" as a way of signalling that the person is your social inferior. "Hi John [the gardener] this is Mrs. Rich." That sort of thing.
Filipinos also will use "Attorney" as a title and form of address.
I've always seen saying "This is Mrs Blank" as a way of signalling that the person is your social inferior.
That's just way to complicated/snooterrific.
I love honorifics, and use them as much as I can. (Vestiges of my Asian-Am upbringing, perhaps.) It has been hard for me to switch to calling peers by their first name, although I'm a little old to be calling people my age Mr. and Ms.. It'd sound cutesy, although I mostly mean it.
I don't particularly love to be called by my first name once I've given someone an honorific, but while I'm contemplating kicking people's shins for using their iPhones while we're chatting, I'm not prepared to correct a peer for familiarly using my first name.
I'm also handy with "Sir" and "Ma'am", which is unusual for a decadent urban unreal American of my generation.
72: I like those also and use them when strangers who are adults and not pissing me off at the moment. What I don't like is having use a different honorific based on something other than age/gender/parked-block-me-status.
I'm also handy with "Sir" and "Ma'am", which is unusual for a decadent urban unreal American of my generation.
Me too, though it really isn't that uncommon here.
62: On the rare occasions I'm in a court room, I always internally blanch at the idea that I may have to address someone in the subservient third person.
They use counsel so they don't have to remember even what your role is! I get it a lot, and feel like I've gotten a brief, imaginary promotion.
On the rare occasions I'm in a court room...
...I have trouble hiding the handcuffs.
Usages like "I'm attorney last name" are typical of lawyers whose job is to put pressure on non-lawyer bureaucrats who blow ordinary folks off, like people who call benefits staff or whatever; it's a little understandable in that context. Probably your conservator-lawyers fall within that category. Still, "I'm X, so and so's attorney" is much preferable.
doctors and professors are usually much bigger wankers than other professions, so IDing as such is worse than 'chef jose' or etc.
but 'esquire' seems ok, because who fancies themself a knight except like grabbing your replica scimitar for historical re:enactment saturdays?
lady megan, did you really have asian upbringing? i thought you just played footies with cutie asian skaters in AP particle physics.
i worked with a black guy last week and he used 'ma'am' which was like ??????
53: I had a class in grad school that met at the home of the professor. She was like the professor in certain stories and plays: an eccentric, brilliant, irritating woman, and she had been seriously ill and still wasn't quite up for trips to campus. One day she mentioned to us for no reason I can remember that her dog had died on the sofa we were sitting on. It's just maybe good to leave some of those boundaries solid and intact.
Also, o oudemia[vocative ending], other opera fan of unfogged, it reminded me of a line in Lulu: Isn't this the couch your father bled to death on? Of course in that case they're about to do it, which is even worse than teaching a class. And father>dog. But still.
Not a real Asian-Am upbringing, but all my friends in jr high and high school were Asian-Am, and my sport was Korean, so I was fairly immersed. Besides my nuclear family, I didn't know very many white people. When I got to Berkeley, my main reaction was that I'd never seen so many white people in my life. I did, in fact, have a hard time telling them apart, to my Asian-Am boyfriend's amusement. He'd gone to a white high school.
In Czech, the equivalent of "Mr Doctor Jones" or "Mrs Doctor Jones" is common (MD, PhD, JD, all of them). German's worse.
Chinese government officials got little hat buttons and elaborate rank badges for robes.
I'm happy not to be called dude, and if I have something to say not to get interrupted until I've said it and then rephrased it so that it makes sense. What is the maximum apparent physical (not sartorial) age compatible with being soberly (in the not drunken sense of the word) addressed as "Dude?"
77 is correct; many of the people I know who are most officious about this stuff have to deal with the welfare system, which is enough to make anyone go round the bend. It still grates unbearably.
That said, IME there is a perfect 100% correlation between putting "Ph.D." as part of one's e-mail address (not the signature, the actual address) and being wildly insecure and pretentious.
82: probably whenever you stop wearing cargo shorts.
82.last: At the bowling alley? Or elsewhere?
That said, IME there is a perfect 100% correlation between putting "Ph.D." as part of one's e-mail address (not the signature, the actual address) and being wildly insecure and pretentious.
What about using it as part of a blog title?
*looks innocent*
German's worse.
To the point of using "Herr Doktor Doktor Professor" for someone with two doctorates. I've heard that Austrians are especially sensitive about titles like that.
83.2: Or being an administrator in an academic institution gets it exactly right.
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Hey Halford or k-sky (or other Angeleno),
What do I think of Janice Hahn? Do I like her better or worse than pure drama Newsom, who is nevertheless very good on environmental stuff?
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I was leasing out a part of a building to a start up church that was using a very large conference room for their meetings. My assistant kept taking messages from what she informed me was Mr. Pastamachalzi. When me met in person I realized he was Pastor Machalzi. I can only assume that he had not been ordained, or he would have been "Reverend".
What do I think of Janice Hahn
Not completely incompetent, in a nepotism sort of way.
90: I don't think your assumption is necessarily correct.
I have to admit, I do still get a secret thrill out of using 'Dr', not having had it that long, and with it not having been that easy to get. Also, when I get the impression someone is being snooty with me because teh Scot [accent, etc], it's nice to drop it.
Back to folding furniture; I don't know about the modern stuff, but there's a Craftsman-era apartment building in Seattle with wonderful built-ins, including beds that slide out from under a shorter adjoining room. (Don't have to make the bed at all! Bonus!)
The moving parts are still all fine, it's a much-loved building.
Other long-term investment: it has gilded moldings on the outside, mostly complicated high-up ones. One reads that very very thin actual gilding is cost-effective after about 100 years, as it's durable and protective.
92. Well, we all know about assumptions. I have absolutely no idea what the honorifics are concerning the various and sundry arbiters of the word of the Allmighty. I do remember that all chaplains were to be called "Padre", regardless of denomination or sex.
95: I do remember that all chaplains were to be called "Padre", regardless of denomination or sex.
Just the other day, I saw a cute, female "Padre" wearing leggings and a shirt with a clerical collar.
I have to admit, I do still get a secret thrill out of using 'Dr', not having had it that long, and with it not having been that easy to get. Also, when I get the impression someone is being snooty with me because teh Scot [accent, etc], it's nice to drop it.
In the world of science, as soon as you give a vendor or other mass-mail-mailing organization an address at an academic institution they are liable to start sending you things addressed to "Dr." just to get on your good side, so the thrill for us is a bit more limited.
97: Yes to that. I should probably create a spam filter for "Dr. Hick."
re: 97
Yeah, I have those, too. But still, it's nice. Plus, at my place of work, people less academically qualified than me like to lord it, so it's a small gesture of defiance to keep the title in my email signature.
Just the other day, I saw a cute, female "Padre" wearing leggings and a shirt with a clerical collar.
Pastor Melissa Scott?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoJ-ZPliCj0&feature=related
And hope that you don't get images of shepherds.
Or hope that you do. It's a free county.
In case bob is reading, 104.last is used as an idiom.
THAT WILL BE ENOUGH OF THAT, THANK YOU
Christianity: Just when you thought it couldn't get any weirder.
IT'S NOT YOU THE PADRE IS AFTER, BUT WE'RE JUST WAITING BEHIND THIS BUSH WHILE HE DISTRACTS THE SHEPHERD.
We've heard this one before. Get lost.
Help. The boy is right this time.
Hey wolf, can you take care of this Kaus guy while you're at it?
Yes, by all means, come right away. One at a time.
I SEE NOTHING. I HEAR NOTHING. I KNOW NOTHING.
the 'should you call a brah 'father'' was a plot point the the updike book i read. i didn't really like it, it was way squick in a low-rent plasticky 70s velour-and-out-of-shape way
it had a very strong distinct impression on me, in a bad way. so i suppose it was 'good' writing, but in a fuck off way
i actually helped my sister move from a philadelphia apartment a few weeks ago. i never really connected the hilly drive into philly with the reading of the book.
its funny, how books have distinct landmarks, of a different world from the one i move my body around within
its funny, how books have distinct landmarks, of a different world from the one i move my body around within
That's because I can't find Weathertop.
Q: How does Mickey Kaus practice safe sex?
A: He ties a red ribbon on the goats that kick.
109, 120: Analogous Catholic priest joke left as an exercise for the reader.
107: You're sure that was an actual priest or reverend or whatever? Vicar? Wow, there must be a story there.
Every month, my paychecks come addressed to "Dr. Geebie, PhD PhD". I find this terribly hilarious, and I like to pretend that I demanded such treatment. I need three honorifics, or else my greatness will be diminished.
Academics are far and away the most status-conscious people I've ever worked with.
He ties a red ribbon on the goats that kick.
On a related note, ogged sent me this story yesterday, about which I had two thoughts.
1. Excellent mug shot, but the guy is my exact age, with my same first name, and long red hair and a beard. Bro!
2. Of course it was inconclusive; how can you establish consent with something that answers "Nay" to everything?
Academics are far and away the most status-conscious people I've ever worked with.
4 reals. Who else would think ABD was worth mentioning? Kind of like DNF at the marathon.
125: The animal cruelty charges stem from when Rodriguez allegedly tied the horse to a redwood with a coarse rope.
Protip for horse-fuckers: Don't forget your silken cord.
122: I bet it was not. Expect fake clerical collar hipster trend articles anytime now on the appropriate websites.
My degree isn't finished yet, so I make all my friends refer to me as "Master Cecily ABD". In the third person only; if they're talking to my face we can be less formal and just "Master Cecily" is okay.
This is also helpful for getting people to remember to pay attention to me instead of their phones. "I have a masters degree" I say "I am ALMOST A DOCTOR." Then I kick their shins again.
Surely a well-equipped escort service would have clerical costumes.
Of course we do, and stop calling me Shirley.
130: Or altar boy costumes, depending on clientele.
125.2 I think establishing consent with an animal that can easily kick you to death is pretty straightforward, especially since you sort of have to approach from behind.
132, 133: Be sure to check for the red ribbon.
Bleat means bleat, you sexists.
133: Some guy died trying it the other way.
"Brünftige Kühe wurden zu 88 Prozent erkannt. Für Züchter sei es wichtig zu wissen, wann die Tiere empfängnisbereit sind, sagt Jahns. Nur dann sei eine Besamung erfolgversprechend. Bei entsprechender Ruf-Erkennung kann der Landwirt akustisch oder mit optischem Signal auf seinem Computer informiert werden und dann schnell handeln."
69: Boyer is not a Filipino name as far as I know.
69 was to 63. It was very early and I was commenting from my Blackberry.
77 and 83 make sense, but I was calling him to let him know that I would need permission for his ward to go ahead on a plan that she worked on, because he's the guardian. He was surprised that his signature was required now for anything other than antipsychotic stuff, and he had no interest in discussing it with me at all.
I'm unreasonably miffed, because I feel that I'm doing more to advocate for this woman than he can be bothered to.
Also, as a technical matter, the guy's not acting as her lawyer. When the guardianship comes up for review she'll get, if she wants, a lawyer whose job it is to advocate for exactly what she wants, if that involves having the guardianship removed, but he's just someone who happens to be a lawyer and isn't representing her or providing her with legal counsel.
145. Knecht had to make an emergency "confession".
Academics are far and away the most status-conscious people I've ever worked with.
Baffling. Who's status conscious? When everyone you talk to on a typical day has a PhD or is in the process of getting one, it's totally irrelevant.
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Just overheard some Chets on the subway talking about Bros Icing Bros, congratulating themselves on being on the cutting edge of drinking games. It was awesome. When I got on the train and saw them, I thought to myself, "I bet those guys ice each other."
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You know who is really status conscious? Active duty military and a big chunk of the mid-to-lower-level civil servants working here.
On the clerical-collar-with-fishnets: Wikipedia says "vicars and tarts" is really a common dress-up scheme. Criminy.
Academics are far and away the most status-conscious people I've ever worked with.
Like essear, this is not my experience whatsoever.
150. Ayup. The military, I give a pass to. It is hierarchical. But the civilians. Oy! People introducing themselves as Dr. is common there. Many have doctorates in fields that aren't relevant to what they are doing. I keep wanting to needle them. But, since I salute privates, I hold it in. (LHF) Oh, and there is this one guy whose sig block has $Name, Ph.D. (ABD). He is such a winner.
150. I'd amend that to a bunch of the high-level civil servants too.
Oh, and there is this one guy whose sig block has $Name, Ph.D. (ABD).
I keep having to ask admin people who order things not to put "M.A." on my door. Just "Moby Hick" is fine.
155. IME it was the wives who were most aware of rank. I wonder how that translates now, with so many more female troops. (NB most married females had spouses in the military.)
156: Appointed folks, sure. SES, sure. But I haven't seen many GS-15s lording it over GS-14s or anything.
155: The civilians are trying to assert themselves in that hierarchical military culture.
147, 154: Different samples? And I didn't mean that all academics I've worked with have been status-conscious, just that it's far more common than among other sorts of people I've encountered.
I went to high school with a woman who is now a fairly high ranking naval officer (not an admiral or anything, but maybe a captain? anyhow, fairly high up) and is married to a non-military guy whom she met on EHarmony. I've always wondered how the male officers interact with the guy.
No opinion about Janice Hahn, Halford?
I've always wondered how the male officers interact with the guy.
Like Shellbacks to Pollywogs?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line-crossing_ceremony
I have seen some dickish 13-15s. Then again, there are assholes all over. You're right that the mid-levels are the most sensitive. They can feel pissed upon and end up pissy.
Was I called on to have an opinion? I must have missed it. Anyhow, she's smarter than her brother, not as smart as her father, and now runs the political machine that the Hahn family has had in South LA since 1950 or so.
I think she's probably savvier than Gavin Newsom, plus he just kind of generally annoys me for no very well thought out reason, so I'll vote for her. On environmental stuff, I expect she'd be knowledgeable, very good on water issues and somewhat bad on some other issues (she very much comes from the Port of LA), but it's not like I have a detailed knowledge of her record, plus I'm too lazy to try and figure out what the L.Gov. actually does on environmental stuff (serve on the state lands commission, maybe?).
I asked way back up in the 80s, because I surely don't want to form my own opinions on the entire ballot.
Hasn't Port of LA done good stuff in the past couple years? Or perhaps they were forced into it by the mayor but love taking credit now.
Anyway, thanks. That's more than I knew, and reassures me that either would be fair to good in a mostly useless position.
in a mostly useless position.
Paying careful attention to how you cast your vote in the primary for Lt. Gov. is probably a very good indication that you have too much free time.
The port put in some air pollution restrictions on idling trucks, which were causing a huge amount of air pollution, but of course (as you know it is with all of these things) it was a combination of some good people internally and a lot of external pressure, including from the mayor and the state ARB.
God, I hate being called on to vote on so many different offices. I mean, WTF with voting for judges. I spend a good chunk of my life in LA Superior Court, know and interact with many judges there, and still have absolutely no clue who I should vote for in any judicial election, and just end up voting to retain all sitting judges on principle. And why on earth is my vote being called upon to decide who would make the best county assessor?
So The People can turn the assessor out of office if she doesn't assess right.
I hate it so much when people tell me I have too much free time. It's my free time! I'll use it how I want! YOU have too much free time, if you have time to tell me that!
Not Megan though, she has way too much free time. Megan, can't you think of something better to do? Like think about what kind of present you could get me, and which kind of compliment I might like best if you gave it to me?
Mostly people tell me this when I am proudly showing off something ridiculous I made. Then I hate them slightly more than before, and vow to kick their shins especially sharply the next time they try to use their phone around me.
Well, and opened up the truck drivers to unionization, didn't they? I'll just credit that all to Ms. Hahn, but still makes me think the two of them are about a toss-up. Good. I like having two environmentally sound and mostly indistinguishable candidates to choose from.
Actually, the county assessor just assessed my house at like 40% of its market value, giving me a huge tax break, so I should probably try to figure out who he is and keep that guy in office.
So The People can turn the assessor out of office if she doesn't assess right.
Around here, assessing right (in the sense of accurately) has been a very good way to lose an election for county executive (who hires the assessor). The more expensive the house, the more likely you are to vote.
So The People can turn the assessor out of office if she doesn't assess right.
Around here, assessing right (in the sense of accurately) has been a very good way to lose an election for county executive (who hires the assessor). The more expensive the house, the more likely you are to vote.
Lately a few people have conveyed to me the opinion that the only justifiable thing to do with one's free time aside from work is having children. By not having children, I deprive myself of any reasonable excuses for not agreeing to work 100-hour weeks and travel anywhere anyone asks me to.
Sorry. Our property tax rate is 3% so the topic makes me double-comment angry.
Around here, politicians will do whatever stunt the activists dream up, in an election year!
P.S. I made those capes.
Was the safety net saved? Because I could make capes.
Almost! We were so close! but no. It was not saved. If only we had had more capes.
Or better city council members.
P.S. I made those capes
Bitch set me up!
If I try it, I think I'll go for full length capes, not more capes. You want people thinking "I'm Superman."
Miss Messily, that is the finest cape I've ever seen. I like how it hangs just right over his shoulders, and I can see the message on the back very clearly. Good thing they got you involved. D.C. politics is a ten times better because of your skills.
I was specifically told to design capes at the "hero" rather than "superhero" level.
I don't have to think about what kind of compliments you might like best, Especially. I just have to say the things I think constantly out loud.
There were masks to go with, but none of the council members wanted to do photo ops with the masks on.
Did they consider bras that say "Support our Safety Net?"
187: That seems like a good decision, winning election-wise.
There was a moment where some reporter didn't see the last letter, and thought the message was "New taxes NO!". But on second glance, he realized his error. Whew! Close one! No one found five dollars.
none of the council members wanted to do photo ops with the masks on.
Don't want too many reminders of "stolen" elections
http://www.banningandlow.com/images/I1106.bmp
Thin people could be a problem. "New taxes NOW" becomes "ew taxes NO." Which seems under supplied with commas in addition to being not what you want.
Adding in some scoliosis, and you could get "taxes NOW" or "New Taxes." So that might work a bit better.
The wikipedia page on scoliosis (I wanted to spell it right) has a photo that makes me wonder if an x-ray can violate laws on underaged nude photos.
Come on, the caption clearly states that she's clothed.
Sure, but ask yourself why does the caption say she was 16? And of all the millions of x-rays of people with scoliosis, why post one where you notice the underwire before the spine?
If Moby Hick goes anywhere near a full body scanner, watch out!
This is a non-sequitur at this point, but whenever I've refreshed this thread, it's the comment I see:
8: I guess in the home of the future we won't have books, just iPads.
Pretty much, yes, I think so. I have such confused, conflicted feelings about this. It's already the case that the vast majority of what people consume, consult and peruse, reading-wise, is extremely limited, but man, there's a hell of lot of beautiful and fascinating material out there that will become even more -- exclusively -- the province of what will essentially be curators, historians. This strikes me as a sad thing, the shift toward books as not unlike museum pieces. (Note, I do not refer to fairly common texts in dead-tree format; those can and will shift to digitization. It's the other stuff, the beautifully-bound and/or -printed, the historical curiosity for which the physical object itself adds to the experience of engagement. That these things will pass out of the purview of the average person altogether strikes me as sad. Problematic even!)
Well. As you were.
Note, I do not refer to fairly common texts in dead-tree format; those can and will shift to digitization
Sweet baby Jeebus, please have Mr. Jobs give iPads to my children's school, so that they do not develop scoliosis from carrying all those books and the school can save money too and not have to get new textbooks from Texas everytime someone wants to change the curriculum for You know whatever reason. Amen.
I'm not at all convinced that physical books will ever pass out of common use entirely. The codex is a very useful technology with features that just can't be emulated by electronic forms.
197: Ha. If I think "scoliosis" then I immediately think "Deenie."
Things like textbooks, though, I think will probably switch over to completely electronic at some point, and not a moment too soon.
As to the original post: I love that furniture. Our kids are going to have folding bunk beds now, like it or not.
Sure, but they'll switch to electronic textbooks with self-destructing DRM or some such; it'll be a revenue opportunity for the textbook companies once they can prevent using textbooks after some amount of time. I doubt the districts will save anything.
Sure, but they'll switch to electronic textbooks with self-destructing DRM or some such; it'll be a revenue opportunity for the textbook companies once they can prevent using textbooks after some amount of time. I doubt the districts will save anything.
In the short term, maybe, but after that, who knows? I don't see how the textbook companies can maintain that kind of leverage forever.
I'm not at all convinced that physical books will ever pass out of common use entirely.
I suspect they'll become rarities in the lives of the vast majority of people. And that is fine where textbooks or the latest Harry Potter or John Grisham or Jonah Goldberg is concerned.
206: In the public schools, it might actually be a plus if textbook license fees become an annual "must pay" cost item.
And that is fine where textbooks or the latest Harry Potter or John Grisham or Jonah Goldberg is concerned.
Aren't those sorts of books the only ones the vast majority of people see these days anyway?
A mashup of Harry Potter, John Grisham, and Jonah Goldberg would be far more entire than any existing work by/about any of them.
entertaining, dammit, not entire
Harry Potter and the Liberal Fascist Public Defender.
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Rand Paul gets called on using Rush songs without permission by the group's lawyer.
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In many ways I like the trend toward electronic-only publishing. I read a lot more papers on a screen than on paper nowadays, after realizing what an obscene amount of paper I was printing out, reading, and dumping in the recycling bin.
I do like physical books, but it's maybe more of aesthetic attachment than a rational one. But I think there is a more pressing reason to worry a bit about the long-term trends. PDF as a format, at least, has been around for a while, so we might hope that we have at least several more decades of the same files being usable. But proprietary e-book formats? Should I believe I'll even be able to read those files five years from now, much less fifty?
fake accent probably has more intelligent things to say about such issues.
It's the other stuff, the beautifully-bound and/or -printed, the historical curiosity for which the physical object itself adds to the experience of engagement. That these things will pass out of the purview of the average person altogether strikes me as sad.
I think these things are well outside the purview of the average person and always have been.
Aren't those sorts of books the only ones the vast majority of people see these days anyway?
Pretty much. I think the pattern will extend to, like, almost everyone. Not just the vast majority, but all but the very few.
This mood is coming chiefly from the fact that I've spent the last week or so handling more antiquarian stuff than we have been for the last few years: it's refreshing! But it reflects the fact that we're gradually leaving behind a whole mid-level crowd of readers who were once viable customers for University Press books, and are increasingly less so. I'd intended to extend my list to increasing levels of sophistication beyond Jonah Goldberg, but ran out of steam. University Press books are becoming dead in the water, suffice it to say. They're in the same class (in terms of digitization) as Harry Potter.
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I think I am looking at another big chunk of days (most recent n = 10, mean is probably 3 or 4) where I'm housebound, mostly bedridden, in pain, and bored out of my mind. I need suggestions for reading/watching material that won't make me think too hard, and also won't expect me to remember details that happened four episodes ago. I don't have cable but do have netflix. And I like new blogs if they're funny. Help help I am so sick and whiny please help!
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Books as art objects are well and good, but it's not a step backward for university press books to become available to more people at a lower price.
it's not a step backward for university press books to become available to more people at a lower price.
No, it isn't. It does mean, tangentially, that many of us will just be pulping them, since it's not worth the time or effort to sell them for $5. Once those are gone, it'll be mostly digital versions. So we're looking at books chiefly in the form of higher-end things.
220: Cecily, have you seen the tv show Party Down? All of Season 1 and each episode of Season 2 after it airs are available via Netflix on Demand. It is very funny! Each ep. is only 30 minutes long and thematically based around whoever's event their catering. (It's about cater waiters.)
Scholarly monographs are exactly the kind of thing that I'd say is perfect for electronic publication, with its very low marginal costs. Only of interest to a small and not very wealthy audience, but of considerable interest to that audience. It's never really made any sense economically to publish them in physically at all.
I don't have any suggestions, Cecily, but you have my sympathies! Don't forget to breathe! And you have people checking in on you, right?
220 I Haven't! I will check it out. I can't do the on-demand from Netflix because they aren't captioned but I can do the old fashioned way where I push button on a box and then a few days later the discs show up in my house. Thanks!
Boredom: Travis McGee, Columbo. Maybe the recent animated kids' show Avatar if you have any susceptibility to animation. Patrick O'Brian. Arrested Development. Bollywood-- Priyadarshan's movies are pretty good.
Status among academics and civil servants: It's not really the rank, though for academics rank translates into lab space or other intramural resources; in the struggle for a better space or intramural funds BFing in the M is common. It's editorships, invitations to panels, collaborations-- the right to pass judgement and to be consulted, this is the real currency.
Foreign films on-demand are captioned. There's a bunch of the Criterion collection available, including Kurosawa. Marx Brothers, Preston Sturges?
Hee. I saw 220 and I was like "oh! I should recommend Party Down!" and then I got distracted by an email.
227: D'oh! I'm a nitwit. Let's see -- comfort no-think tv for me involves the David Suchet Poirot tv shows, and the new BBC Marple ones are good too. If you like that kind of thing.
Archer is really funny, but you should probably be a boy and a bad person.
89-166-167: I love Janice. She has ten times the charisma of her brother. She's a gutsy, pro-labor populist and she enjoys compliments on her hair. (Which are sincere!) She's been very good on the Port Trucker campaign, which is pretty advanced legally in the way it ties together environmental and labor concerns.
That's good enough for me, since I don't have any allegiance to Newsom. Thanks, k-sky.
fake accent probably has more intelligent things to say about such issues.
Actually, I don't really have anything to say worthy of that compliment. There is such a thing now as pdf/a, which is supposed to be archival pdf - I don't know the technical details, but I guess it's supposed to be usable over a longer period than regular pdf - but the book formats I think are in a lot of flux.
Plus I haven't been paying attention to the book side of things recently. (Like, I know of epub, but only of its existence.) There seems to be a bit of a debate about whether, having gone electronic, it makes sense to publish a book in essentially an image-of-print format, or if other functions/structures should be built in, like links, comments, multimedia, pathways other than the usual chapter-based ones, etc. Once you get into that, you're sort of beyond looking just at file formats*, since the "best" format might depend on the kind of design the book has, or what you want to do with it. Commentpress is supposed to be good if you're looking for feedback and revisions, for example. (Which leads to another issue, of knowing when an e-book is "done.")
There are various xml-based text encoding projects/standards out there, but about all I know about them is that it's apparently quite time-intensive to do the mark-up. Maybe things have gotten easier over time.
* Also you have to wade through people proclaiming various revolutions in reading, so it's hard to get an idea of where things will settle. Some of the open source e-reading software (built for reading on a computer) I came across a couple of years ago, and which was proclaimed to be a huge improvement over static pdf, has already been abandoned, so it's not just the proprietary formats/readers you have to watch out for. There is newer open source stuff now, of course.
God, I hate being called on to vote on so many different offices
I've come to think of elections as California's version of a jobs program.
Foreign films on-demand are captioned. There's a bunch of the Criterion collection available, including Kurosawa. Marx Brothers, Preston Sturges?
here is a list of the criterion on demands from netflix:
http://mubi.com/lists/1917?from_theauteurs=1
53, 80: My upper level math logic class met at the professor's apartment. He was quite the eccentric, wearing shorts and Tevas all year round (in Missouri), putting photos of loons and of the UCSB women's basketball team in the margins of exams. He wrote a book with Quine a reeeeeally long time ago.
At some point, when he decided we'd had enough class for the evening, he would silently erase the board (he had a freestanding chalkboard in his living room) and then write codes for the flavorss of Breyers ice cream he had bought that week. Then he would put on a Bartok, Dvorak, or Shostakovich record -- always one of those three -- and then everyone had to choose which ice cream to have. You would be served a giant bowl of it, and you were expected to eat it all.
Scholarly monographs are exactly the kind of thing that I'd say is perfect for electronic publication, with its very low marginal costs.
Do not overestimate how much difference printing a book makes compared to electronic publication however. Books that would be too costly to print are quite likely too costly to publish electronically as well, unless you go the self publish lulu route.
Fair enough. I suppose it depends in part on what sort of electronic publication you envision.
Books that would be too costly to print are quite likely too costly to publish electronically as well, unless you go the self publish lulu route.
What about the "put a PDF on a webpage" route?
I've gotten the impression that the really difficult to replace/transform to all-electronic part of scholarly publishing is the operating/managing work, not so much the whole peer review system, though it's the review system that seems to draw most of the attention. Someone's got to coordinate with all those authors and reviewers and editors. Plus site maintenance, digital preservation, etc. You're not going to be able to put your cloth-backed acid-free long-term preserved edition in a vault somewhere, or whatever they do now.
The only ones who truly understand what it means to live minimally are the dead.
243. Like the hospital here where the management decided that signs to the "Mortuary" were demoralising for patients, so they were all reworded: "Low Activity Unit".
ONLY THE DEAD HAVE SEEN THE END OF CONSUMER CULTURE.
Blume! The upper bound on the degree of our separation is 2!!!
220: And I like new blogs if they're funny.
I'm glad Unfogged got grandfathered in then!
No viewing/reading suggestions at the moment (other than RTFA), but good luck and hope this latest chunk of days is below the mean in terms of suckage and duration.
I second the animated series Avatar. Pretty, funny, intelligently written, and fun. Highly digestible.
Actually, what about interesting blogs?
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/
http://mpettis.com/
http://tomorrowmuseum.com/
http://www.newshelton.com/wet/dry/
http://coverlaydown.com/
http://diddywah.blogspot.com/
Also I look for people with compatible musical taste on last.fm (which is getting worse, can't stream tracks you choose any more) and listen to their libraries.
I would really like to be able to find interesting art blogs-- I like northern european watercolors and contemporary representational art (Neo Rauch, Eric Fischl, not John Currin or Jeff Koons).
Is anyone here into visual arts and care to share browsing habits? Armsmasher has a professional interest, doesn't he?
'Smasher's blog is Grammar Police (just in case you weren't aware), and has an arty blogroll. I don't know anything about the topic, but that might get you someplace.
too costly to publish electronically as well,
User-friendly options to export a widely-supported xml format would cut down on a lot of the cost; that'll come. On the administrative/editorial side, truly open reviwing options exist for articles in some fields (ArXix, BioMed Central), but like putting up great art on flickr, it's not something that's really caught on.
Pirate movies!
I have recently enjoyed the hell out of "The Black Swan" with Tyrone Powers. (So, so hot.)
Another classic is the Douglas Fairbanks Sr. silent movie, "The Black Pirate." Dude had presence.
Errol Flynn is mandatory viewing in the genre, even though he's really not my favorite. He gets the best scripts, though. The high watermark is "Captain Blood" but "The Seahawk" is also pretty good.
Unless you're a completist, you can skip "The Red Pirate" (with Burt Lancaster and an acrobat-sidekick) and "Yellowbeard" (with Monty Python members and Cheech/Chong), "Swashbuckler" (campy 1970s, good action), or that Geena Davis vehicle that torpedoed her career and an entire studio. I'm a completist, and pirate movie=good for me, so I pretty much loved them all.
"Roman Polanski's Pirates!" (yes, that's the title) is wonderful: cynical, dirty, and genuinely swashbuckling. It has Walter Matthau as a dirty backstabbing wretch of a great captain. My years-long enjoyment of this movie has recently been somewhat dimmed by the news that Polanski molested the very beautiful teen love interest. ugh.
Of the recent "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies, I enjoyed the hell out of the first, accepted the second, and regard the third as a disastrous mess. What's so fun about the first, in the context of this exalted pirate-movie lineage, are all the references. All of the great pirate movies get hat-tips here and there.
I hope the sick-time passes quickly, Messily!
re: 251
I browse various photography blogs, but, tbh, most of them aren't that good or interesting to non-photographers. Shorpy is good for random old-school images, though.
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To all you social science academic types:
Robert Kuttner and a group of left academics (spearheaded by Nelson Lichtenstein, Donald Cohen, and Peter Dreier) have launched "an important project in the battle with conservative ideas" and will pay(!!) for brief policy briefs:
We are looking for faculty and graduate students (in history, sociology, economics, political science, planning, public health, and public policy) interested in writing short (2000 word) policy briefs for which we can pay $1,000.
E-mail me at mypseud at geemail and I'll forward you the details.
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Just academics? They don't want ramblings on water from bureaucrats who could nevertheless find a use for a grand, should one come her way? I can say progressive things about water, and even tie it to larger themes.
I'm confident you can ramble with the best of them, but here's a little more detail on what they want:
To give substance and scholarly integrity to this crying wolf argument [i.e., demonstrate that conservatives have cried wolf in the past], we are calling upon historians and social scientists, in training or well established, to use their research skills to identify instances, in recent years as well as in the more distant pass, in which the crying wolf scare was put forward by industry executives, conservative politicians, and right-wing pundits before the passage of legislation or the promulgation of regulations that have become hallmarks of popular and progressive statecraft. On each issue we seek to document three things: First, historical examples and quotes drawn from speeches, legislative testimony, newspaper and other media opinion pieces, think-tank reports, or political platforms which claim that a proposed policy or regulation would generate a set of negative consequences; second, a discussion of how these crying-wolf claims impacted the new laws or regulations as they were passed into law; and third, a well-documented analysis of the extent to which conservative and special interest fears were or were not realized during the years and decades after the new laws or regulations went into effect.
Also, are they not interested in scientists with an interest in policy?
Oh, I totally couldn't do that. We don't pass any laws here since the legislature got froze, and here is all I know.
I liked the Geena Davis pirate movie. I also liked the Geena Davis spy-turned-housewife movie. It's possible that I am Geena Davis.
Is it true what they say about Jeff Goldblum?
I also liked the Geena Davis spy-turned-housewife movie.
Shane Black script, innit.
Will a collection of digital books get this kind of result?
The study (authored by M.D.R. Evans, Jonathan Kelley, Joanna Sikorac and Donald J. Treimand) looked at samples from 27 nations, and according to its abstract, found that growing up in a household with 500 or more books is "as great an advantage as having university-educated rather than unschooled parents, and twice the advantage of having a professional rather than an unskilled father." Children with as few as 25 books in the family household completed on average two more years of schooling than children raised in homes without any books.
I liked that one as well. It's kind of a shame -- she's really well suited for that sort of goofy-action-hero role, but it's not a big enough niche to sustain a successful career for a woman.
266: Funny, I'd wondered the same thing. (I've also wondered if there's a peer effect, and if we should be encouraging the kids to bring their friends over to rub up against the bookshelves more.)
251: Art Fag City is a good place to start looking for art blogs. It's gossipy, but links to a lot of other blogs. I like Edward Winkleman's blog too. Lots of art blogs are really about gossip and money and how horrible various dealers and collectors are, but with a few clicks you can usually get to some art.
It's gossipy, but links to a lot of other blogs
But that's why I like Terry Teachout
http://www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight
Also re: Geena Davis. Loved her right up to the 1st Woman President Show, which sucked donkey balls. And not in a good way.
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This seems like it's destined for discussion here:
Woman says she was fired from Citibank for being too hot.
With pictures, of course, and more here.
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I'll have to check out mcmc's artblog recommendations. I myself highly recommend the Journey 'Round My Skull blog.
271. Don't hate me because I'm beautiful.
I just interviewed a candidate for a junior position who was SMOKIN' hott. I was consciously questioning whether I was somehow lowering the bar for her because of her hottness. Aggravating factor: we share an aspect of personal history that tends to prejudice me in her favor. Reassuring data point: the guy who interviewed her by telephone was positive on her, too.
271: That story sounds so obviously out of line that I have a hard time believing that Citibank's version isn't going to be entirely different -- like, with a completely unrelated reason for her firing.
In the annals of why even if you're conservative you have to be insane to be a Republican unless you're a straight white christian and of this country isn't PC enough. Let's imagine some idiot politician called a candidate a 'dirty fucking kike' and went off on the secret Jewish plan to infiltrate fake Christians into government as part of their war with 'us'... You would have everybody falling over their feet to drum the guy out of public life. And that's a good thing.
277: But teraz, we're at war over there.
I accidentally started watching Cougar Town and now I can't stop.
275: That's seem deep anonymizing you've done there!
276: I agree with you. NYC is filled with hot women in expensive clothes, one would be unemployable if one couldn't work around them. Also -- in finance? Come on!
High Wind in Jamaica with Quinn, Coburn, Baxter is the ultimate pirate movie.
271: If you can see nipple, it's not "professional attire." I don't know if those pictures are supposed to be the clothes she was fired for wearing, but if so her idea of professional does not match mine.
277. That story reminds me that "democracy" is pretty messy. Even idiots can vote, so why wouldn't they vote for idiots.
Kind of like the sitch in many ME countries. An actual election would return Islamist majorities. Not in the best interests of anyone, long term.
The recent kerfuffle between Turkey and Israel is but one example. Israel and Turkey were close military allies until the election of the relatively Islamist AK party. In the bad old days we would be seeing a coup right about now.
286: "See" as in the actual item, or as in the outline of said body part against clothes? Because if the latter I think that's a pretty dumb standard. Adults should be mature enough to not freak out at the realization that people have nipples.
If you can see nipple, it's not "professional attire."
286: That's a 'rule' I've seen violated an awful lot, and have violated myself without comment from anyone I work with (not being smokin' myself here does have a protective effect). Stretchy knits are sold as professional wear, and stretchy knits mean an occasional visible nipple. (I admit the pink satin blouse in one of the pictures is weirdly over-the-top, but everything else looks like the sexy end of professional to me.)
pirate movie=good for me
Even this gem?
I didn't know about that movie. We are *so* renting it this weekend. (They sing!)
It's some kind of mangled Pirates of Penzance?
But, uh, I have to wash my hair!
Looks like a pretty garden-variety sex harrassment case to me. I'm not really sure what the fuss is, other than the NY Post's desire to run the headline "Woman Fired for Being Too Hot."
(By "garden variety" I just mean that these are the kinds of allegations that show up in these sorts of cases all the time, and sorting through them would require actually learning something about the facts. And 286 is ridiculous).
288: The key phrase is "adults should be mature enough" - they aren't, not taken as a whole.
290: To me the sexy end of professional reads as consciously and deliberately slutty looking. I know I'm far from alone in this. I'm pro-slut, but it's not the face I'd prefer to encounter in professional settings, at least not from my co-workers. Also "sold as" is very different from "is suitable for."
To me the sexy end of professional reads as consciously and deliberately slutty looking.
Buh wha?
297: Ah, what do a bunch of elitist reviewers know anyway? The people demand to see Christopher Atkins soulfully singing "How Do I Live Without Her"!
298.2 Are you thinking of something like this?
but it's not the face I'd prefer to encounter in professional settings, at least not from my co-workers.
And I'd like it if my co-workers' khakis were properly pressed. If she's within professional norms (and what's for sale as career wear is, in fact, a pretty good indication of what the norms are) then your esthetic preferences aren't something she's responsible for taking into account.
To me the sexy end of professional reads as consciously and deliberately slutty looking.
Seriously, this is insane.
Please keep digging, togolosh. It's not Ogged, but it'll do.
301: With a jacket, that works for court.
The key phrase is "adults should be mature enough" - they aren't, not taken as a whole.
By all means, let's address this by telling women not to let on that they have ankles nipples.
Is it a sexy lawyer costume, as the URL indicates, or a sexy secretary costume, as the page itself indicates? Who will resolve this murkiness?
291: The movie that killed my Blue-Lagoon-born Christopher Atkins crush. (Pro tip: I was the high-school Latin tutor, as in we were both in high school, she was a senior and I was a sophomore, of the girl who played "young Brooke Shields" in that movie. I think we only met once or twice.)
I am troubled by this, too. I didn't pay thousands of dollars to go to school to be mistaken for a sexy secretary!
307: As suggested in 305, I think that to be a sexy lawyer costume, it needs a jacket. A little bolero would work, without disturbing the other features of the outfit.
Maybe it's a sexy legal secretary.
To be honest, I'm not sure it's a very accurate representation of what sexy secretaries generally wear.
The people demand to see Christopher Atkins Hitchens soulfully singing "How Do I Live Without Her"!
Also, what I really want to see is the "Sexy Barrister" costume.
This one is "Sexy Defense Attorney Costume", which suggests that... yep! Sexy Prosecuter [sic] is out there.
308: Clearly she had bigger fish to fry than learning some stupid ole dead language.
313: Holy crap, would I pay a lot of money to see that.
314: Will you settle for Sexy Judge?
316: Here's the link to the Defense Attorney. I have to admit that the subtleties of the distinction between them are beyond me.
314: Will no one speak up for the sexy solicitors?
If you can see nipple, it's not "professional attire."
An environmentalist stance against excessive AC?
322: Or perhaps tologosh is in the cups of Big Padded Bra.
(Was it someone here who described a politician indebted to the garment industry as in the pocket of Big Pants? Maybe Fafblog? Anyway, I'll treasure that forever.)
321: Sex solicitation is illegal, NPH.
320: Thanks for the aitch tee em help.
251: I was following Sweet Station for a while.
I didn't pay thousands of dollars to go to school to be mistaken for a sexy secretary
"I didn't spend six years in Evil Medical School to be called "mister," thank you very much. "
From 325: I am so calling people who are assholes about their iPads "iPrats." (Spelled with 2 t's in the original for some reason.)
302: Absolutely. At the same time, I think it relevant that women seeking to send a "sexy end of professional" message are, to a fair chunk of people, sending a "deliberately slutty" message. It's not analyzable in an objective manner because people's visceral responses differ.
I'm very sympathetic to the problems women face when it comes to professional wear, problems compounded by the variation in standards between professions and the variation in the way people perceive the exact same outfit. But if a woman seeks to stake out a position at the edge of what she understands to be acceptable she runs the risk of going over the line for at least some people. I don't think that's what happened here - your suggestion in 276 is likely correct.
331: But seriously, a woman wearing a shirt that allows you to tell, temperature depending, that she is in possession of nipples codes to you as "slut"?
At the same time, I think it relevant that women seeking to send a "sexy end of professional" message are, to a fair chunk of people, sending a "deliberately slutty" message. It's not analyzable in an objective manner because people's visceral responses differ.
This is still bothering me. What, to you, is the content of a "deliberately slutty" message, that distinguishes it from "sexy end of professional"? That is, what's an appropriate response to one that wouldn't be an appropriate response to the other?
It's not analyzable in an objective manner because people's visceral responses differ.
I'm a firm believer in harrassing people who have obnoxious visceral responses until they either change those responses or at least shut up about it in public.
Men who wear fitted shirts and tailored suits are also sluts, or so I've heard.
335: Did I mention that you were looking especially natty today, neb?
What, to you, is the content of a "deliberately slutty" message, that distinguishes it from "sexy end of professional"?
Well, so, in the latter case you'd have, like, tassles in a thorn, vs. in the former case a schoolgirl outfit.
Don't change, togolosh! Dig in! Your best bet here is to find a really strong analogy.
331 has a veneer of reasonableness, but continues to be absolutely fucking insane.
Many work clothes are designed to make people look more attractive. Some of these clothes succeed! Doing so does not create an image of sluttiness. Unless you are equating attractiveness with sluttiness, in which case, may I suggest applying for a Saudi Arabian passport.
Also, as we have heard from a certain commenter ad nauseum, occasionally visible nipples are absolutely ordinary parts of normal women's workwear, and have been for at least 20 years.
Your best bet here is to find a really strong analogy.
I think it relevant that women seeking to send a "sexy end of professional" "tough and demanding boss" message are, to a fair chunk of people, sending a "deliberately slutty""castrating bitch" message. It's not analyzable in an objective manner because people's visceral responses differ.
I'm very sympathetic to the problems women face when it comes to professional wear behavior, problems compounded by the variation in standards between professions and the variation in the way people perceive the exact same outfitmanagement style. But if a woman seeks to stake out a position at the edge of what she understands to be acceptable she runs the risk of going over the line for at least some people.
335: I wasn't going to say anything, neb, but there has been talk.
occasionally visible nipples are absolutely ordinary parts of normal women's workwear
And Toyota commercials.
Tog is mad that women stopped wearing those 80's bows instead of necktie things
Oh, god am I glad that I'm too young to have had to interact with those. The amount of checking to make sure it hadn't gone awry somehow and ended up all weird-looking had to have been awful, particularly for someone who fiddles with stuff. I don't even wear jewelry because I'm always playing with it -- with a neck bow I'd strangle myself accidentally somehow.
Someone could do a great cultural history of those bow things. I guess they were designed to kind of sort of be neckties in places where men were wearing neckties? And they only had, what, a 10 year run?
with a neck bow I'd strangle myself accidentally somehow.
Just get one with a quick safety-release buckle, like many cat collars have.
333: ...what's an appropriate response to one that wouldn't be an appropriate response to the other?
Good question. I'm not really sure. Presumably you have two such categories into which you could put outfits people actually wear, right? If so, you could answer the question for yourself. As a first stab, for me - I'd have a lower opinion of the judgment of the woman in deliberately slutty case, and be less likely to take her seriously. If she's obviously gaming my limbic system I tend to assume that whatever it is she wants to sell is likely not all that great on its own merits.
334: Why obnoxious? Unless you reject the notion that anything is "deliberately slutty" we're just arguing over where the line lies.
I guess they were designed to kind of sort of be neckties in places where men were wearing neckties?
I just kind of assumed that the bow manufactures needed a place to dump excess stock once head bows went out of fashion.
346: Yeah -- button front cotton shirts are a problem around the neckline as women's office wear. Something literally styled like a men's shirt needs a tie or it looks sloppy. You can design a shirt as a v-neck, and have it look reasonable, but if you want it to be closed up to the neck, you've got to do something around the collar to make it look finished, and those screwy little fluffy bows were one solution.
This is why I wear nipple-displaying stretchy knit tops under my suit jackets, days I have to wear a suit.
350: Head bows will live forever in children's books, so you can tell which one is supposed to be the girl bear.
If she's obviously gaming my limbic system
Wsystem of yours that finds "professional attire" pleasing is being gamed just as surely by those who dress according to its standards.
Also, I'm not super into calling people out for offensive comments a la Mitch, but this:
I'd have a lower opinion of the judgment of the woman in deliberately slutty case, and be less likely to take her seriously. If she's obviously gaming my limbic system I tend to assume that whatever it is she wants to sell is likely not all that great on its own merits.
is pretty much straight up sexism, in my book.
"Wsystem" s/b "Whatever system", obvs.
Also, I'm not super into calling people out for offensive comments a la Mitch
WHAT'S THAT SUPPOSED TO MEAN A$$HOLE???
348: Presumably you have two such categories into which you could put outfits people actually wear, right?
I'm not just being difficult here, but no, I don't. The combination of 'deliberately' and 'slutty' sounds really weird to me -- I doubt that you mean that you think the wearer actually wanted people looking at her to think she's a slut, whatever slut means exactly to you or to her.
Intentionally sexy, sure, I'd agree that those clothes are. I dress in outfits that I think make me look sexy sometimes too, and even wear them to the office. So long as they're normal professional clothes, I don't think that's evidence of poor judgment.
There are clothes that are office-inappropriate on all sorts of dimensions: not formal enough, not tidy enough, oddly styled, and so on, and too sexy is a possibility. But there's nothing extreme about those clothes (barring the one odd pink blouse); I'd wear pretty much any of that. Wouldn't look the same on me, of course, but no one would bat an eye at the outfit.
354: While I agree that it's sexist, I want to agree in the context of all the prior discussions about how this is a patriarchial society; almost everyone has stuff like this going on in their heads somewhere; it's worth talking about without dismissing anyone as having shown themselves to be a bad person; and so on. All that stuff can be taken as read, right?
Also 340 is good.
In that it points up the sexism of thinking it is properly considered the woman's problem when people have inappropriate visceral reactions to such things?
Oh, wait, I'm banned. Sorry.
Perhaps this could be more clearly explicated by some case studies. Does this outfit code as deliberately slutty?
Togolosh, is there any way a man could dress that would be equivalent?
To build on LB's 357, 'intentionally sexy' can also mean 'not dressing to hide curves'. You're coming dangerously close to requiring that women disguise their bodies, or at least some women, in some cases. And it's your perception of their attractiveness that is deciding what cases those are.
362: I got asked to stop wearing my assless chaps at work.
358: Well, you're judging someone harshly for an offense one of the major components of which is having nice tits. You're taking her appearance as a wrongful attempt to manipulate you -- the fact that you think she's really hott means that she's doing something to you ("obviously gaming my limbic system") and you resent it.
This, kind of sexist. Certainly, no question about it, she's trying to look sexy. But that's not an injury to you, and thinking of it that way is sexist. Imagine the clothes were more restrained, but she still looked fantastic in them: if the effect on you is the same, why isn't that just as much, or as little, an offense?
As a practical matter, buying women's clothes is an effing pain in the ass, as we spunky gals have discussed here more than once. Larger gender politics aside (but not given a pass), the last thing I need to worry about is the potential for nipple outline showage.
This is starting to feel like the Ann Althouse vs. Jessica Valenti dust-up.
To try and unpack it a little bit, it seems to me like what Toggers is saying is "if you try to dress in a deliberately sexually attractive way, I won't take you seriously." Which (a) obviously has a long and bad history that's deeply tied up with bad results for women and (b) is totally fucking ridiculous; people like to look sexually attractive, both to attract the other sex and feel better about themselves, and so what.
It's also weird to assume that this is a problem with how women are dressing, rather than Tog's response.
And, to 359, yes of course I assume Togolosh's good faith. To be honest, it's perfectly possible he's less sexist than me. I'm a straight white privileged dude and my default setting is that the patriarchy works just dandy for me (default setting I'm trying to overcome), so I'm certainly not claiming any kind of high moral authority on these things, just being kind of a bantering dick in the way that we all are here sometimes.
362 A friend of mine who ran a small IT firm once hired this very talented guy for a paid summer internship. The first day the intern showed up in a suit and tie. It was a pretty informal place, so he told him that unless he is interacting with clients, he can and probably should dress down. The next few days he came in khakis and a button down shirt. Then a heat wave arrived, and he noticed that some folks were coming in shorts and t-shirts. He asked if that was ok, was told pretty much anything is fine. So the following day he came in tight short shorts and a skintight mesh tank. My friend was amused but did tell him that that's going a bit too far.
a bantering dick
I don't need to see that at the office!
As a practical matter, buying women's clothes is an effing pain in the ass
Word. The salesclerks always look at me funny and ask if I'm buying them as a gift for someone else.
368 last: Yeah, while I figured it could probably go without saying, still, no harm being clear. There was a nasty little meltdown over at Ta-Nehisi Coates' where he got cranky with a poster who he perceived to be calling him and his commenters sexist generally, and then thought about it, talked it over with his partner, and apologized very decently. So I'm just remembering that people get tense when the s-word is thrown around.
369: Heh. Next Tuesday, the thong comes out.
I am today wearing a snug bike jersey that shows my nipples in the airconditioned half of the building.
Maybe hot or not will be a nice complement to the interminable humorless sexism discussion.
Hot:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/25723451@N04/4387710794/in/set-72157623419174375/
Not:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/iiconpiercing/4164975033/
Is a tongue piercing suitable for the office? What about neck tattoos (say leopard spots behind the ear that continue down the neck under the collar line, which I saw on the street last week)? Oversized earrings? Oversized metallic nails? Oversized earrings plus nails plus simpering mien? Clothes are just part of the story, which is why dress codes and "I'd wear that" are insufficient.
Discussion of generalities seems less entertaining than working out which particulars cross whose boundaries. Age and ethnicity matters a lot
A bantering dick beats an emo schlong anyday.
357: OK, that's clearer. I'm using "deliberately slutty" to mean something like "intended to unambiguously signal sexual availability and a desire to sexualize the context of ones' interactions." Not that the person intends to deliver, mind you, but that they want the observer to see them in sexual terms.
360: No, more that it points to the impossible position women are constantly being put in when it comes to figuring out how to maneuver between the needs of the job and the inappropriate transference of traditional (patriarchal) norms of female behavior into the workplace. If a woman is supposed to be decorative and appealing to men she inevitably will be at a disadvantage with respect to men who only have to focus on the job, for example. Similarly if she's supposed to be deferential she'll have difficulty with leadership. My preferred solution is to drop the traditional requirements of decoration and deference.
Next Tuesday, the thong comes out.
That's keeping it wedged in there a pretty long time, LB. I'm not sure that's entirely hygienic.
lw's "Not" is really an unfair standard for the modern office. Not everyone gets the stapler right on the first try.
a bantering dick
I don't need to see that at the office!
I'm using "deliberately slutty" to mean something like "intended to unambiguously signal sexual availability and a desire to sexualize the context of ones' interactions." Not that the person intends to deliver, mind you, but that they want the observer to see them in sexual terms.
And the outline of a nipple is such an unambiguous signal to you?
My preferred solution is to drop the traditional requirements of decoration and deference.
As long as women defer to your sense of "professional attire" and thus decorate themselves accordingly?
I'm using "deliberately slutty" to mean something like "intended to unambiguously signal sexual availability and a desire to sexualize the context of ones' interactions."
I'm going to keep on picking on you, here. What is "unambiguously signal sexual availability" supposed to mean? You think she's intending to convey that she'll fuck anyone who asks? Because (a) that seems like an unlikely message, and (b) I certainly wouldn't read even much sexier clothes as meaning that. If that's not the message you think she's intending to convey, what is -- 'availability' to whom?
My preferred solution is to drop the traditional requirements of decoration and deference.
Awesome, let's start in with that plan tomorrow! I'll stop giving a shit how I look, you change everyone's attitudes.
Look, I know sarcasm isn't particularly helpful, but are you fucking serious?
376.2: Now I'm confused. So is the problem that women themselves want to dress up but men don't want them to because the men become too hot-and-bothered (so women should be urged to avoid dressing the way they would otherwise want to), or that men want women to dress up but women don't/shouldn't because it takes the women's attention away from their work (so we should impose limits on how women dress for their own good)?
'availability' to whom?
Me! Me! I volunteer!
Further to 383: Except that I'd drop the first clause from "intended to unambiguously signal sexual availability and a desire to sexualize the context of ones' interactions."
383 gets it exactly wrong, unless you're just admiring the sentence structure or something.
And the outline of a nipple is such an unambiguous signal to you?
As a feminist, I merely shout "hooray!" and then go about my business.
(Also, I'm at work, hence the brevity of my comments. Should. Not. Comment. From. Work. Get. Distracted.)
384: I think tologosh is thinking (1) it's bad that women feel required to make themselves sexy to advance in the workplace, and (2) women who do so enthusiastically and successfully, like our banker, are bad people because they're taking advantage of a bad system, so (3) padded Mao jackets for everyone!
389: You're clearly confused, Motch. Men are studs, women are sluts.
388: You're supposed to throw your arms up in the air too, NPH. Some feminist you are.
interminable humorless sexism discussion
You didn't find LB's "hottt wiggg action" funny? Who's the humorless one now, buddy?
Mao jackets for everyone!
I'd vote for that candidate. Mao jackets are suh-weet.
363: I don't intend to be prescriptive, at least not in the sense of wanting to control what women wear where. I'm trying to get at the ambiguity associated with what clothes signal. I may be trying to signal sober and serious while a piece of my audience is perceiving me as an absurd clownish slob, for example. Also it's not really a matter of her attractiveness as it is my (and others') perception of what she is trying to signal.
362: No. The Patriarchy. Blame it.
Okay, if the pic linked in 391 was what togolosh was talking about with respect to showing nipple, I can understand. I mean, apo does look "professional" in that pic, but not in the same sense as we're talking about here.
but that they want the observer to see them in sexual terms.
Such clothes exist, but I don't see how standard office wear can qualify. As you're implying, this is about coded meanings, and no matter how hot someone looks in office wear, the meaning of it is 'work'. That was what I was getting at in the anecdote about the guy who showed up in the skintight mesh tank and short shorts. Unlike a standard t-shirt, that codes as 'look at me sexually'. But a suit, even in an era where they are cut tightly, won't look that way no matter how much they show off a guy's ass and chest. Same goes for women wearing whatever the standard work clothes are. It's not like she was showing up in the kind of club clothes which sometimes are meant to convey that message.
397.last: I don't know about that.
394: Here I am trying so hard and they just keep upping the ante on me.
it is my (and others') perception of what she is trying to signal.
Seriously, try and say what you think she's trying to signal in short words: who does she want to believe or think what about her? I will say that I think she probably wants people to notice that she's attractive. But I can't see that as proof of poor judgment or other wrongdoing.
Also it's not really a matter of her attractiveness as it is my (and others') perception of what she is trying to signal.
And I think you're making huge assumptions about what she's trying to signal, and letting your visceral reactions go woefully unexamined.
You're supposed to throw your arms up in the air too, NPH. Some feminist you are.
What's the protocol in this situation?
380, 381
Oh please. Female salespeople do this all the time-- the most extreme are touts for bars, but indicating an interest that just might be personal is definitely a profitable niche.
Here is a less downmarket example of this sales dynamic:
http://equityprivate.typepad.com/ep/2008/02/debt-bitches-lp.html
To claim that it doesn't exist, or that perceptive adults don't know it when they see it is a bit much. Unfortunately, describing it invariably means attacking someone personally on the basis of something intentionally ambiguous. I work with colleagues who wear slinky clothes, but facial expressions and things people say trump clothes completely; I don't think that it's complicated.
The real problem comes with mixing interpersonal interactions with work-- people who are suddenly friendly when they want something is the most extreme form.
405: Sure, people flirt, and sometimes they flirt to gain an interpersonal advantage rather than for the mad joy of it all. But we're talking about this woman's clothes, not her behavior, and tologosh keeps on using words like 'unambiguous' and 'deliberately'.
To claim that it doesn't exist, or that perceptive adults don't know it when they see it is a bit much.
Who's claiming what now?
Female salespeople do this all the time
Perhaps nowhere more than in the pharmaceutical research industry, where 75% of every business development department consists of blond-haired women in their 20s. I'm not even exaggerating.
408: My understanding is that marketing and PR in the computer industry is the same -- Buck's workday as an IT journalist is chatting up an endless string of cute twentysomethings.
Look, sexual attractiveness is part of human behavior. People enjoy doing it, and sometimes use it to manipulate people. So fucking what.
I really hate lines like this:
The real problem comes with mixing interpersonal interactions with work-- people who are suddenly friendly when they want something is the most extreme form.
Yeah, good luck legislating that out of existence. Look, the right response to sexism in the workplace is to treat people like human beings, not to start condemning them for acting like human beings.
409: And then he goes to the farmers market.
Look, sexual attractiveness is part of human behavior. People enjoy doing it, and sometimes use it to manipulate people. So fucking what.
Yup. Men and women both do it, and you can do it in a Mao jacket, if that's what's worn in your office, just as well as you can in a stretchy top that shows your nipples.
411: He leads a rich, full life.
410: Halford, if you don't stop being so reasonable, we're going to have to kick you out of here.
414: Come to think of it, Halford is banned!
I don't think clothes can be meaningfully separated from behavior.
T is a reasonable person-- it is possible to recognize deliberate false friendliness. The OP we're talking about doesn't give much behavior to go on, but the entitled tone she uses is pretty ugly. Of course, her lawsuit is the basis for unflattering comedy which publicized her, which is not going to paint her in the best light or to indicate how difficult her coworkers are, which is the other half of that story.
My take is that clothes, even hot macrame outfits, are not enough to send a "cut me some slack on this one, you big lug" signal, but the much more ambiguous shadings of eye contact and whatever else are easy to detect. Basically, I am willing to entertain a double standard: on the one hand, reasonable people can call it like they see it, which may include catty remarks about clothes, and on the other state senators from SC may not do so.
410. I'm not suggesting legislation, this is notionally like small talk in a bar.
but the entitled tone she uses is pretty ugly.
Taking her side of the story as true (and I'm sure Citibank has an entirely different version, but I don't know it yet) she got fired for looking overly attractive in fitted business suits and turtlenecks. I think that women, generally, are entitled not to get fired for stuff like that, and can't see what's ugly about feeling that way.
I'd still like to hear how "dressing professionally" is not just as contrived and manipulative as "deliberately slutty".
Also, if we want to take this thread to quadruple digits, someone could assert that they can't understand how people who call themselves feminists can pay any attention to frivolous things like clothes and shoes.
Wear clothes. Mostly pants. Not too many.
418: Is there an argument here that choosing one's clothes should be spontaneous and unconsidered?
381: I'm finding your questions quite helpful in clarifying my thinking, so pick away! Availability meaning she's not taken by another man. The standard patriarchal bullshit.
382: It's quite possible to have a preferred solution that simply will never happen. The political desires of a bunch of commenters here, for example. I don't know what the best practically achievable solution is.
403: If you think I'm claiming my perceptions are de-facto mind reading you have misread me. I've tried to be very clear that I'm talking about a disjunction between signal sent and signal received. There's also a difference between visceral response and considered intellectual response that I've left out in the interest of brevity. I'd assumed that in this forum ascribing a response to one's viscera is understood to imply that it is in addition to an intellectual one.
417.
I agree that being fired for your looks is unacceptable. I'd like to reiterate that I do not think that clothes and behavior can be meaningfully separated, and this quote is behavior:
Between that and the gold lame blouse photo, I did not get a great feeling. Again, I'm less interested in attacking some saleswoman being mocked in the press than I am in generational conflict about decency-- tongue piercings and neck tattoos seem like corner cases to me. I just watched the Mad Men where Sal has a relevant problem this week, and of course Joan.
Availability meaning she's not taken by another man. The standard patriarchal bullshit.
That doesn't get me any further. "Not taken" is the sort of thing that you might know about a co-worker however she dressed. And I don't think you'd evaluate the banker's outfits differently if she were wearing a big flashy diamond and a wedding ring with them, would you?
Wear clothes. Mostly pants. Not too many.
417: I have, on a few occasions, encountered incompetent female employees who dressed sexily and behaved flirtatiously and who might be suspected of relying on behaviors that served them well in social situations instead of improving their job skills. One possibility for Citibank's side of the story is that that's what was going on here, that she'd been counseled on workplace-inappropriate dress/behavior combinations among other sins, and that her lawyer is running with an advocate's version of those counseling sessions. I don't know if that's anything like how togolosh and lw are reading it, but it's generally consistent with their comments.
428: Oh, something like that is certainly plausible. But that's very little about the clothes alone, if that's Citibank's version.
...that they can't understand how people who call themselves feminists leftists can pay any attention to frivolous things like clothes and shoes.
Insert poster from Cultural Revolution here, with noble revolutionary in unisex uniform. Couldn't find a good one.
Rather talk about Hughes.
I've tried to be very clear that I'm talking about a disjunction between signal sent and signal received.
But you're also saying that it's the signal received that should govern women's dress, notwithstanding that the signal received is a function of all kinds of patriarchal bullshit.
429: Yes. Amazingly, it's completely possible for someone to both dress sexily and improve their job skills.
429.last: Agreed, but all we have is her and her lawyer's word that it was about the clothes.
432: Has someone argued that it's not?
432: Absolutely. But it's a big old world, and in it are a few people who do dress sexily and do not improve their job skills.
Based on the last few comments, though, togolosh is saying something different.
418. It is-- I had a friend who had one set of suits (nice ones) for cases in the city, and another set (less nice) for cases before rural juries.
Just as his (correct and unflattering) assumptions were reflected in his wardrobe but couldn't be stated openly to his intended audience, so the unflattering assumptions about guys who think with their viscera can be reflected in a woman's clothes.
But reading too much into the clothes is a mistake, unless you're talking to this guy
Regarding the banker's outfit and a big ring, the traditional "no thanks" signal is to mention the spouse after receiving a personal remark. Behavior means more than clothes, you don't evaluate an outfit, you evaluate a person.
In fairness, 432 doesn't hold true for Antartic exploration or bike racing. It probably does hold true for retail banking.
Oh, damnit, another unfunny joke ruined even more by bad spelling.
Reading between the lines, as it were, I will make the bold prediction that it will be argued that Her Hottness was in fact not all that good at her job, and is quite miffed that Her Hottness cannot continue to trade on her looks. This is the private sector, and they expect results!
Also, IME, the socially skilled but incompetent man is WAY more common in the workplace than the hot but incompetent woman. Hot and competent women, on the other hand, are all over the place.
(Admittedly, perhaps this is because hottness inflation has devalued the market rate for hottness of women in my particular city/general area of practice, but still).
441.1 is very much my experience as well. The people I was thinking of in 428 were all low-level employees and more pathetic than anything else.
this is because hottness inflation has devalued the market rate for hottness of women in my particular city/general area of practice
Reverse Polish hottness?
439: Why don't they freeze to the ladder?
426: OK, let me try again. Two things: First, knowing someone is not taken is different from knowing that they want people to believe they are not taken. The former is just a fact about their status, the latter a fact about their state of mind. Second, wedding band plus signal of availability means availability subject to hiding from her husband. Or that she's in an open marriage.
I feel like I'm accusing this woman of being someone quite horrible, but that's not my intention - I'm interested in the way signals get crossed. She's just what brought it up, and I'd prefer to think that she's merely a little unclear about the range of possible interpretations of her garb.
431: If it's a matter of dealing with the public then absolutely yes. If not, not. And the signal received is the essence of having a clothing standard in the first place. I may intend to send signals that I'm a dysfunctional pervert, but if the message received is that I'm a serious scientist to cerebral for pants, I have to take that into account when I go out.
Also 425.1 is correct. I am talking about clothing alone when it's really a matter of clothing plus behavior. And behavior depends on the behavior of people around you, so you could quite easily have the same person in the same clothes be problematic in with set of cow-orkers and not in another. Mao jackets really are the best solution.
I just watched "Human Nature". What a weird movie! But clearly, the correct solution is for all humans to stop wearing clothes at all.
444: Sheer hottness, of course.
446.2 gets it exactly right. Too bad for you excessive latitude types.
At the Korean bathhouse I go to, the [patrons? clients? customers?] are all nakey but the staff ladies wear matching black lace underwear and bras. Work clothes can look different! I kind of love this detail about the place. Also I am very curious about what the employees wear in the men's bath.
Update to 275: Ms. Smokinhott did not get a job offer.
450. Did you buy her a drink to console her?
Second, wedding band plus signal of availability means availability subject to hiding from her husband.
So, 'not taken' really doesn't sound like what you're talking about. 'I might fuck you' sounds like what you're talking about. And sending signals like that really isn't about the clothes -- clothes can help, but it's not just clothes.
"I might fuck you" signals are perhaps best sent without any clothes on at all.
No offense -- really -- but if there's anything to 445 beyond "don't make yourself sexy or flirtatious, even in work clothes, or people won't tale you seriously" I'm not getting it.
the socially skilled but incompetent man is WAY more common in the workplace than the hot but incompetent woman
Probably true, especially if it's a fairly intense field. It's kind of a hard slog getting ahead in something through networking and glad-handing alone (though I'd say not hard enough of one). If you're socially-skilled but work-incompetent, it's probably best to find a way out of the job, and women currently have better routes toward that than men.
Plus, there's definitely a strong element of the good ol' boy network being fine with elevating mediocre buddies, while gorgeous women are to be employed but never advanced.
455, cont.: I'd say the bigger problem in general is just the sheer lack of actual competent people, good-looking or no.
(And I'd also say that men in tailored suits and tight shirts are totally sluts, with N = 2-3?)
If I can reconstruct what I think Tologosh is saying, the argument goes like:
(1) Clothes like that might be interpreted by a reasonable man as being actually intended by the wearer to convey that "There's a substantial chance that I'd be willing to fuck you."
(2) Conveying that message in the workplace is uncomfortable and disruptive to workplace morale.
(3) Even if the wearer of the clothes doesn't intend to send the disruptive message, she is showing poor judgment because she should know that reasonable people will receive the disruptive message.
(4) Therefore she should wear a Mao jacket.
I think the argument breaks down on the first point -- given that she's wearing the same clothes all day, and didn't put them on specifically to talk to any given reasonable man, if he thinks they mean anything about the likelihood that she's 'sexually available' to him, he's just lost his status as reasonable. Also, I don't believe that many men are likely to believe, reasonably or not, that they're actually likely to get laid because they can see the outline of a co-worker's or saleswoman's nipple.
I suppose it depends what one wears under the Mao jacket
http://sofiedieu.jimdo.com/s/cc_images/cache_1217367708.jpg
Or under the People's Liberation Army Uniform:
http://scrapetv.com/News/News%20Pages/Everyone%20Else/images-5/North-Korea-Army-Babes.jpg
457 -- I guess that makes a little more sense, but
(1) is clearly wrong, unless the person in question is literally wearing nothing but crotchless panties.
(2) is also wrong. Less seriously, how does Toggers think movies ever get made? More seriously, workplaces can function just fine with a little bit of sexual tension.
(3) is also wrong, not to mention victim-blaming. What's the poor judgment? How is the woman in question supposed to be responsible for the wide range of weird male responses.
(4) Even granting (1-3) why is the response the Mao jacket, rather than telling the men to put their boners on ice?
It's kind of a hard slog getting ahead in something through networking and glad-handing alone
Sales, baby. Lead generation is the most important thing in any business. There is always someone who can write up the ticket, but without customers, who cares?
Sales, baby.
Oh geez, yeah. No doubt. The ultimate luxury is when you hit the place in an industry niche where customers come to you, but sales people are crucial until then.
No idea how they do it, either. I mean, all that chasing and chasing and chasing for one big win that so rarely happens. Ai! It's exhausting and a little depressing for me to even talk to our sales people, let alone go out on a call with them. Not my personality type at all.
Mao jackets are suh-weet.
Hell yeah. My dad had this Mao-jacket-looking thing from back when he worked at Arco in '80s, so it had this logo on it. I totally ganked it and wore it throughout college. Not the warmest thing in the world but well worth the cold to get to walk around looking like some petro-commie.
You know, BP owns ARCO, you heartless bastard.
I'm talking about a disjunction between signal sent and signal received.
If only they used error-correcting codes clothes.
OT question: what's a normal temperature for the AC to be set at? Like 78?
466: You're a better woman than I. I'd probably set the AC at 70 or 72.
78, except most university buildings, which are cooled to 60 in the summer and heated to 80 in the winter.
well, I have a fever, and I don't want my roommate to be mad. (she wouldn't be mad. She'd just be hot) . anyway I've been turning it up all day (meaning, turning the temperature up) and now I can't tell if I've gone way past where normal bounds are.
We tend to fluctuate between 75 and 78. I offset my guilt by resisting turning on the heat in the winter until I'm like two sweaters in.
466:There is no normal. How...normative.
We have managed to reduce our Kwh around 50% from last year, incidentally.
Interesting whether the Mao-jacket is meant to attack gender distinctions or conspicuous consumption and status competition via appearance. Also interesting how the abject slaves of identity politics would approach the question.
I suppose the answer from the identity crowd that saying women shouldn't need to spend $1000 to "look nice" in a work outfit is misogyny.
and 468 last is so terribly, infuriatingly true.
My personal introduction to sexual harassment and a hostile workplace came in the summer of 1990 (although, I am ashamed to say, I recognized it as neither until about a year later in the time of Anita Hill). I was an intern at CNN and there was a creepy old (still older than I am now, I am sure!) producer who would follow me around all day and complain to my boss that what I was wearing was inappropriate and provocative. This impacted my work. More than once I had to stay in the office rather than go on assignment because of my "inappropriate attire."
I was wearing cotton plaid dresses from Britches (to the unfamiliar think Talbots). He would make sure that I knew that he knew the name of my entirely obscure hometown, just to tweek me. Once, when I was writing up a story over in the newsroom (because everyone didn't have their own computer and one just had to find a free one), he stood over me and complained about my clothes and complained about my being there and then proceeded to open salt packets and dump them down my shirt. CNN anchor David Fr/e/nch intervened and told me I'd better scram.
Dude was just an old pervert and I was dressed both nicely and way more conservatively than I would ever dress otherwise. Oh, and, when my internship was over he offered to get me a job "anywhere I wanted." Creepy old perv.
Togolosh is willing to further explore and refine the first portion of his expansion at 376:
I'm using "deliberately slutty" to mean something like "intended to unambiguously signal sexual availability and a desire to sexualize the context of ones' interactions"
while i wouldn't be, in part because it invites a reading like LB's in 457(1), and this does strike me as plainly false.
I would stand by the second portion of Togolosh's statement: while downright "slutty" may be a little strong, dressing sexy in an environment which is explicitly non-sexual in purpose does, it seems to me, sexualize interactions. It's a distraction; I've certainly found myself slightly annoyed while working with a banking representative who was dressed in what seemed to me to be an oddly and unnecessarily provocative fashion.
Whether this sexy dressing is intentional on a given woman's part differs from case to case. I tend to think that many, if not most, women know perfectly well how an outfit is coming across. But hey, maybe not.
Should the hott Citibank employee have been fired solely for dressing as she did? Of course not; those outfits (though not the pink blouse) aren't egregious.
I usually go with 75. Still very comfortable in pants and a t-shirt, even if you come in from a run or something. If the temperature creeps up to 78-80, I tend to start feeling pretty warm just sitting around the house.
If your place has decent insulation and not too much super-direct sunlight, it shouldn't be bad on the electricity bills either.
473: Whoa. That's fucked up. How had that guy managed to keep his job? I imagine you weren't the only person he'd pulled that kind of stuff on.
Oops. Forgot to capitalize an "i" there. I'd initially typed that one-handed! 'cause I've been on hold for ... 43 minutes. Now I think I've had enough of listening to this muzak-cum-cheery-informational-bulletins loop. This is just going to have to wait until the morning. I can't take it any more.
These things are all about affect and behaviour, no? I can think of inappropriately sexualised encounters with work colleagues, or sales people, or students, or people in sports classes, but in almost all of those cases the 'offending' thing has been behaviour -- too much direct eye contact, standing too close, touching, etc. -- rather than outfits. Choice of outfit can contribute [in either direction] but it's quite quickly trumped by behaviour [again, in either direction].
How had that guy managed to keep his job?
I don't know about that guy in specific, but there's definitely a class of guy like that who will pick their targets quite skillfully on the basis of who's unlikely to have the knowledge and wherewithal to fight back. Young intern sounds about right.
I had a Westlaw rep (i.e., salesperson who sells Westlaw to law firms) comment on my shirt by touching it, giving a guttaral growl, and saying "me likey!" She was also wearing thigh-high boots. That seemed like a somewhat unnecessarily sexualized interaction.
I'd initially typed that one-handed!
This is what happens when an environment is overly sexualized.
Out of an abundance of cautian -- and an abiding respect for my bursting, unavoidable sexuality -- I only wear burlap sacks to work. I mean, when I have a job.
I'm only human, though, so I guess they are pretty low-cut burlap sacks.
476/79: Yes to Blume, plus, to play the old fogey card for a moment, things really were different then. I am not making a joke when I say that the Anita Hill hearings changed a lot. Running around grabbing tits had already gone out of favor, but weird, creepy over-focused attention was still in a nebulous zone. There was a security guard (whee!) at my college who pulled a similar routine (not the hateful scolding, etc. like the awful producer [seriously, my stories about that guy could go on and on]), where he would make sure that I understood he knew the name of my hometown, and who introduced himself to my mother while making it clear he already knew her first name. Gross.
This is what happens when an environment is overly sexualized.
Is it okay if I confess that I was snickering (silently, of course! since I was writing an earnest comment) while I was doing it?
482: Oh please, we all know you're just trying to catch the eye of that Christian Ascetic VP. Those 13th century monks are detail oriented, no doubt, and no one better to put in charge if you want millions of lines of code meticulously reproduced. Still, it just leads to a whole office of sackcloth and hairshirts, and we all know how most programmers look in mesh!
So, on the nipple question, I have to ask: assuming we can put to one side the broader question whether women should or shouldn't be expected to modify their choice of apparel in accordance with the responses of the audience:
Ladies, if you were working in an office in which, after a few days, it became clear that the AC was set in such a way that you were experiencing high beams basically all day long, what would you do? Would you carry on with your selected outfits despite the fact that you were presenting every person with whom you came in contact -- members of the public, fellow staff members -- with high beams, like at all times?
One of the photos of the hott Citibank employee shows us nipple through her shirt, and of course that happens from time to time. But if it were a constant?
Fuck it. I had a detailed and thoughtful (not to mention utterly compelling) response to 457 and 460, but it got clobbered on refresh.
Summary:
It's not about reasonableness, it's about being aware of irrational responses, and that awareness is the responsibility of the person setting the dress code, not the people trying to comply with it.
The boundaries of professional attire are arbitrary and drawing them conservatively isn't a big deal, while drawing them liberally potentially causes trouble.
I'd draw the limits of professional attire for a bank such that habitually showing nipple through ones' shirt was deprecated, but I wouldn't fire anyone over it.
If the facts of the woman's case are as she claims, she should win her suit.
486: A padded bra should suffice to keep the high beams inconspicuous. Not even all that much padding is required, in fact.
What is this blog coming to? I was on the phone for an hour and I come back to a single response to 486? Not that there's anything wrong with Bonsaisue's response.
What is this blog coming to? I was on the phone for an hour and I come back to a single response to 486?
I have no idea how that could have happened.
So, on the nipple question
Well, I have to ask: is this even a question? I mean, unless your name is Bambi* and you're working as a hostess at a strip club, that's just not an appropriate look for the workplace.
Yes, I'm being classist (because dress codes are class-based, of course, and disciplinary tools of the capitalist oppressors and so on and so forth). And come the revolution, we can all run around naked if we please, while we hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, and criticize after dinner, and etc. But in the meanwhile, there are dress codes, and for men no less than for women (why do white-collar men have to wear ties to work, after all?).
And in the meanwhile, also, given pre-revolutionary gender relations (but after the revolution, we can all just let it all hang loose, naturally), I just don't see the percentage in actively encouraging still more pornification of female employees, under the dubious banner of "self-expression" or increased freedom. Not that dress codes tend toward anyone's self-actualization, of course (see reference to capitalist oppressors, above), but, you know, let's not lie and pretend that women conforming to an ideal (once edgy, now all too mainstream) dreamed up by Hugh Hefner represents some new advance in female emancipation.
*Probably not your real name.
488: I have not actually read the thread, but this is not true for everyone. One of my friends has spent hundreds of dollars and way too much brain energy trying to find bras that wrangle her (apparently steel plated) nipples into submission, and still fails at it. I know she's not alone.
Hugh Hefner dreamed up nipples?
I didn't give the guy enough credit.
My apologies for generalizing. Let's just pretend my comment contained the qualifier "in my experience."
MC says scary transgressive things. Thanks, MC.
She should get some of those rubber grip enhancers that someone (who? Was it ogged?) here thought they invented, and punch some silver dollar sized circles out. That'll keep those nipples from advertising. Sew them
in somehow (the rubber disks).
Wasn't it just the other day that parsimon was wondering why young feminists get impatient with their older counterparts?
Just sayin'.
495: yeah, that's super fucking daring to say that -- contrary to conventional wisdom -- women should actually be going out of their way to cover themselves lest they accidentally cause a work boner for some poor unexpecting dude.
The thing that I think these women with nipples don't realize is that having nipples is a problem, and when you have a problem you take action to fix it, lest you impose that problem on others.
That's why I duct tape my nuts down every morning; people might get uncomfortable.
Visible nipples just happen. And frankly, they happen to men MORE than women, since most women have been scared into buying IPEX bras (or whatever that Victoria's Secret one is, the one that has special nipple pads) and men are still relying on the thin undershirt. There will be no equality until we all are wearing pasties!
So if you were working in a place in which you had high beams all the time, and were working with the general public in a highly professional capacity, you'd proceed in wearing tops which allowed this to be obvious?
Because if you do, you're totally asking for it.
It'd be cool if you answered the question, Blume, rather than jumping to conclusions about what I mean in asking it.
I had cheap bras when I moved to NYC and got a job wearing a tight T-shirt every day at a fancy spa. Every day, I'd come to work and be told that my breasts were a problem. It was partially because I have nipples, and partially because I was the only front-desk employee over the age of 20. It was kind of awful. Nipples exist, and breasts happen. Everyone knows this.
I like when people help me figure out what's cool. If I don't know what's cool, I'm just another schlub with duct-taped nuts in a burlap sack, wondering why all these women are having breasts at me all the time.
500: I'm fairly sure I would be completely oblivious to this situation, unless someone pointed it out, in which case I'm fairly sure the interaction would be such that I'd be humiliated. And then I'd carry on with what I was doing anyway, but be embarrassed about it. I control my tops for many things - how low cut they are, what happens when I move, etc. I don't need one more restriction.
I'm not jumping to conclusions, but rather pointing out the direction that the line of questioning leads.
But to answer the question: I really don't know what situation you're talking about. The one in which I am ultra aware of my nipples all the time? I mean, if it's chilly in my workplace I'd probably bring a cardigan. But that has nothing to do with nipples.
In my case, 500, it was a uniform. They didn't have any loose-fitting, well-constructed T-shirts for me to wear. They also thought it was criminal that I didn't wear enough makeup. I was 23, and had perfect skin, but without makeup, I was gross. I told them if they wanted me to wear makeup and padded underwear, they should give them to me. They gave me the makeup and waited for me to start grad school.
507: I was wondering how far the analogy "high beams" went: like, if you were showing your nipples when it was inappropriate, would other women flash their nipples at you to point it out to you?
[B]reasts happen.
Often, right next to one another.
(This is also a good opportunity for someone to refer to the "titty everywhere" scene in Harry Crews' Scar Lover.)
For fuck's sake, Tweety. You're talking to a woman who doesn't wear a bra 90% of the time. But who would not expect that to be appropriate in many professional work environments.
I'm done.
511: I heard there's a gang initiation where they shoot at women who flash their nipples at them.
Me? I'm just riffin'. I never wear a bra.
If it seems that I didn't answer the question (not addressing what kind of tops I would wear), that was on purpose. Short of wearing really thick fabrics all the time, I'm not sure what one could wear that would absolutely guarantee no visible nipple ever.
514: I've heard when it's foggy you don't want to use your regular nipples, and should instead turn on your fog nipples if you have them.
A student told me yesterday that I look "a lot older" than I am. That was also awesome. "Maybe it's the stress. Teaching must be really stressful for you to look that old at 30."
But who would not expect that to be appropriate in many professional work environments.
Perhaps then the question should be why women are required to wear bras in most professional work environments.
I don't get it. You were offended that I made a joke about the sullen and patronizing tone of your response to Blume? Or you're mad that I duct tape my nuts? Believe me, you don't want to see them free and easy.
Just sayin'.
Just saying what, if you don't mind my asking?
Would you wear a low-cut, nipple-revealing blouse to an interview for an academic position, say? (honestly, now). Well, I don't know what you would do, of course, but I suspect that you would not. The norms are in place, and they are obviously not of your own making, and they are of course weighted down with all sorts of objectionable anti-woman or misogynist meaning. But that doesn't mean that any alternative or opposition to said norms is automatically feminist or woman-friendly, either. There's more than one way to skin a cat, and there are more than a few ways to be anti-woman. I highly suspect you would not wear such a blouse to an academic interview: so, you know, why argue for working-class women bearing the brunt of the new (and fabulously profit-making, btw) form of the exploitation of women (which includes a measure of self-exploitation, of course, but then, exploitation always has, and always did).
Also: young or old or middle-aged, any feminist voice is worth listening to or not to on its merits, or lack thereof: you're still here until you've been buried six feet under.
any feminist voice is worth listening to or not to on its merits, or lack thereof
Cogent and incisive.
522: I got my current position at Religious Women's College, where there is a strictly modest dress code (nothing showing above the elbows or knees, or below the neck) with an outfit of pants and a quite low-cut top. I did not realize it was that low-cut, though now I'm aware of it, when a colleague told me that was part of why they hired me. I wasn't trying to kiss up and pretend I was one of their religious community, and I wasn't going to soft-pedal everything for their students. I'm not saying I'd show up to an interview with the intent to sell sexuality, but I do think there's something valuable in being yourself, rather than the most uptight sexist bullshit imaginable.
Wait a minute. "Nipple revealing" does not mean "I am wearing a Gaultier bandage to my interview." Women's anatomy is such that any number of unarguably "professionally appropriate" pieces of clothing -- say anything made of jersey, for example, or anything worn over a non-padded bra -- can become "nipple revealing" and policing this extravagantly leaves only burlap and burqas.
2nd wave feminism:Equal pay for equal work, choice, less sexual exploitation
3rd wave impatient suicide wives:I have a fucking basic human right to flash my nipples, and I am impatient with with the ancient boring priorities.
Yeah, Blume you deserve what this will get ya.
You're a really terrific troll sometimes, bob.
The assumptions that one is arguing in favor of voluntary pornification, or arguing that the right not to worry about nipple outlines showing is somehow related to a realm of 'choice feminism' that deems all sorts of dubious things to be 'self expression': these assumptions get tiresome.
It must feel nice to really feel like you're good at something. I know I like that feeling.
526: Fuck you, Bob.
2nd wave feminism: Unless you submit to our totally conflicting litmus tests for feminism, you are a collaborationist.
3rd wave feminism: There are things about masculinity that we want, and things about femininity that we honor, and those negotiations are very personal decisions.
Bob, why don't you explain to us the deep feminist implications of Charlotte Gainsbourg hacking off her clit with rusty pliers. You know, we need schooling.
525: Exactly. Which is why I didn't even address the questions in 522 about what I'd wear to an interview.
so, you know, why argue for working-class women bearing the brunt of the new (and fabulously profit-making, btw) form of the exploitation of women
I genuinely lost track of the twist in this argument where anyone was arguing for working-class women bearing the brunt of a new form of exploitation. What's the new form of exploitation, and why is it being foisted on working class women?
I'm not saying I'd show up to an interview with the intent to sell sexuality, but I do think there's something valuable in being yourself, rather than the most uptight sexist bullshit imaginable.
Oh, of course. And I totally agree with you. But, you know, either strictly burka-clad or else half-nakedly babelicious is one of those false dichotomies without which we could not comment on blogs within the internets.
526 is one of those instances where bob hits it out of the park, perhaps without meaning to.
And 535.3 is one of those instances where someone reveals way more than they probably meant to.
3rd wave impatient suicide wives:I have a fucking basic human right to flash my nipples, and I am impatient with with the ancient boring priorities.
Seriously, MC? Blume killing herself after Sifu drives her to it is "out of the park" to you?
526 is one of those instances where bob hits it out of the park, perhaps without meaning to.
The last 40 or so comments make a lot more sense now that I know MC is just here to troll.
the most uptight sexist bullshit imaginable being padding my bra with pieces of cloth so that no one might see my nipples if there's a breeze or too much A/C.
A student I had a few years ago at non-religious public college said one of her other profs, openly mocked students for wearing regular college-type clothing because they clearly hated women, with their T-shirts and occasionally visible bra straps and such. This is feminism? I'm not buying it.
531:Oh, really? A request?
There was a Dane in the IMDB boards that spent 4 long posts using numerology to prove the LvT's point was:
The Mark of the Beast
=
Female and Male circumcision.
Apparently the Danes are fanatics about not cutting males.
Remember that Mummy consistently put the boy's shoes on the wrong feet? This guy says that mothers consistently abuse their boy babies.
...
On another level, Gainsbourg, in the throes of desire, watched her child step out the window. To the extent she was capable, she made a choice. Rationality couldn't touch her after that.
You have gotten me started.
I have to say I'm a little tired of the generalizations about 2nd wave feminists. But I guess we've got it coming, because we took all the good jobs, and now that we've got ours we're gonna hold you back, because we hate you for your freedom! Haha! Suck it, punks!
Also we're NEVER going to retire!!! NEVER!!!
Although I agree with 530-1.
537:Fuck off, I obviously did not want to call Blume a "Suicide Girl"
So maybe those in favor of zealously guarding against any hint of the existence of nipples can explain why it's OK for clothes to reveal the shape of breasts or an ass but not nipples? What if some people are more turned on by the sight of a flat stomach? Do we need to require people to pad those too?
Sweet baby Jesus. By nipple-revealing we're meaning that they're standing to attention, right? Dude, that can happen in high-necked wool sweater. It can happen when I'm otherwise overheated. I don't feel an obligation to ensure that I wear heavy blazers or multiple layers if the clothing is otherwise modest, though of course as an adult I do from time to time adjust my wardrobe to project the right kind of image, or if it's particularly chilly. But I have far better things to do with my time than duct tape my breasts, and that's what it would take.
I'm not sure what this has to do with the working class or second wave feminism but I swear to God if someone under thirty mentioned that they wear socks on occasion we'd have a bunch of people tut-tutting about how back in their day they would never do such a thing and these young girls these days how they wear those socks that rise above the ankle. Do they do that? Hmm. I wouldn't know. Are socks the sorts of things that are done? Strange.
That's why I duct tape my nuts down every morning
If only I'd done that yesterday, maybe last night's soccer game wouldn't have been quite so painful.
these young girls these days how they wear those socks that rise above the ankle. Do they do that? Hmm. I wouldn't know. Are socks the sorts of things that are done? Strange.
This is epic.
If 541 is at all a response to 539.last, I should say that I'm about the same age as this prof; she's just an evil person who hates young women's bodies and having to look at them, because they are inherently sexist.
Dude, that can happen in high-necked wool sweater. It can happen when I'm otherwise overheated. I don't feel an obligation to ensure that I wear heavy blazers or multiple layers if the clothing is otherwise modest, though of course as an adult I do from time to time adjust my wardrobe to project the right kind of image, or if it's particularly chilly. But I have far better things to do with my time than duct tape my breasts, and that's what it would take.
For about the first time in my life, I am safe from visible nipples. This is because I am wearing THICK WOOLEN BREAST COVERINGS every day, on account of breastfeeding + being a wool-loving hippie. Normally, I am pretty much guaranteed to nipple as described above.
those in favor of zealously guarding against any hint of the existence of nipples
Buh. Who is in favor of that? The only person here who has conceivably argued for guarding against any hint of the existence of nipples, is, maybe, Togolosh, and I doubt he meant that either. The scenario I sketched in 486 specified high beams at all times, acknowledging that obviously nipples do show from time to time, which is only natural. Everything since then has somehow assumed this meant that any and all showing of nipple should be verboten. I specifically said that that was not the case. No burkas are called for. Breasts are not bad or to be hidden.
Now I really have to go to bed.
But I guess we've got it coming, because we took all the good jobs, and now that we've got ours we're gonna hold you back, because we hate you for your freedom! Haha! Suck it, punks!
Oh yeah? Well we're going to get our revenge by making sure that Ke$ha is never out of the top ten ever again!
551: Who has high beams at all times? Are you suggesting that people with visible nipples have rubber bands around them or something? How is it not environmental?
It's possible I don't know how other people's breasts work. If I didn't wear a bra, the problem would be jiggling, not nipple-visibility. But yeah, I can't be made to care about whether I can see someone's vague nipple outline. If I can, and I care, it's because I'm perving on them, not because they're obviously a slut hoping to capitalize on it.
So, how about the shelves that stay horizontal when you fold down the bed?
Dear God, you're all nuts.
I only meant that I thought that bob had captured something interesting about the difference in priorities between the second and third waves (obviously, he's not helping me much with his 540, but that's how he rolls). I never meant to call for the death of Blume, fer fuck's sake, much less at the hand of Sifu (are youse all bat-fucking crazy, or just what, eh?).
Seriously, MC? Blume killing herself after Sifu drives her to it is "out of the park" to you?
Er, no. I'm sorry, but that's just not a serious scenario to me. Where's this coming from, oud?
552: Put your hands up! Put your hands up! (But not, you know, in such a way that might reveal your navel.)
So, how about the shelves that stay horizontal when you fold down the bed?
If only that engineering genius could be designed to construct clothes with hidden nipple-hiding layers that can be deployed when necessary.
Er, no. I'm sorry, but that's just not a serious scenario to me. Where's this coming from, oud?
So let's unpack the thing where (after referring to her as a "suicide wife" which -- sorry bob! -- only meant that she was a whore and a trollop who sold her body in the name of empowerment, as it turned out) he said that she deserved what was coming to her.
Whaddya figure that was about?
This thread is going to make me care about whether I have erect nipples from moment to moment, isn't it? It's fucking summer. There is A/C. I shouldn't have to wear a lot of clothing.
On the subway today I was already paranoid about wearing a low-cut T to even out some unfortunate tan lines because the vibration made my tits jiggle--even with a bra! I am such a fucking slut.
From way up in the link in 277:
Asked to clarify, he said he did not mean the United States was at war with India, but was at war with "foreign countries."
Isn't this actually progress? He admitted that the Civil War is finally over.
AWB, you dirty dirty slut? You wanna make out with me in the corner to titillate some boys?
to even out some unfortunate tan lines
This summer, I must remember to get haircuts before I spend much time in the un.
Or in the 'sun.' Whichever has the tanning rays.
You didn't tell us you were working there, Moby! Translator?
Continuing Anti Christ
G also says the same at the birth of her son that she screams at Dafoe as he is trying to escape her torture:"You're leaving me. You bastard." She also says here toddler was always trying to get away from her, which may be why she put the shoes on backwards.
Not only is the adam-and-eve symbolism (G always, always initiates the sex) obvious, but birth imagery is ubiquitous. When G smashes D's nuts with the board, from our viewpoint it looks like she is cutting an umbilical cord. D crawls into the foxhole(womb), and G digs him hum out. The sillbirth fawn. etc.
...
"Nature is Satan's Church." "Chaos Reigns"
...
On a banal level, it was rational (useless) man vs batural (chaotic) woman. By getting Dafoe to strangle her, G proved that Chaos reigns and was released from guilt and desire. Was it gynocide or an act of
mercy? Look at Dafoe's face. A tool.
LvT is a radically lapsed Catholic who keeps Nietzsche's Antichrist on his bedside table. Probably a seriously fucked up misanthrope/misogynist, but interesting and fun.
Dammit! Pwned by my own impatient suicide wife.
565: Translator? I don't even know 'er.
Blume killing herself after Sifu drives her to it
Okay, pet peeve time: it should be "after Tweety drives her to it". "Sifu" is a title.
571: I think the horse left the dojo on that one a few years ago.
How far back do I have to read before 567 makes sense?
573: the answer is NP-complete.
561: I have no other reason to do so and yet it is so titillating! We should share blowjob tips sometime.
573: You'd probably have to go all the way back to The Idiots, but man, what a masochist's quest that would be. Just read LvT's wikipedia page and call it a night.
So anyway the Dangerous Ponies were super-duper fun and awesome. What are you guys talking about? [catches up] Oh.
What are you guys talking about?
Duct tape!
578: Oh, that guy. Yes, I'm not seeing his movies. I don't like even regular levels of violent or creepy in my movies.
And titillating! Everybody knows how you titillate an ocelot?
582: stick a finger in its ass!
581: Yeah, I remember I was out on a date with a guy and mentioned having recently gotten Dogville from Netflix. He sort of paused and said, "You don't have to watch it. You can just send it back if you want to." I can't decide whether I'm glad I didn't take the advice.
Everybody knows how you titillate an ocelot?
You oss it a lot?
549: No, not particularly a response to 539. I don't know why I bother to object to a stereotype that's so thoroughly embedded in the culture. To me it just seems like a new iteration of the common dislike for old women, onto whom a mean-spirited prudery always seems to get projected. Or maybe lots of middle-aged women in positions of authority do fall into the patriarchally approved role of sex cop, despite the best intentions of their younger selves. But I see lots of young women energetically policing each other, as well. I don't think it's peculiar to my age group. Oh, what am I even talking about? Blah, blah, blah.
We love you, mcmc. You're not like the others.
(No, really!)
586: I didn't even get through Kill Bill and that violence was probably much less realistic.
Oh yeah? Well we're going to get our revenge by making sure that Ke$ha is never out of the top ten ever again!
Lord, take me now! Please!!!!
The only LvT film I've seen is The Element of Crime (because it was playing on tv, sounded interesting, and was not an LvT film I've heard of). It's not bad, but also not outside of what I'd think of as in the category of regular films. Also, the X-Files totally ripped it off for the plot of an episode, though they didn't take the setting.
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Mythbusters (shut up) just used "honed in on" in a segment about rockets! Hah!
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and those negotiations are very personal decisions.
You're probably at least half-right about the second wave, AWB, but the problem with the third-wave emphasis on "personal decisions" is that it just gets co-opted into a bunch of libertarian claptrap about "choices" and is no sort of political (collective action-like) movement at all.
588: Well, I guess that's why I attach it to 2nd wavism rather than the age group. I know plenty of women my age who have some clear dichotomy in mind between the "right" kind of women and the "wrong" kind, and I hate them too. I know plenty of women in their 50's and 60's (and even 70's and 80's) who are totally aware that young women are making all kinds of choices that weren't available to them.
My own resentment comes from realizing, quite late in life, that it never occurred to me to try to think about what it would mean to have an intimate romantic relationship, and possibly children. I've been so fucking obsessed with not turning into my mother (college dropout, early unhappy marriage, house-slavery, kid-anxiety) that I never bothered to figure out if any little part of that was something I might want. I'm too busy being anxious about feeling "owned."
My students have far more complex relationships with these questions than I did at their age. They're trying to figure out who they are behind the masks of femininity and anti-femininity, and I respect them so much for it. I am in that transitional generation, I feel, and it's a weird and sometimes resentful place to be.
595: Yeah, I'm aware that "choice" is a big bugbear for the 2nd wave. I don't know what to say about it, other than that following a programmatic idea of what's "really" feminist isn't a choice, nor is blindly following mass culture, but perhaps the only thing one can do is have a mass culture more interested in real experimentation, trial and error, which sometimes includes things "we" might not like.
For all my rejections of servitude, I still ended up in way too many abusive and draining relationships, because I wanted sex. Not "I wanted to serve my feminine ego by being servile" but I actually have a libido, and one that never bothered to figure out how to create intimacies. Intimacies, I thought, were for co-dependent heterosexual losers. Yeah, I'm a bit angry at my history with radical feminism--not because it's wrong about what the world is, but because it robbed me of a really intense source of soothing, comfort, and pleasure that, culturally inscribed or not, is badly missed.
I've been so fucking obsessed with not turning into my mother (college dropout, early unhappy marriage, house-slavery, kid-anxiety) that I never bothered to figure out if any little part of that was something I might want.
That's sort of the story of my life; luckily when I did figure it out the answer was still no. (Except I don't want to die alone and be eaten by cats, but that's what co-op housing is for.)
You oscillate [sic] its tit a lot. But I suppose 584 would also work.
Anybody who keeps Nietzsche at his bedside is not really going to believe that "Nature is Satan's Church."
More like "Rationality and Socialization are Satan's Church"
Which is part of the point of Dogville
IOW, I think LvT is ironic.
I kinda hate Breaking the Waves but if you break it story down into "Submission to violent fatal rape is the ultimate form of feminine Christian Love." you should get a clue that LvT doesn't really mean it (especially when compared with Dogville) and is simply pushing disgusting tropes to their breaking point.
That anybody found BtW moving or convincing, except as an attack on misogyny, is scary.
All generations are in that transitional generation, if they're lucky.
I really appreciate 597, though I'm not sure how to respond to it.
I'm a bit angry at my history with radical feminism--not because it's wrong about what the world is, but because it robbed me of a really intense source of soothing, comfort, and pleasure that, culturally inscribed or not, is badly missed.
Yeah, I guess that's the problem with any progamme of radical demasking or demystification. That "the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; [and] the point is to change it" is more easily said than done, I guess. There's the actually existing world, radically critiqued; and then there's the fact that you still have to live within and make your way through that world, however flawed and imperfect. "The personal is political" was a brilliant slogan which insisted upon the recognition of an obvious series of connections that was flatly and wrongly denied at the time (late 60s and early 70s, I mean). It was important to make that point, and to do that work. But it's possible to get carried away with that point, I think, and I believe that some people did.
the point is to change it
Not in THAT outfit you're not!
Would you wear a low-cut, nipple-revealing blouse to an interview for an academic position, say? (honestly, now).
If the idea is that the blouse is actually cut lower than my nipples, then no, I would not.
fuck, this is like old times. after breast-feeding for four + years I have permanent high-beams. (the dear things even nommed the color off, which is hilarious). sometimes I wear bras that aren't heavily padded and someone can see the outline of my nipples. the shame!
588: I sympathize with this a lot -- I don't, IRL, see older women who identify as feminist acting as the sexuality police. And I identify as second-wavey more than third wave largely because the feminist stuff I read growing up was second wave stuff, and I'm not particularly up-to-date academically or activisty, and bits of what I understand as third-wave feminism seem unsympathetic to me (this is caricature, I'm sure, but the "Any choice a woman makes is a feminist choice" bit makes me cranky.)
What I understand as a second-wave approach to sexuality is that it's about self-ownership: that women should be required neither to display nor hide the fact that they're potentially sexual beings for the comfort or entertainment of the men around them. If I don't want to wear heels because they hurt my feet, the fact that the men around me would enjoy looking at my ass more if I wore heels doesn't have to control my decision making: it's my feet, and my ass. And if I want to wear fitted clothes because I like the way they make me look, I'm not responsible for secondguessing the chance that the men around me will be disturbed by my burgeoning sexuality -- they can manage their own responses to that.
Argh. I don't know that any of that responds to anything anyone specific said. I just wanted to stake out the position that "Stop freaking out about visible nipples" was a reasonably second-wavy feminist thing to say. As well as a third-wavy thing to say -- I'm not actually intending to disapprove of third wave feminism, it's just not where I identify.
(Except I don't want to die alone and be eaten by cats, but that's what co-op housing is for.)
If you die in a co-op house (coöp house?), they eat your body?
What we need to do is fabricate some steel tophats to deploy with our ROVs. We can inject heated seawater to keep the nipples from erecting.
610: the junk shot has proven itself ineffective thousands of times over.
To do:
Breakfast, cannibalism joke before 9:00, clean garage, grocery shopping.
I wonder if anyone's invented an electrically heated bra to keep one's nipples relaxed. The potential for such a thing going bad seems epic.
You could make it powered by slight pendulous sway and heat differential (more effective in cold rooms!).
The family was singing folk songs last night, and there was a giant book of songs that we were using to get lyrics out of, and there was a whole section on women's lib folk songs. Songs on Lucretia Mott and toils of mothering and I forget what else. It was awesome.
607: The very real content of that caricature (any choice etc) makes me cranky too. And that's a large part of why I get so angry at the kneejerk boilerplate of 491.3 or the repeated demands to know what I would do about visible nipples. ("Would you wear such a thing? Well, WOULD YOU?!!")
I get 'the personal is political', I really do. But I just can't bring myself to give a shit about certain things. And I also get the sorrow about "feminism" not being a movement that necessarily accomplishes much collective political action. But given the much broader array of concerns addressed by transectional feminisms, I can't see that as a loss only.
I was skimming the thread, and I originally read this,
566: Like Israel!
as a response to this,
Dammit! Pwned by my own impatient suicide wife.
and I thought "Damn, the in-jokes have now made this blog completely impenetrable."
620 NMM to Wisconsin in israel.gov.
And that's a large part of why I get so angry at the kneejerk boilerplate of 491.3 or the repeated demands to know what I would do about visible nipples. ("Would you wear such a thing? Well, WOULD YOU?!!")
There were no repeated demands, Blume, and nobody used ALLCAPs. Just to be clear. But I'm sorry I asked you directly, and I should have asked in a general way (without making it about you personally). My point was about social class, which is a much more taboo topic than sexuality.
My point was about social class
I could tell that, but I couldn't quite tease out what exactly the point about class was. It seemed like you were saying that impatience with those who would object to nipply silhouettes in the office was tantamount to requiring working-class women to dress in a demeaningly nipplish fashion. But that seems like I was misunderstanding you. If you wanted to summarize your point all in one go for me, I'd be grateful.
It seems like a lot of factors beside age decide whether people will identify as second or third wave feminists, but I'm not sure what they are. I think of people my age as part of the third wave, yet LB is younger than I am and identifies as second wave.
(I identify as third wave, but that's mostly because it was an open debate in the 70s whether men could even be feminists)
and this I still don't get. we're stipulatively ok with lower-class women having visible nipples while we upper-class types...what now? or we want upper-class women to have the freedom to wear what they want without realizing that something...imposed on lower-class women workers...something--what? seriously, I have zero comprehension of this critique. please spell it out a little more, MC? taboos be damned.
pwnd by rfts. but really, in a friendly spirit, would you spell it out?
I identify as third wave, but that's mostly because it was an open debate in the 70s whether men could even be feminists
1st wave myself, if I can't be a feminist at least I can be a socialist with Goldman and the Pankhursts.
or we want upper-class women to have the freedom to wear what they want without realizing that something...imposed on lower-class women workers...something--what?
Well, sort of...But more like: if it becomes part of the new norm of dress codes for female service sector and support staff employees to wear highly revealing clothing, it will only tend toward their further exploitation in the workplace. It won't affect professional class women (or not directly), because nipple-revealing blouses and etc are not going to become the dress code for professional women.
if it becomes part of the new norm of dress codes for female service sector and support staff employees to wear highly revealing clothing, it will only tend toward their further exploitation in the workplace.
Ah! But the thing that people were speaking in favor of was not a new norm of highly revealing clothing, but a recognition of the fact that a nipply effect is not so much highly revealing as a frequent natural outcome of wearing totally ordinary clothes.
So the argument goes something like:
1. Professional woman somewhere wears clothes that inadvertently allow someone to determine that she is in possession of nipples.
2. ?????
3. Lower-class women are all forced to dress like Hooters employees!
A little more detail in step 2 might be enlightening.
hm. I guess I don't really see it. I think the point people were trying to make above is that anything short of an extremely well-padded bra can allow nipple showage at some point, and it can hardly be mandatory to wear extremely well-padded bras at all times.
my husband would like to put in a vote for turtleneck sweaters+high beams=sexy, though.
Yeah, it looks like it's been a couple hundred comments of talking past one another.
I highly doubt any of the people on the this blog are talking about deliberately choosing to wear nipple-flashing shirts, or to argue for them as a new professional wear. Yet that seems to be the position that a couple people are arguing against. Or, rather, they're arguing that we should try to lean away from more revealing professional wear whenever possible.
Which, hell, I'm all on board for. There are some pants that I just never wear to work because I lean toward not letting anyone know which way I'm leaning.
Though just a touch of sexual tension in the office can be kind of great. It's like a third of our lives! Bring in some frisson!
People get sexually harassed at work no matter what they're wearing. Harassers have this amazing ability to turn anything they see you wear or any part of the body into perv material. If I am trying desperately to wear something to make some guy at work stop commenting on how he gets sexy thoughts every time he sees my x, y, or z, then I'm allowing the worst, most sexist men to control my life, and blaming myself for whatever happens to me.
If there's a slippery slope here, it's not that my nipple being visible through layers of fabric to someone whose eyes wander is going to magically make all women into whores; it's that women spend their whole lives trying to figure out how to get out of harassers/abusers ways, and h/a's just move right into that lane.
I doubt there's anything this woman could have worn to work to avoid getting shit from co-workers. Once they've decided she's the target of their harassment, she could show up in a body-length poncho and that would be sexxxy.
the nastiest cat-calling that ever happened to me was when I was wearing 1) buddy holly glasses 2) a 3/4 in buzz cut 3) a black turtleneck 4) a floor length laura ashley skirt 5) combat boots. it was at this point that I decided I might just as well wear booty shorts.
637: It's true. It's as if street harassers see you when you're dressed up and figure, eh, she already knows. But me when I'm wearing a T-shirt I slept in and haven't showered, on my way to the post office? That requires comment.
637: I was once wearing a Laura Ashley sundress (circa, um, 1988? Shit was covered up) and walking several yards ahead of my parents down a street in Annapolis, MD. Two guys walked past me and then said various obscene things about my (entirely covered up) tits and what they wanted to do with me just as they were directly in front my parents! Fun! But I was no doubt asking for it with my mid-calf hemline.
When strangers comment on my physical appearance, it's pretty much always to let me know about mustard stains.
"Bemustard'd" at least sounds classier than "beketchup'd".
Yeah, it looks like it's been a couple hundred comments of talking past one another.
What?! No, that could never happen, not on this blog.
643: I don't eat much ketchup at all. If it looks like ketchup and it is on my shirt, it's pasta sauce. (The basil doesn't usually stick to the shirt for very long.)
About a month ago, I was on the train looking pretty cute, with a nice outfit and my hair done, with bright lipstick. This adorable guy sitting across from me kept looking at me with interest and a little smile, but not staring. I was feeling pleased with myself. We stood to get off at the same stop, and he looks sideways at me, and puts a finger to his underlip, somewhat suggestively, and I'm all, whoa, awesome, and smile back. He says, "No, right here. Smudge," and points at his lip again. Apparently I had lipstick on my chin. "I have to do this for my mom," he says.
Sigh.
Sounds like Laura Ashley is the problem. Those dirty, dirty floral prints.
645: In ketchup news, I recently purchased a new product called Simply Heinz™, after spending several minutes comparing it to the regular Heinz to eventually figure out that it had sugar in lieu of corn syrup (it's the Pesach/Mexican Coke of ketchup, I guess). Googling just now, I learned that it was released along with another ketchup innovation: the Heinz dip and squeeze packet. Yep. Exciting times in the ketchup industry, these are.
What?! No, that could never happen, not on this blog.
Heh, good point. I resisted the urge to add an "(again)" to the end of that sentence.
In a hundred years there won't be men or women, just wankers.
Aren't men and women all already wankers? I thought that was part of third-wave along with the nipple shirts!
I really dislike padding in my bras. Those ubiquitous foam cups seem to be substituting for proper engineering and fit.
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So, it's Saturday, which means I have to take Newt to his 11:30 swimming class, and Sally to her noon basketball. And today, I needed to go buy new bike shorts, because I somehow lost the plastic bag with my horrible sweaty bike clothes in it out of my bag at the meetup. So I dropped Newt off a little early, and walked ten blocks with Sally to a Modells, that ended up not having any padded shorts. And then we walked back to the swimming place, and I dropped off Sally and went to get Newt.
And then I found five dollars. Really. It was in the hallway leading into the locker rooms.
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653: because I somehow lost the plastic bag with my horrible sweaty bike clothes in it out of my bag at the meetup.
Hmmm...
My point was about social class
Yeah, I got that, with the Marx-quoting and all.
Let me guess, Tweety's off huffing some bag he picked up in New York?
Let me attempt [note I'm not endorsing] a version of what I think MC is getting at. You can run an argument that invokes class along something like the following lines:
Working class women, and women in low status jobs are more likely to be subject to sexual harrassment, objectification, coercion to 'act sexy' or trade on their appearance/mode of dress in order to cater [consciously or unconsciously] to the titilation of their customers or co-workers. Having fairly conservative dress codes in the working environment helps those women, because it makes it harder for those who'd pressure them to 'dress sexy' or otherwise exploit/objectify them, because conservative clothing norms provide constraints within which everyone is presumed to act.
Women with higher-status aren't as likely to be subject to such pressure, so those conservative clothing norms may well infringe their choice to dress how they like, and reduce their ability to assess for themselves what might or might not be appropriate in a given work context. However, the argument might go, the norms aren't there for them -- they protect sales assistants and secretaries [in some small way] from some of the more pernicious sexualisation of the low-status that can happen in the work place, they aren't there to protect lawyers and executives. They don't need that protection.
But lower-class women are also subjected to more scrutiny and criticism of their dress for being too sexy. If you're wearing a really expensive dress with a navel-deep neckline, you're like Kate Beckinsale. If you're wearing a cheap outfit that shows some skin, you're a whore.
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653:It was an interesting question to me at 3 AM Thursday why Tilda Swinton, intense feminist, would participate in the fairly routine remake The Deep End of a decent 1948 noir The Reckless Moment
TDE was, in itself, a remarkable portrayal of the multitasking and intense responsibilities of the modern homeworker. For those who could compare, there was at least a change in priorities and a significant increase in bourgeois expectations, what Swinton vs Bennett was protecting, how much was invested.
The male lead (James Mason, in one of his first Hollywood roles) was also more prominent in the original than the remake (Goran Visnjic) and the romance (never very overt) more important. In the remake, the admiration of the conflicted scoundrel is at least as important as the compassion.
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re: 659
Sure, and I can see other problems with argument. I wouldn't really be confident that conservative clothing norms [to the extent that they really exist] act to protect the interests of lower-status individuals; and I'm not really sure, either, that middle-class or white-collar workers are under less sexist scrutiny, or subject to less pressure to be 'feminine'. Which I think might be part of what you are getting at.
But it's not obviously crazy that one might think that some norms might function differently for people in a social and economic position that affords them a fair degree of autonomy/agency from the way the function for those who lack the same.
In ketchup news, I recently purchased a new product called Simply Heinzâ„¢, after spending several minutes comparing it to the regular Heinz to eventually figure out that it had sugar in lieu of corn syrup
If one is interested in crazy natural ketchup, I genuinely recommend wholemato. Unfortunately none of the stores hear carry it, but it's the best that I've tried.
As for the thread, it seems like there's been a couple of the threads over the last couple of months that have ended up with a bunch of sniping back and forth about second and third wave feminism, and I have to admit to finding it interesting. I do hope, however, that there will be some amicable agreement that comes out of it. Given how smart and analytical the hive mind is, in many cases, it surprises me that the discussion is so much on the level of stereotypes.
sniping back and forth about second and third wave feminism, and I have to admit to finding it interesting woo-hoo, girl fights!
I work with a bunch of younger, lowish-status women at a workplace without any particular dress code. Their clothes are sort of unreal: miniskirts, cleavage down to the ribcage, astonishingly tight leggings. They aren't wearing this stuff for any job-related reason---since the possibilities for advancement are pretty much nil---but instead for some sort of personal power, probably related in some way to their voracious desire for branded luxury items.
I'd never want to curtail these women's right to dress sexy, but I wish they could be empowered in ways that would be of greater long-term benefit to them.
Has anyone checked EBay for the bids on Lizardbreath's sweaty bike clothes?
I almost feel honor-bound to bid the price up.
re: 664.2
Yeah. On the other hand, who's to say that their assessment that they aren't going anywhere career-wise, so they might as well look hot while they are at it, isn't right?
I think of male friends who are basically slackers, and who spent a lot of time hanging out and drinking/smoking. I'm pretty sure that they are right that they'd have to work their arses off to make even minor advances in their earnings and/or career prospects, so why bother?
I work with a bunch of younger
Honestly, that's mostly the crux of the argument here, and the "these kids today" lament is an evergreen one.
I'm sure they go home from work and have rainbow parties every night!
666, while being of the Devil, is totally right.
664:Back on the veldt, men wanted to and were allowed to be pretty too, penis sheaths and facial tattoos. The suppression of male natural decorativeness in Western culture is also interesting. I can't see much correlation to sexism or capitalism (the toga, Chinese male apparel pre-colonial).
I still want those unisex Mao jackets. Or t-shirts and bluejeans for everybody. Cheap bluejeans. Way too much bullshit associated with appearance.
I guess i also kinda hate food.
Honestly, that's mostly the crux of the argument here, and the "these kids today" lament is an evergreen one.
Honestly, I think that's bollocks. Younger people have always dressed more adventurously than older ones. Not even noteworthy. The point is that JM's colleagues (and I can offer a supporting data point - I work on the same floor as a call centre, and her description of the younger women there is spot on) aren't prioritising impressing the boss by power dressing, because there isn't a boss who can be impressed by it. So why not relax a bit? On said call centre, the guys wear slacks and tees, jeans on Fridays.
The point is that JM's colleagues
I wasn't really talking about JM's workplace, but the entire thread generally (she just had the useful quote). Much like in some earlier thread when I said that sexual display among young people isn't significantly different than the naked hippies in a lake milieu that parsimon finds unobjectionable and wholly, entirely different. But it really isn't; it's just a slightly different aesthetic. People in their prime reproductive years engage in both conscious and unconscious sexual signaling like pretty much the entire rest of the animal kingdom (and a bunch of the plant kingdom).
Honestly, that's mostly the crux of the argument here, and the "these kids today" lament is an evergreen one.
The crux of which argument?
Tee-hee.
Perhaps Feminist Hulk can smash this unbridgeable barrier.
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God help me, I keep reading the Washington Post's opinion pages. I really should just stick with Sports and Comics.
Today, the lead editorial is titled, Turkey's Erdogan bears responsibility in flotilla fiasco. I shouldn't be surprised. In the paper's first editorial about this it said, We have no sympathy for the motives of the participants in the flotilla
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677: "the Turkish government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which since Monday has shown a sympathy toward Islamic militants and a penchant for grotesque demagoguery toward Israel that ought to be unacceptable for a member of NATO."
NATO's purpose is a defensive alliance among its North American and European members. WTF does that have to do with Israel?
it's just a slightly different aesthetic.
This thread has migrated quite a bit. I was originally interested in the question of appropriate workplace attire and whether dressing sexy was or wasn't appropriate in certain environments. This somehow turned into a discussion of what was considered to be my view that dressing sexy is *never* appropriate, and that a showing of nipple is always and every way awful, and that women should stuff burlap in their bras as a matter of course. (That isn't my view.)
This then turned into a discussion of the probable horribleness of 2nd-wave feminists, who designate themselves the sex police (this again engages in massive assumptions about anything I, at least, actually said -- I'm not necessarily a 2nd wave feminist, I don't accept that characterization of 2nd wave feminism anyway, etc.)
Now we've turned to the notion that these 2nd wavers are just engaging in "those kids these days" and don't realize that the kids are just enjoying their sexuality.
Honestly, this is so incredibly far from the original themes of the thread -- except as discussed by Togolosh, perhaps -- that the initial exploration is lost in the murk. Women just do, in *this* world, have to negotiate between the freedoms they would like to have and those the rest of society is willing to accept.
677/78: Anthony Wiener has taken to the locution "our former ally, Turkey." Really, pal?
Honestly, this is so incredibly far from the original themes of the thread -- except as discussed by Togolosh, perhaps -- that the initial exploration is lost in the murk.
The original theme of the thread was space-saving furniture, so this seems pretty accurate.
The feminism subthread seems to have mostly stemmed from togolosh's comments, so there is that.
Part of the problem is that different communities draw the too-sexy line in different places, and this is especially obvious in NYC, where those communities confront each other all the time, particularly in the workplace. What I wear in my community in Brooklyn may not be considered appropriate in my workplace in Queens or Manhattan, or even a few blocks from my apartment. Those negotiations are complex. No, I don't want to offend people or draw unwanted sexual attention to myself; it's not my goal when I get dressed in the morning to be confrontational. But if I have to pass through a Chasidic neighborhood to get to my job, and I know it's offensive to that community to wear pants or an open-throated shirt, am I supposed to buy different clothes because someone might think I'm purposefully trying to be a temptress?
a discussion of what was considered to be my view
Sorry, I wasn't trying to single you out either. I don't have a dog in whatever 2nd wave/3rd wave fights exist.
am I supposed to buy different clothes because someone might think I'm purposefully trying to be a temptress?
No. There's no reason to think that my acknowledging that women (and men) do have to dress according to standards deemed acceptable in the target environment means that I'd suggest that women should capitulate to every whim. Is there?
684: Yeah, and I wasn't meaning to single you out either. As singular as you are. Your comment just came at a time when I was putting it all together.
Yeah, it looks like it's been a couple hundred comments of talking past one another.
On the plus side, it's one of those threads that has helped to clarify and radicalize opinions I never new I had. At the outset, I'm thinking, huh, maybe there's some rationale for restraining sartorial sexiness in the workplace, but now I'll settle for nothing less than the right of all women to show all nipple all the time. That said, I think dress codes generally are fundamentally ridiculous.
A dear friend of mine, out of what he later called "an extended bout with misogyny", went gay for a while in college. Like girls do! Had as a boyfriend a drag performance artist who was into theory.
As part of his otherwise understated transformation, he cut nipple holes in a nice sweater.
I submit: that sweater was neither second- nor third-wave feminist, nor was it appropriate professional attire.
now I'll settle for nothing less than the right of all women to show all nipple all the time
Not only right but duty!
That sounds more like a Ruprechtian position.
Social cleavage could tear us apart.
This somehow turned into a discussion of what was considered to be my view that dressing sexy is *never* appropriate, and that a showing of nipple is always and every way awful, and that women should stuff burlap in their bras as a matter of course. (That isn't my view.)
As far as I can tell, what happened is that togolosh declared, in 286 and 298, that the perfectly normal professional wear the woman was photographed in was deliberately slutty and too sexy for an office, and implied that any visible nipple is always a display of sluttiness. People jumped all over him. You came into the discussion, possibly appearing to defend togolosh, and then raised a hypothetical example of always-visible nipples as problematic. So people may have somewhat conflated your view with togolosh's, and then MC came along and said some crazy things, supporting mcmanus, and that became the new target.
But: your, e.g., 474, 486, and 551 are obviously more reasonable than what togolosh and MC were saying, so I don't think you should think of most of the vitriol as having been directed at you.
Actually "vitriol" isn't even the right word; mostly there was just befuddlement, I think.
now I'll settle for nothing less than the right of all women to show all nipple all the time.
Some of the comments here from women have taught me things I didn't know: for example, if you breastfeed for years, you have perpetual high-beams. I did not know that. Obviously it's absurd that you should be expected to cover up extensively. Time for a change in workplace expectations. I apologize for not knowing this.
The workplace expectations do change gradually, and we should all be pushing the boundaries within available parameters. Those parameters mostly involve the expectations of the public, since a business is presumably being run.
It's just occurred to me: there's a woman working at the local wine store in the last year or two who dresses unusually, with tons of bracelets and necklaces and low-cut blouses, with a hair clip danging a feather or beads. She's great, and also very attractive in a natural way. She has a Greek look, if that means anything. Comfortable in her skin, grounded, looks you directly in the eye, listens and smiles. No flirtatiousness. I imagine the public is learning.
688: A dear friend of mine, out of what he later called "an extended bout with misogyny", went gay for a while in college.
Unless women enjoy confusion, I really can't see how your friend's action was anything but helpful to women as a class.
Anywa, if misogyny was a reliable precursor to to male homosexuality, that would solve many problems.
Much like in some earlier thread when I said that sexual display among young people isn't significantly different than the naked hippies in a lake milieu that parsimon finds unobjectionable and wholly, entirely different. But it really isn't; it's just a slightly different aesthetic.
I missed that earlier thread. But different aesthetic, sure. The context really does matter, though.
In the public sphere (in politics, in the workplace, etc), it is still the case (though it may be changing, gradually) that the exercise of authority (being taken seriously, in other words) is associated with sober, masculine attire (dark or drab colours, most of the body covered up, and so on). This has been the case since at least the early 19th century, though it's of course not natural or inevitable (and ruling class males used to dress differently: in bright colours, with cod-pieces even!).
This can actually be a problem for women in the professions. I think the current expectation is that a woman should dress basically in accordance with that masculine ideal, while letting a bit of her "feminine side" show through. If she goes too far in one direction, that's likely to be seen as "too" masculine, if she goes too far in other direction, she will likely be seen as signalling something sexual, which means she will not be taken seriously. You see this kind of thing with discussions of female politicians' wardrobes...you almost never see corresponding discussions of male politician's wardrobes because the uniform for men is so standard (whereas women have to take that uniform and modify it somewhat, without modifying it too much).
674: The peony in my backyard just started doing some pretty spectacular sexual signaling, presumably unconscious. Unfortunately, its got some powdery mildew, and I think it may not make it through the winter.
I missed that earlier thread. But different aesthetic, sure. The context really does matter, though.
I have no idea which thread that was in; I do recall that Apo was saying something he meant, and at the time, I blew it off, perhaps wrongly.
Context matters: I remember thinking that a bunch of naked hippies in a lake are off hours, not working, among friends whom they know to be cool with the nekkidness, and a lot of the time there won't be any resultant hanky-panky: it's not sexualized. So I said: it's totally different. I'm not sure I can stand by that view.
Probably best not to recall that thread, whichever it was.
699:...authority (being taken seriously, in other words) is associated with sober, masculine attire (dark or drab colours, most of the body covered up, and so on).
A good and important comment.
I mentioned he toga, and I think even Medieval or Elizabethan noble men dressed marginally more modestly in color or pattern than the women. Then there were the late 19th century beards and facial hair. But at least this is true of our era for a century. Is there a male President of a nation anywhere who could get away with a yellow suit?
But this certainly raises the question as to whether the injunction to dress modestly, conventionally in the workplace is asexist stricture?
It could very well be so, in a very deep manifestation of the racist patriarchy and as an attack on difference I vaguely understand that some modern social theorists do make that interpretation. But this should not be considered a specifically sexist problem, and to analyze nipple display as radically different than the forbidding of cornrows etc is exatly the kind of shallow self serving identity politics that makes the left so useless anymore.
And I think it this appropriation of the politics of difference, this reframing of an instance of general conformism into a problem of and only one or a few selected classes of minorities and outsiders that I find so problematic. It turns liberation politics into interest group competition.
I currently have head hair giding my impudent nipples, a Santa Claus beard, and wear sandals, blue jeans and a t-shirt. Is this an appropriate managerial appearance? And why the fuck not, bourgeois tools?
Is there a male President of a nation anywhere who could get away with a yellow suit?
Lots of them. But white-haired white people look better in powder blue.
Eh, it was a passing point then and now. I doubt it requires much examination, really. More often than not there isn't any resultant hanky-panky in any crowd. But look, my own history is muchg closer to your own (I think - I'm team naked hippie in the lake, anyway) and I've spent a fair amount of time naked around friends with whom nothing was going to happen and we were all cool with the nakedness and everybody understood the rules. But really, it was still pretty sexualized. Less so now that we're all graying and saggy, though.
I remember going skinny dipping with some friends of mine about fifteen years ago, and being essentially told, "Can you swim somewhere else for a while. We suddenly want to screw now." This from the couple that invited me skinning dipping to begin with.
703: And why the fuck not, bourgeois tools?
Artisanal bourgeois tools. Get it right.
658: Henceforth, this shall be known as the "Oh-Cletus-you-know-I-got-to-wear-the-shirt-what-Dairy-Queen-gives-me" argument.
We shall not end the cycle of violence until we end the violence of cyclists.
Also, a 9-year-old, an 8-year-old, a 7-year-old and a 2-year-old add up to an exhausting afternoon of drawing and playing on a jungle gym.
708.1: Heh. I say that all the time.
A discussion of professional clothing can't be complete without reference to Hatoyama, who's just resigned as Prime Minister of Japan. They say it's because of his performance, but everyone knows it's because of his clothes.
I keep wishing that "The hairstyles of Mieczyslaw Rakowski" were posted online somewhere because there are always situations where I find I'd like to link it. Also, it's been years since I've read it, and I'm not sure I still have a copy.
AFAIKT, this thread seems to follow the usual path of sort of identifying some bit of patriarchal action without allowing that there could be any problem with attire beyond mesh shirts and biker shorts. then finding the blame for said patriarchal difficulties exclusively with a not quite named sexist pig group, which probably includes anyone who isn't a person saying that being a woman is difficult.
I'm sure glad we once again avoided all discussion of real material condition or norms, and focused just on the secondary status implications of even raising a question.
If i had such a nonexistent plan of action i guess i would avoid discussion of it too.
Action is for posts with orange titles.
I really and truly read 711 as a reply to 712.
Apo at 705: But really, it was still pretty sexualized.
I'm just confused over this now that you're making me examine it, and don't have a really firm view. I ask myself: sexualized? (remembers this instance) Sexualized? (remembers that instance). I really don't know. I want to say: not. On the other hand, I've seen arguments and disturbances break out on occasion after the fact because someone did something or said something or didn't do something or turned away or god knows what, and everybody gets all upset.
The one I still don't know what to make of is a group of acquaintances swimming and bathing and hanging out in various stages of nakedness -- I wasn't there, but heard about it -- and one of the women waded into the water downstream during her period and rinsed out her (reusable) pad. Apparently someone else turned away from her, got mad, and she was *really* pissed off that he turned away from her. Sexualized? It sounds to me like just a variation on a bunch of people hanging out and sometimes getting annoyed with each other. I don't know.
Oh. 716.1 should read: 712 as a reply to 710.
Fuck! 711 to 710.
Maybe I should just go do something else.
713 That was translated? And just wondering, how did you end up reading Tyrmand? (Leopold Tyrmand was this cult Polish counter culture personality and writer during the fifties and sixties.)
Don't know what to make of pad-rinsing resentment. In my case, everybody tended to be coupled up already, so there was that moderating things. But there often was a bit of straight couple gay chicken going on.
there often was a bit of straight couple gay chicken going on.
I enjoy talking about hippies and their ways! But it was never the topic, so instead I'm just smiling.
Have people seen this NYT op-ed on changes in the acceptability of gayness?
Have people seen this NYT op-ed on changes in the acceptability of gayness?
I hadn't, thanks. It's interesting. This one on Jewish exceptionalism is good too.
722: Thanks, interesting. I didn't realize until the end that it was written by Michael Chabon, not that that matters.
It's not exceptionalism if you really are God's chosen.
Being God's chosen sounds pretty exceptional to me.
I like the Chabon piece. What I find odd/interesting is the way that some hawkish, pro-Israel and not-Jewish rightwingers in this country manage to put American exceptionalism to the service of Jewish exceptionalism (or is it the other way around?).
I like the Chabon piece.
I confess I did not like it in the end, for this passage:
After my initial shock at this fresh display of foolery by the Chelmites of Jerusalem had subsided, I felt an abstract pity for the wasted dead with their cargo of lumber and delusions, for the ill-equipped, poorly led soldiers who had killed them and, running true and clear like a subterranean stream, pity for Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier held captive by Hamas the past four years, and his family. But I also felt a kind of grim relief, even resolve.
An abstract pity for the dead with their cargo of delusions? But okay, it's a start.
Yeah, one of the things I found most interesting about it was that his own sympathies clearly lie more with Israel than with its critics. And yet, there he is criticizing one of the core elements of pro-Israel rhetoric.
The ritual genuflection towards Gilad Shalit left a very sour taste in my mouth. But that appears to be the price of entry to being a "serious" commentator on the subject in America. (But to teo's point, this event has at least expanded the set of otherwise reflexively pro-Israel folks beginning to question some of their assumptions.)
And Charles Blow can go suck a big fat one with his, and the president's ham-handed attempts to demonstrate that he was sufficiently engaged and enraged. Get out of my media you fake fucking emo children.
728: Yes, that was very irritating. I had initially put it down to a kind of writerly flourish, a forgivable conceit if the writing is compelling enough overall. But on second thought, it is surely more than that.
730.2: You have to try to overlook that, JP. That's just, I dunno, the standard claptrap about Obama's dealings with the oil gush. Even people you otherwise respect are saying it. They're not right; it's just, for some reason, something you have to throw out. I have no idea why.
Get out of my media you fake fucking emo children.
I love this. I want to make a T-shirt with this on the front, and the line "I hope I die before I meet any of you in a job interview" from Greenberg on the back. I just need the right picture.
But to teo's point, this event has at least expanded the set of otherwise reflexively pro-Israel folks beginning to question some of their assumptions.
Beinart being another example, although slightly earlier than this specific event.
Beinart's NYRB piece has gotten quite a bit of attention. He was on NPR (ATC) tonight talking about it, but since for counterpoint they invited professional apologist/douchebag Alan Dershowitz, the segment was less interesting than it might have been.
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You know that adage, "never write anything online you don't want to see on the front page of the New York Times"? A short tribute I wrote in my FB status to an activist I knew who died today wound up fifteen minutes later on the local media and politics blog. It's not a problem (thankfully, he left out the pull quote from the farmworker episode of the A-Team) -- it's just a little weird, as there are people who were much closer to him and who are actual public figures who will presumably make public statements very soon. But I'm in the blogger's FB feed.
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Beinart's NYRB piece has gotten quite a bit of attention.
It has, and I find this interesting because there's not much that's new or surprising in it. Probably due largely to his putting it in the NYRB, which has a much more influential readership than the publications that usually publish that sort of thing. Seems pretty shrewd on Beinart's part. He's a guy who really knows how to play the game.
737: Which is kind of funny, because by mainstream (NPR, say) standards, NYRB generally flies under the radar. Beinart does know how to play the game, but that's not to take away from the piece, which I thought was compelling even if it wasn't particularly new or surprising (I have no idea about whether anything in the last section, about US Orthodox, is at all controversial or even debatable).
Not that impressed by the Chabon essay, since in the end it doesn't engage with the fact that Israel's policies are deeply immoral, and not just stupid. That's what was so surprisingly good about Beinart's piece.
One thing I did find morbidly amusing was his mention of Kevin Macdonald, a shrink specialzing in 'on the veldt' style 'analyses' of Jews and their supposed unusual intelligence. While he does talk about that, he also argues that the intelligence is inherently harmful to the Jews' 'host societies', since Jews are biologically driven to seek to undermine the social cohesion of the society they live in - e.g. liberalism, socialism, feminism, civil rights, sexuality, art, literature. These societies then react with antisemitism as a natural biological self-defense mechanism. This is just old school rassenkunde. Unsurprisingly, Macdonald is a regular over at the various far right fringe groups that emphasize antisemitism, e.g. IHR ('the holocaust never happened, and it was the Jews fault anyways'). John Derbyshire is an admirer, but hey NR is a big supporter of Likudnik views, so of course there can't be any antisemites among them.
719: It was semi-assigned for a class. I can't remember if it was optional or removed from the required readings for lack of time, but I distinctly remember reading it quite a bit later and wishing we'd read it instead of some of the stuff we had read. Anyway, we got it as a photocopied handout, but I think it must have been published in a translated collection, since it looked like it came from a book.
One thing I did find morbidly amusing was his mention of Kevin Macdonald, a shrink specialzing in 'on the veldt' style 'analyses' of Jews and their supposed unusual intelligence. While he does talk about that, he also argues that the intelligence is inherently harmful to the Jews' 'host societies', since Jews are biologically driven to seek to undermine the social cohesion of the society they live in - e.g. liberalism, socialism, feminism, civil rights, sexuality, art, literature. These societies then react with antisemitism as a natural biological self-defense mechanism.
This is Chabon's point, though. He's saying that the embrace of the "Jews are smart" idea by guys like this is bad for the Jews. It's true that he doesn't phrase it very clearly or straightforwardly, but that's what I understood him to be arguing.
And if it's moralizing about Israel/Palestine that you want, there's no shortage of places to find it. I though Chabon's piece was interesting partly because he doesn't take that route.
Israel is such a small area where so many people want to live. Space-saving furniture could be a means of making this possible. If so, the guy who invented the bookshelf that stays flat as the Murphy bed comes down should get a Nobel.
It's not really that many people. It's just that they hate each other.
743: Space-saving furniture can only accomplish so much in a land where even flowing desert robes reveal the people's offensively protuberant nipples.
You know who has nipples that stay modestly hidden? Indians.
743: Does Israel allow Murphies bed into the Gaza Strip?
747: Presumably not the ones on the MV Rachel Corrie. I mean, the IRA might've sent them, you know.
I must say, I found the Chabon piece annoying. Could we please have some commentary on these issues that treats the 1.5 million people trapped in Gaza as real human beings and not just as objects of interest in the never-ending intra-Jewish dialogue of figuring out what it means to be a Jew? The Beinart piece suffered, at some level, from the same flaw. I realize that both C and B are interested in issues of Jewish identity, and that's totally fine and they can write what they want, but it's annoying that even left wing dialogue in the US can't quite get interested in thinking of the Palestinians as real people..
617: Rise up Singing?
Yes! How did you know? That is one freaking comprehensive folk song book.
749: Agreed. This by Peter Beinart is about the specifics of the humanitarian blockade of Gaza. (Just about half the population of Gaza are children under the age of 15, for example.)
This explains why Israel prevents Gazans from importing, among other things, cilantro, sage, jam, chocolate, French fries, dried fruit, fabrics, notebooks, empty flowerpots and toys, none of which are particularly useful in building Kassam rockets. It's why Israel bans virtually all exports from Gaza, a policy that has helped to destroy the Strip's agriculture, contributed to the closing of some 95 percent of its factories, and left more 80 percent of its population dependent on food aid. It's why Gaza's fishermen are not allowed to travel more than three miles from the coast, which dramatically reduces their catch. And it's why Israel prevents Gazan students from studying in the West Bank, a policy recently denounced by 10 winners of the prestigious Israel Prize. There's a name for all this: collective punishment.
752: Peter Beinart looks a lot younger than I had imagined.
753: The mark of Venus! Being gat-toothed keeps one young, I think. (Perpetually boyish-looking Ted Turner comes to mind.)
gat-toothed
That's a new one on me.
751:
Time in high school and college spent around activist Quakers and folk music enthusiasts.
That book really does cram a lot in. I remember watching my friends try and puzzle out melodies from the minimalist chord change notes. The only thing I've ever seen that was denser was the zine Slug and lettuce. Column after column of six point font.
755: Because you didn't write your senior thesis on the Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale!
This is also about the the effect of the blockade and the larger stand-off on Israelis more than on the residents of Gaza, but it's still good on the "everything get's worse in a way that helps no one except those that profit from the politics of worseness" angle.
757: your senior thesis on the Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale
Which will get bandied about in the press when you get nominated for the Supreme Court or run for President.
760: "She's . . . really inane? What are we nominating her for again? Why?"
762.1 was part of the plot of an episode of Sex and the City.
Unfogged has been very nipple-obsessed lately.
nipple caps in the workplace should be regarded as unprofessional
The nipple cap is BP's next strategy for stopping the oil gusher.
So "gat-toothed" does not mean a mouth full of guns, right?
Unfogged has been very nipple-obsessed lately.
We've been nipping on the nightrope ever since AWB linked that Janelle Manáe song.
Agreed with 739 and 749. Chabon has always had a big cutesiness problem. Israel's situation is not cute. Couldn't quite believe he brought the dinner table scene into it -- is this My Big Fat Jewish Wedding? It was very American Jewish in the way that it not only denied humanity to Israel's victims, but didn't really take Israeli Jews seriously either. Beinart on the other hand gets it, totally reversed my view of him in the last couple of weeks.
I'm sure glad we once again avoided all discussion of real material condition or norms, and focused just on the secondary status implications of even raising a question.
yoyo nails this standard liberal rhetorical move.
The problem with the clothes thing is that it's basically women who are sexy, the clothes are ancillary. Victorian men fetishized ankles and I personally have a thing for tight pantsuits. Once you go down the "no sexxy distractions in the workplace" road you end up with either burkas or sex-segregated offices.
Once you go down the "no sexxy distractions in the workplace" road you end up with either burkas or sex-segregated offices.
This essentially argues that there's an inevitable slippery slope from "minimize obviously sexy distractions" to burkas.
If we're going to allow that there's such a slippery slope in the offing, then I can argue that "sexy distractions are okay in the workplace" means that women can wear bikinis, and men can wear short shorts and mesh tops.
If that argument on my part fails, then what we have on the table is the possibility that there's not necessarily a slippery slope in play after all. And indeed, I don't think there is, PGD.
I loved that video. I guess I need to go look at it again to find out how it leads to nipple-gazing.
I couldnt see any visible nipples in janelle monae's video, but I was reminded about how fabulous tuxedos are.
I was reminded about how fabulous tuxedos are.
NTM turtlenecks.
775: Not that you're relieved of your obligation to read every single comment, will, but comment #271 is the friend you're in search of.
God tuxedos are awful. only the help wears them. and people at prom
the funny part about israel/palestine is that its such a crappy piece of land
I like tuxedos. Just get one that looks like almost entirely like a black suit and you won't look like a prom goer or the help.
You can. The lapels won't fit exactly, but almost nobody will notice if you have a shirt with the little pleats.
Anyway, buying a black suit would require more thinking and the good part of the tuxedo* is that you don't really have to think much about what you are wearing.
*Other than the 100% nipple coverage.
Someone should start cross checking Knecht's anecdotes and SATC or Desparate Housewives episodes.
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Bleg!!
If anyone has a spare google voice invite, please e-mail me.
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784: Thanks, but I have a full life already.
Desparate Housewives
Previously, on Disparate Housewives...
Yes, not having to think about clothes is one of the good parts of being the help instead of going to parties.
We got told at work that the women should be careful about wearing clothes that are too revealing because of the number of sex offenders we work with. (I'm referring to the clients who have mental diagnoses and criminal records.)
I do have one low-plunging dress, but I always cover part of the plunge with a half-done-up cardigan
I'm not sure that it matters. The other day I and two other workers got totally harassed by this guy who was calling us sluts, evil white women and asked if I wanted a dick in me. He was muttering and rambling. The emergency psychiatric team came out and evaluated him but did nothing. When he started following one of the counselors to her car, he was sectioned. I was very well covered up that day.
I think that if it were the UPS guy, the company would have to do something because of sexual harassment issues, btu these people are really sick, and we're supposed to be taking care of them in group homes, so it's a problem.
Someone I know had a really creepy situation where she had to drive someone to doctors appointments, and he started making sexualized comments and obsessing over an outfit she'd worn six weeks before. She finally pushed through a transfer, because she didn't feel safe being in the car with him. The male rehabilitation specialist who got him was kind of angry and thought that she just didn't want to deal with a difficult client.
As far as I can tell, what happened is that togolosh declared, in 286 and 298, that the perfectly normal professional wear the woman was photographed in was deliberately slutty and too sexy for an office, and implied that any visible nipple is always a display of sluttiness.
This mischaracterizes my position. Everything I said was in the context of the dress code for a bank, which was the topic that started the discussion. I also clearly stated that I was referring to visceral (as opposed to carefully considered) reactions to apparent willful violations of that code.
The strawman holocaust upthread was entertaining, but I don't hold the opinions ascribed to those unfortunates. I've changed my opinions somewhat thanks to the arguments of the people who responded to what I was actually talking about (notably LB), but if I'm to be pilloried I'd rather it be for opinions I actually hold (or held, as the case may be).
I'll have to be offline for a while, but I'll try to check back when I can. I don't want to pour gasoline on the fire (quite the opposite), just offer clarification.
Ooh, watch Mr. Nippledectomy back off when he meets a little resistance.
They're side by side, they're glorified
Where the underwear can meet the teat,
Nippledectomy.
Little titties, on old biddies,
Innocent and sweet.
Sexy boobies, on young newbies,
They're so indiscreet!
Remember, imbeciles and wits,
sots and ascetics, fair and foul,
young girls with little tender tits,
that DEATH is written over all.
I haven't see a show since Urinetown, but have musicals really gotten that gloomy?
Mine was a threeplank bed whereon
I lay and cursed the weary sun.
They took away the prison clothes
and on the frosty nights I froze.
I had a Bible where I read
that Jesus came to raise the dead--
I kept myself from going mad
by singing an old bawdy ballad
and birds sang on my windowsill
and tortured me till I was ill,
but Archipiada came to me
and comforted my cold body.
I'm really disappointed that you people didn't take this thread to 1000 today.
There's still time! In some time zones.
I spent a boring day in a series of tubes. I was hoping to find that it had been a more exciting day in these other, inter-, tubes. Aren't feminism threads supposed to go to 1000?
We could have 198 comments offering suggestions on how to close a door. It appears that the plates securing the deadbolts - there must be some technical name for this - are sticking out a little too much. It seems to be an issue with the one on the door, not the one on the threshold. I'd try slamming the door, but it's too late at night. And there's no phillips screwdriver here - there's a flat head one, but it's too large - as far as I can tell, so I can't try to do anything about the plate itself. I bet a swiss army knife would work, but I don't have one.
I think you've covered pretty much all the options as far as door-closing goes.
The attorney for the Citibank woman appears to be into .
I think that this whole case is about getting on reality TV. It's a publicity bonanza.
Link @806 - an explosive suit is certainly more interesting than a tuxedo, and probably inappropriate for work, at least in an open plan office.
803: Nothing that can't be fixed with sand paper and several hours of time.
Vigorous rubbing can fix nearly anything.
The founder of a Manhattan law firm dedicated to empowering women is a chauvinist pig with pierced genitals who wore a bondage collar at work, an explosive new suit charges.
But he loves women, iykwim.
So it was all a stunt, and we've all been had? I'm shocked.
I think I have mentioned that my former assistant was an attractive 27 year old who nipples were visibly erect on a regular basis.
It was distracting.
I dont believe anyone said anything to her, but several women in the office commented on it to me and said, "She HAS to know!"
She was universally liked because she was a genuinely nice person.
806: Ahaha -- that woman friended me on FB, although I don't know her at all. She sent me a little note and everything. I googled her name to make sure I really didn't know her, and discovered that she seems to serially sue her bosses.
I've seen a number of my female coworkers topless (with and without pasties), and that hasn't prevented me from (a) doing my job or (b) refraining from sexually harassing them. Admittedly, I don't work in a bank, but I used to.
eh. I havent followed this discussion that closely, but I do not think it is unreasonable to expect the employees of a law firm to not have regularly visible nipples.
Virginia is a "right to work" state. Essentially, that means you can let anyone go for any (non-discriminatory) reason or no reason at all. Without any severance. (A horrible thing, in my mind.)
My former assistant didnt suffer any negative consequences. She left to pursue another occupation.
It is a rule of reason, not horribly different from other things. You can socialize with people in the office. Just dont do it too much.
818.b: You mean "at-will" employment state. "Right to work" (gah, it sticks in the craw like "death tax") means you don't have to join the union if you take a job in a union shop.
Bave:
I was using the term that is used by most people to describe how great Virginia is. We all have the right to work!
That is, until they realize that at-will is a much more accurate term when their employer screws them over.
820: If you friend me on FB, you will hear more than you every imagined you could want to hear about my job. Suffice it to say that coworker nudity has been in the context of radical performance art type stuff. Although sometimes the distinction between that and the sort of context you allude to is blurrier than I might like.
822. I'm relieved. I was picturing a topless bank, and the image wasn't pretty.
No problem, will. I just have an allergy to "right to work" from the years when I was a kid and my dad, a minor, Republican sometime politician in my home state, was really into it.
I always thought it was odd that radical performance art or avant garde theater leads to so much nudity.
818.1 I talked to a couple of people over the weekend about this and that was the generally held opinion (though in my discussions I specified bank rather than law firm). They were all of roughly my age, so I suspect there's an age-cohort effect. That said, various people upthread have indicated that it's difficult to find nipple-obscuring bras or other clothing, which I'd naively assumed was not the case*. To me that implies that the no-nipplage rule potentially imposes an excessive burden on women when it comes to finding work clothes. But if the standard is to shift around according to what's made available by the buyers at clothing stores, that seems to abdicate decision making to the same folks who set the existing harmful standard of female beauty.
* The women who work at the two banks I regularly use seem not to have problems with this, including the very large breasted ones, so that's my starting point. But my bank is owned by people who wouldn't give a shit if they imposed excessive burdens on low level employees.
I am generally sympathetic to will and the other prudes/sexists on this thread, and I think will obliquely raises an interesting point: While I think nipple outlines are on the wrong side of the professional attire line for both men and women, any conversation about this with the offending employee is potentially even more inappropriate.
826.last: The women who work at the two banks I regularly use seem not to have problems with this, including the very large breasted ones
And togolosh has the surreptitious mobile phone video footage to prove it!
any conversation about this with the offending employee is potentially even more inappropriate.
Compliment the employee on their outfit, but suggest that if they wear it to work again they might want to consider adding a cardigan.
including the very large breasted ones,
Breast size, not actually relevant to whether your nipples show through your clothing.
On the 'how hard is it to find clothes that hide your nipples' front, I think the issue is more that there's not a clean line between "No chance nipples will be visible" and "This is the shirt I wear to showcase every detail of my aureoles." I'm wearing a Brooks Brothers shirtdress today, over a non-padded bra. It's not tight, but it's pretty light material -- in a cold room, you'd probably be able to tell that I had them.
Now, I also think the real issue isn't "Are nipples visible", it's more like, "Whether or not they're visible, do we think the woman involved is doing enough to hide them?" I doubt anyone, whether or not they can see my nipples in this dress, is going to think I'm dressing slutty on purpose.
Which comes back to my broader issue with this sort of concern -- if we're talking about clothes that are generally within office-clothing norms, 'too slutty' isn't a brightline rule about the clothes. It's a judgment of the attractiveness of the woman wearing them, and whether she's doing enough to keep her attractiveness from bothering the men around her. If I, as a moderately drab and untidy matronly type, can get away with an article of clothing without looking inappropriate, then it really seems oppressive to me to call the same clothing inappropriate because the person wearing it is hot.
'too slutty' isn't a brightline rule about the clothes.
Slutty, like beauty, is in the details.
'too slutty' isn't a brightline rule about the clothes.
I know it when I see it!
If I, as a moderately drab and untidy matronly type, can get away with an article of clothing without looking inappropriate, then it really seems oppressive to me to call the same clothing inappropriate because the person wearing it is hot.
This seems a bit overstrict to me. I know you hate it, and I'm not going to enforce it, but there is a degree of personal fit between the clothes and the individual.
'too slutty' isn't a brightline rule
togolosh's phrase here was certainly infelicitous, and ought to be abandoned. "Too slutty" attaches a moral value judgment on a matter that should be nearly as value-neutral as the question of whether a man should wear a tie.
834: This seems a bit overstrict to me.
Not to get fussy with you, but don't you mean 'understrict'? I'm the one taking the position that no one should be getting picky about how sexy their co-workers look in roughly ordinary officewear. "Strict" is the other guys.
A lot of it comes down to 'modesty' rather than 'sluttiness'. We live in a society which generally frowns on showing off [or at least mine does], and particular frowns on it [teh sexism] in women, and certain kinds of clothing, even if they aren't unprofessional, on certain people, can be seen as attention-seeking. That's obviously sexist and unfair, but it's also not inexplicable either.
I think you're being underfussy now.
I always thought it was odd that radical performance art or avant garde theater leads to so much nudity.
Why? Nudity is transgressive, yet it attracts an audience.
837: Oooh, this is right, and I hadn't quite got there yet. McArdle's comment on this woman was something like "who knew you could be too arrogant to be a banker?" and lw on this thread talked about her ugly sense of entitlement. And, if we take her story at face value (which, of course, Citibank has its own version, her story could be a complete invention), that's a little weird -- the only entitlement she's claiming is that she shouldn't be fired for wearing fitted business clothes and looking good in them.
But as you say, there's a strong expectation of "modesty" in the "not being a showoff" sense for women (probably for men too, some, but quite strongly for women). So dressing in a showoffy way (which she certainly seems to have been), means that she needs to be cut down to size, and filing legal papers that actually state in so many words that her supervisors told her she was distractingly attractive means that she's grotesquely arrogant and entitled.
I really don't like the 'don't be a showoff' norm. I've got it pretty well internalized, but it's one of those norms that's set up to reward the person who can violate it without getting punished, and I hate that kind of thing.
831.first: Does it not make it somewhat harder to find clothes that are conservative in the nipple-exposure department? If not, please ignore.
831.last: That's the sense I got from your earlier comments, and I think you are essentially correct. Regardless of the standard for clothing the people bumping up against the boundaries are going to be either willfully violating the code or very attractive and wearing something that's close to the borderline. This is compounded by variations in people's perceptions of where that boundary lies.
My preference is for very explicit dress codes in part because it helps to reduce that sort of conflict - if the code is fuzzy it promotes conflicts coming from differing interpretations. The same issue of hotness still exists, but it conflicts arising from it can be shut down more effectively if one can simply point to the dress code and unambiguously demonstrate compliance.
What has Israel's attack on the flotilla to do with Al and Tipper Gore's marital breakup?
I would have thought nothing at all, but apparently some see it differently. Wow. I'm rethinking my initial response to that Chabon op-ed, especially in light of PGD's point about cutesiness (which is appallingly on display in the latest Brooks-Collins confab).
re: 840
Yes. I think it's harder for men to violate the 'don't be a show-off' rule when it comes to physical appearance, but it's not impossible. A guy might choose to wear a more fitted shirt, to show off his narrow waist and wide shoulders, say, but he'd have to take it quite a long way to really stand-out as a slick show-off. That's probably a function of both the relative conservativeness of dress codes for men, and the sexist nature of double-standards for women.
But I can certainly think of douche-y guys who made a big deal about their appearance, and where the perception of their douche(y)ness was partly based on their clothing and other sartorial choices; just as I've known women who were sneered at behind their backs [particularly by other women] because of the perception that their clothing choices were partly predicated on the desire to make sure everyone had checked out their 'smokin' figure.
My preference is for very explicit dress codes in part because it helps to reduce that sort of conflict
OK, I've got to come out against this. People should dress how they want to, unless it's unambiguously and deliberately provocative. People express themselves in how they dress; imposing an explicit dress code is tantamount to making everybody wear uniform.
The onus for grown up behaviour is on everyone equally and penalising attractive women or men by telling them they have to wear sackcloth because their colleagues are too juvenile to deal with it if they don't seems to me to be giving the wrong people a pass on their juvenility. Harder for the managers, of course, but they're paid for it.
My preference is for very explicit dress codes in part because it helps to reduce that sort of conflict - if the code is fuzzy it promotes conflicts coming from differing interpretations. The same issue of hotness still exists, but it conflicts arising from it can be shut down more effectively if one can simply point to the dress code and unambiguously demonstrate compliance.
Comity! (And I think the 'unambiguously demonstrating compliance' thing is why the conversation has gotten stuck on nipples. "No visible nipple ever" is a difficult standard -- it means padded bras, and heavy, loose fabrics, and would rule out most ordinary business clothes. "No distractingly visible nipples" is probably the rule you want, but it's not a bright-line rule: it's Potter Stewart.)
Damn. I agreed with 841, and now I want to agree with 844, too. I'd be happiest with an 844-like system, but if there's going to be a dress code, I'd like it to be explicit and across-the-board.
847: In other words, you are a lawyer.
I linked to the quote that made her seem unpleasant to me in 425. Modesty, thrift, and humility are definitely ideals that benefit those in power, and there are sexist double standards.
http://www.thesartorialist.com/photos/41210EssexsPink_4700Web.jpg
http://faithfultofashion.onsugar.com/Fashion-Pic-Daily-2654794
Possibly this is a new modesty standard evolving:
http://antiduckface.com/
The Jersey Shore stereotype of immodesty seems interesting in light of this discussion, as it's an apparently a distinct subculture that can be discussed without taint of racism.
I will say that every single time I've gotten to know women whose nipples turned out to be unusually prominent, I was completely surprised, retrospectively realized a strong preference for covering up.
Didn't some dating site blog recently say that duckface (I think they called it 'flirty face') pictures were actually very successful in attracting responses?
"Fashion could be important, even out on the veldt".
So it was all a stunt, and we've all been had? I'm shocked.
Jump to conclusions much?
844: ...unless it's unambiguously and deliberately provocative. A criterion that will presumably be evaluated by the HR department's Sexiness Evaluation Officer.
The people going with the "just don't be obviously provocative" are completely missing the point that "obviously provocative" is vastly different for different people. Sooner or later there will be some boundary case and someone will have to make a decision about whether an outfit is barely acceptable or barely unacceptable. Unambiguous standards make that much less of a problem for all concerned. They'd have avoided the lawsuit that started this discussion, for example.
Making everybody wear a uniform does not seem to me as oppressive as it apparently is to others. There is already a business uniform for men, and most people are just fine with that.
850: I still think it was probably the expectation of bread that the ducks were responding to.
Potter Stewart was an ass man.
Assistant Manager at the Buy More?
853: I'm pretty sure that what OFE is suggesting is avoiding problems by drawing 'the line' well outside what anyone is likely to wear -- retaining the ability to send a dude who shows up for work in a leather Speedo home, but other than that allowing people to use their own judgment.
There is already a business uniform for men, and most people are just fine with that.
Are they? It seems to me that that convention is breaking down on a daily basis, but maybe businesses are more conservative in America. What I would note is that in less laissez-faire business environments it tends to be more senior people, especially women, who dress more casually than the plebs. I'm agin that kind of implicit discrimination too.
I'd actually set a very high bar for 'unacceptably provocative'. I 'd suggest that in any imaginable case (I don't imagine paralegals coming to work in swim wear), the presumption is that anyone who is offended or overstimulated by a colleague's fashion nonsense should get the fuck over it, and if they can't get over it on their own, then perhaps with a little help from HR.
844: People should dress how they want to, unless it's unambiguously and deliberately provocative.
I imagine we all agree that people should in general be able to dress how they want to, but the devil is obviously in what counts as "unambiguously and deliberately provocative" -- to such a degree that 'dressing how you want to' loses a great deal of meaning.
For "provocative" I'd substitute "inappropriate," given that employee dress for those working in, say, a funeral home, is going to differ quite a bit from the dress you'd expect to see among employees in, oh, an advertising firm, or a newspaper editorial board, or the regional offices of a petroleum exporter. The workplace context matters a great deal! It seems to me that any discussion of these matters that generalizes about acceptable attire without consideration of the type of working environment in question renders itself somewhat blind.
If you're working in a funeral home, I'm afraid I do just have to say that yes, anything short of utter modesty is problematic. I don't believe this is a sexist position to take.
The majority of the working world is less clear, though there are gradations: what's appropriate for a law office differs from what's appropriate for a restaurant, and we all know this stuff, don't we? Of course there can be no bright lines -- the idea that there could or should be seems to me to be a red herring.
857.2 captures my view entirely.
There are two separate issues: What sort of friendly advice would you offer someone regarding professional attire, and what sorts of standards ought to be enforced?
then perhaps with a little help from HR.
BUT YOKO'S NIPPLES ARE SO DISTRACTING!
This conversation is interesting to me because I still am surprised by how people have become more conservative over the past few decades.
I thought it had long ago been established in polite society that men had to get over the fact that women had things that excited or distracted us, like nipples, cleavage, visible panty lines, inner thighs that occasionaly became visible when a woman in a skirt sat down etc. The debate, I thought had turned to whether it was evidence of woman hating, poor socialization etc. for a man to notice such things or whether it was perfectly OK to notice and even enjoy, but that one had to put such lizard-brain thoughts to one side when actually interacting with other people.
Are there standards of workplace appropriateness when it comes to clothes? Sure. And I think they are subject to reasonable debate and examination based on possible sexism. But being able to see that a woman has nipples underneath her clothes? Really? I though we got past that 40 years ago.
[This is not a criticism of anyone here. I understand that people mostly are making descriptive, not perscriptive, statements re: standards. It's just my musing on how things that I thought had changed seem to be moving a different direction than I had thought.]
To elaborate further on 860: togolosh seems to want to codify something that is mostly best left to the judgment of those involved. Any code strict enough to eliminate the possibility of bad faith is going to be waaaaay too specific.
The question of what constitutes good judgment in a particular case is, however, interesting and ambiguous.
and if they can't get over it on their own, then perhaps with a little help from HR.
Our Employee Assistance Program is available 24/7 to help you achieve a happy ending.
If you're working in a funeral home, I'm afraid I do just have to say that yes, anything short of utter modesty is problematic.
Why? The dead can't perv.
The majority of the working world is less clear, though there are gradations: what's appropriate for a law office differs from what's appropriate for a restaurant, and we all know this stuff, don't we?
Sure, but the lawsuit in question isn't asserting that the plaintiff should be able to wear whatever she wants. From the original article:
"In blatantly discriminatory fashion, plaintiff was advised that as a result of the shape of her figure, such clothes were purportedly 'too distracting' for her male colleagues and supervisors to bear."
"The sexy single mom pointed out to her bosses "that other female colleagues wore similar professional attire," and that some dressed far more provocatively, the filing says.
""But her supervisors shot back that those women didn't have to worry about turning them on "as their general unattractiveness rendered moot their sartorial choices, unlike plaintiff," the papers say.
863: I am continually amazed by how much of your hippie past has survived despite your current politics.
I am continually amazed by how much of your hippie past has survived despite your current politics.
My current politics are entirely consistent with my hippie past. It's just you kids these days . . . .
HR department's Sexiness Evaluation Officer.
I knew eventually there would be a career perfectly suited to my skill set.
869: There was an underwear store in Shanghai where a British friend of mine went to to buy a bra. It turned out that part of the fitting process was for this seasoned grandma in a Mao jacket to saunter over and then abruptly cup the customer's breasts in her hands so that the appropriate cup size could then be selected.
So don't narrow your horizons too much, apo, is what I'm saying.
the lawsuit in question isn't asserting that the plaintiff should be able to wear whatever she wants
I know; the thread has just moved on to consider more generally whether it's ever right to place limits on what people should be allowed to wear (or what should be considered appropriate for people to wear).
Why? The dead can't perv.
I was thinking of someone who works in the front office, so to speak, of the funeral home. The person who meets privately with the newly bereaved to discuss arrangements, and who receives visitors for the funeral services, stands quietly and respectfully in the back while people are crying during the services, and so on. If you're working on the mortuary end of things, wearing a thong under your smock is presumably fine.
But funeral homes are always so cold.
I was picturing a topless bank, and the image wasn't pretty.
Picturing involves too much realism. I, on the other hand, am imagining a topless bank. The image is fantastic.
Morticians put quarters on dead womens' nipples to keep them down during business funerals.
874: Actually, only hott dead women.
874: Sistah, please. Susan B Anthony dollars.
You which corpses have really attractive nipples? Indian corpses.
876: Why not Sacajawea dollars, you racist?
Mermorticians use sand dollars.
880: What do mathemorticians use?
Anyways. That pink blouse that the Citibank employee is wearing in one of her pictures? The one that shows a lot of cleavage? Too provocative for the funeral home. If she won't cover up, we have a problem. This has nothing to do with whether her cleavage is just too much for the prudes who either refuse to acknowledge that women have breasts, or can't keep their lizard brains in check. She would (hypothetically) be injecting sexuality into a situation in which it has no place.
I'm still tending to think that some types of legal offices, and some banking situations, are nearly the same. No objection to the occasional nipple showing, but the presumption should be in favor of modesty if you, the employee, are looking at potentially meeting with a client who needs to do estate planning, is writing a will, is rearranging finances pending a divorce, or similar sober and serious matters.
The weirdest thing about the Citibank employee's lawsuit is that Citibank's alleged discriminatory behavior had to do with her fellow staffmembers' problems: what about the customers? That's of primary relevance, it seems to me.
I saw the plaintiff on the Today show this morning. If her attorney is smart he will not let this go to a jury. She really did not come across as aggrieved, but more of a "I'm prettier than you so just deal". Like that TV show with the hidden cameras and the bad behaviour of the beautiful people. She would fit right in.
880: What do mathemorticians use?
Ramekins, actually. Why?
Ramekins, actually. Why?
How should I know? You're the mathematician, or so you say.
I don't know why people keep mentioning the peach blouse, and not the black silk kimono/bathrobe thing
also, no.2 here http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/archives/2010/06/the_five_best_f.php#more
is like a sekrit unfogged joke, right?
When confronted with a nipple existence proof, one need simply note the existence of a continuous surjective function from a topological space onto the nipple in question.
What do mathemorticians use?
Laplacian smoothing.
She would (hypothetically) be injecting sexuality into a situation in which it has no place.
This is where you lose me. The world doesn't come with switches you can flip to add or remove sexuality completely from a situation. Think of Apo's workplace -- whatever he may do to try and keep himself under wraps, that kind of raw sexual power just can't be restrained. (Conf. to Apo: While I'm not your attorney, I do think something like that is the line to take with the judge.)
I'd agree that I wouldn't wear that pink blouse in a funeral home -- front-of-house funeral home employees are supposed to be performing mournful sobriety, and that blouse doesn't qualify as mournfully sober. But that still doesn't get you to 'injecting sexuality' is wrong -- I can picture a perfectly modest, mournfully sober black outfit in which the wearer would still be sexually appealing, depending on her physical appearance and the interest-level of the viewer.
I don't get up in the morning and put on clothes deciding "Am I going to inject sexuality into the workplace today or not?" Mostly it's about what's clean and won't look too weird after it's been wadded up in a bike bag for an hour. But I do buy clothes because I think they make me look attractive, in a human woman kind of way, rather than attractive in the manner of a fern or a bit of landscape, and that means sexuality on some level. If that's 'injecting sexuality' into the workplace, then you can't avoid it short of the cracks I was making above about the padded Mao jackets. And even that wouldn't work.
not the black silk kimono/bathrobe thing
Didn't notice it so much, I guess.
As for the ramekins, you know that small handcrafted artisanal bowls work just as well, right?
whatever he may do to try and keep himself under wraps
I wear a codpiece so nobody can see the outline of my erections.
I can picture a perfectly modest, mournfully sober black outfit in which the wearer would still be sexually appealing
E.g. this bank, whose trademark advertisements feature a woman in deep mourning... sort of
There's a bank called Scottish Widows? Man, you people in the UK are weird. (I actually looked at the picture and thought "Vampire? Why would you advertise a bank with a sexy vampire? Eh, I suppose you can advertise anything with a sexy vampire these days.")
LB, you aren't backing off the padded Mao jackets, are you? Are you abandoning the dream of universal uniforms?
It was originally a friendly society, in Scotland, to provide pensions for the widows of its members. I think it evolved into a building society (mutual S&L), and then turned itself into a bank by a vote of its members. Pretty standard trajectory, in fact.
There's a bank called "Scottish Widows"? That's awesome.
You know, I just went back and looked at the pictures of the lady in the Citibank suit. Anyone who thinks that wearing those clothes should be a fireable offense in any ordinary office is a fucking insane prude, end of story. Seriously.
[Her lawsuit generally sets off my bullshit detector, but we're taking her complaint at face value for the purposes of discussion here].
At the weekend retreat I recently attended, one of the people working (i.e. employee of the umbrella organization putting on the show) showed up to the final day of the thing (in which most people were dressed in jeans/chinos/casual slacks + casual blouse/sportshirt/T-shirt) wearing a little black dress. Admittedly, it was not the slinkiest little black dress I have ever seen, but it was out of place enough to make me wonder whether she was (a) deliberately trying to inject some sexuality somewhere [unlikely, I thought] or (b) had just totally misjudged what range of apparel was going to be required for the weekend, and had thus packed the LBD as one day's apparel based on a complete misreading of the normative sartorial standards one could expect.
Personally, I was a little bit chagrined the other day when I wore one of my frumpiest, uncoolest outfits -- cargo shorts and a seersucker sportshirt, to work, thinking "eh, it's not like I have to impress anyone today", and then wound up sitting next to someone I would REALLY liked to have impressed at a meeting I was not expecting to attend. Oh well.
The dead can't perv.
Resisting the urge to link to Sexy Losers...
857: I'd actually set a very high bar for 'unacceptably provocative'. I 'd suggest that in any imaginable case (I don't imagine paralegals coming to work in swim wear), the presumption is that anyone who is offended or overstimulated by a colleague's fashion nonsense should get the fuck over it, and if they can't get over it on their own, then perhaps with a little help from HR.
Setting the bar far from where anyone is likely to go is all well and good until someone goes there. You're assuming two things that I don't think are justified: (1) common understanding of roughly what constitutes "acceptable" and (2) that people won't go all the way to the boundary just because it's far from the commonly accepted idea of appropriate. (2) in particular is a dodgy assumption if you're hiring lots of young people, who tend to be boundary-pushers by nature.
As to "get the fuck over it" - that's a perfectly fine attitude as long as you don't care about the side effects of the conflicts engendered. The dress code isn't there to advance an egalitarian social agenda, it's there to advance the interests of the organization, including by suppressing sources of conflict that might impact productivity. It's not that some person gets offended, it's that the social signaling involved encourages or discourages certain kinds of behavior.
My experience with ill defined dress codes is that I almost always run into problems with them. Not dressing too sexy, but dressing too working class for the swippletards.
I wear a codpiece so nobody can see the outline of my erections.
The muffled sounds of its thick southern drawl are still pretty distracting though.
My experience with ill defined dress codes is that I almost always run into problems with them. Not dressing too sexy, but dressing too working class for the swippletards.
I'm kind of surprised by this for a man. I can think of about four possible dress codes for men, and they're all pretty hard to screw up. There's (1) Anything goes, short of fetishwear or missing major articles of clothing (shirt, pants) (2) Anything goes so long as it's clean and in good condition (3) Shirts with collars (either polo/golf or button front, and I'd expect 'no shorts' to hit at this level) and (4) Suits.
Where were you running into trouble? Collarless T-shirts where you shouldn't have dropped below collared shirt, or what?
(Now, there's plenty of room to dress badly at any of those levels, and I sympathize as a lousy dresser myself. But that's a little different from violating the dress code.)
But that still doesn't get you to 'injecting sexuality' is wrong -- I can picture a perfectly modest, mournfully sober black outfit in which the wearer would still be sexually appealing, depending on her physical appearance and the interest-level of the viewer.
I want it to get me to "injecting sexuality should be minimized [in some environments] if it can be seen in advance."
Anybody can be attractive in the most shlubby or uniform-like outfit (believe me, my ex-before-last was hot in his orange jumpsuit). I'm not denying that, nor am I saying that women should make themselves deliberately unattractive.
But I do buy clothes because I think they make me look attractive, in a human woman kind of way, rather than attractive in the manner of a fern or a bit of landscape, and that means sexuality on some level. If that's 'injecting sexuality' into the workplace, then you can't avoid it short of the cracks I was making above about the padded Mao jackets.
My emphasis. No -- buying clothes because you think they make you look attractive does not necessarily constitute injecting sexuality into the workplace. This entire discussion is about knowing how to tell the difference, and whether, in a given environment, it matters particularly.
No -- buying clothes because you think they make you look attractive does not necessarily constitute injecting sexuality into the workplace. This entire discussion is about knowing how to tell the difference,
So, buying clothes because you think you look sexually attractive in them, and wearing them to work? Can be okay anywhere. "Injecting sexuality into the workplace"? Wrong, if in a sober environment.
I'm a little stuck on this, unless the way to reconcile them is "You may think you look sexually attractive in those clothes, but trust me, you're not distracting anyone. Wear whatever you like, sugar."
This entire discussion is about knowing how to tell the difference
So, how do you know how to tell the difference?
(believe me, my ex-before-last was hot in his orange jumpsuit).
And while I'm not asking what he was in for, is there a story here?
ex-before-last was hot in his orange jumpsuit
I had not considered inmate road crews as a viable dating pool, but I guess it just goes to show how different men's and women's dating experiences are.
Pwning you just doesn't get old.
Guess I'm headed for the pwnitentiary. I look terrible in orange.
Which reminds me, it used to bug me as a kid that the gambler said "you got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away, know when to run," but the useless f&*ker never explained HOW you know when to hold/fold/walk away/etc. And then he broke even. And yet the singer still seemed to think that he'd gotten some actually useful advice. And then they made a crappy movie about the whole thing, which also failed to offer meaningful tutelage into knowing when to hold/fold/etc. I did, and continue to, call shenanigans.
909: But the traditional stripes would just make you look fat (and easy), so it's kind of a wash.
it used to bug me as a kid that the gambler said
It confused me as a kid that when Lucille picked a fine time to leave him, he had 400 children and a crop in the field. For years I tried to figure out how anybody ends up with 400 children at once.
899. In any organisation, 995 people in 1000 are going to behave like sensible adults over issues like dress, code or no code. Of the remaining five, some will behave childishly by trying to push the boundaries to get a rise out of their colleagues, and others will behave childishly by over-reacting to people who wear stuff they wouldn't. No sympathy with either group.
But, as a point of general principle, in this situation you can either constrain people's behaviour by what boils down to essentially random fiat, or you can encourage people to respond to provocation by ignoring it. I have to favour the second approach, because it doesn't penalise the 995 when they want to spread their wings a little. I have a presumption in favour of fewer rules wherever possible - maybe you don't, I'm not claiming any god given right here.
Of course, if you have a workplace where large numbers of employees get worked up about things like what their colleagues wear for reasons of fashion, snobbery or group politics, then you have a very unhealthy workplace, and I'd take some persuading that this issue is the root cause of the pathology.
"Never count your money, while you're sitting at the table" is useful advice. In hotly contested Monopoly games as a child, I found that concealing my $500s under a stack of $1s made it easier to make advantageous deals.
The weirdest thing about the Citibank employee's lawsuit is that Citibank's alleged discriminatory behavior had to do with her fellow staffmembers' problems: what about the customers? That's of primary relevance, it seems to me.
I do not understand this at all. Should she be claiming that the customers discriminated against her? That seems, uh, counterproductive to her case.
901: T-shirts instead of button-down, work boots or cloth shoes instead of more business-y shoes, and one time when I thought I was fully dialed in with khakis, button down shirt, even the damn shoes were right, and I got bitched out for "looking like a Navvy" because I rolled my sleeves up above the elbow. That last one was social, not work related, but it still pisses me off.
I also run into trouble because I usually wear a cloth hat and sometimes forget to take it off when appropriate.
906: And while I'm not asking what he was in for, is there a story here?
He was restoring classic cars, and that was his favored outfit while doing so. It might not have been orange so much as ... burnt orange? Orangey-brown?
916: But did your nipples ever show?
I found that concealing my $500s under a stack of $1s...
My brother did that. He'd also try to deny that he already had two properties of a given color when trying to buy the third.
That last one was social, not work related, but it still pisses me off.
Rightly so. Although I'm kind of delighted that there's a place where 'navvy' is still a current epithet -- that's a word I've never heard uttered, only read.
913: I am sympathetic to favoring fewer rules, and if I was setting the dress code for my own workplace it would have two: (1) Don't stink, (2) cover your genitals. Once you start getting much more restrictive you run into the clarity issues I've been raving about, which can be handled informally if the overwhelming majority of employees share assumptions about what is or is not appropriate, but if that condition isn't met the next least bad thing is IMO really explicit and unambiguous rules.
I'm still kind of marvelling at 286 in light of and 899.last and 916.
918: Shamefully for a heterosexual man, I actually don't pay much attention to nipples, this thread notwithstanding. Over the weekend I paid more attention to the visibility of my own nipples and I am afraid that the only conclusion possible is that I am a whore.
I'm aware of one meaning for "navvy," but I'm pretty sure it's not the one togolosh means.
915: Should she be claiming that the customers discriminated against her? That seems, uh, counterproductive to her case.
Oh, no, in terms of her case, it makes more sense to claim that her fellow employees were discriminating against her. You're right. I'd just been idly thinking that the more likely scenario might be that customers found her outfits to be offputting -- she wasn't putting forward the image the bank wanted to project.
It would actually be hilarious if she brought suit against customers for discriminating against her.
924: I know it meaning 'laborer' from the 'navigators' who surveyed and dug the canals in England -- seems to make sense in Tologosh's context. What meaning do you know?
What meaning do you know?
"Navajo." It's somewhat derogatory and not used much anymore.
Are there standards of workplace appropriateness when it comes to clothes? Sure. And I think they are subject to reasonable debate and examination based on possible sexism. But being able to see that a woman has nipples underneath her clothes? Really? I though we got past that 40 years ago.
In the situation at my work, the issue wasnt that you could occassionally see them, but the 4/5 days a week visibility.
As I think I mentioned, nobody said anything to her and nobody did anything about it.
I wouldnt have an issue if someone thought it best to discuss it with her to make it happen less frequently.
make it happen less frequently.
How? Willpower? Or are you thinking burlap?
You know, I just went back and looked at the pictures of the lady in the Citibank suit. Anyone who thinks that wearing those clothes should be a fireable offense in any ordinary office is a fucking insane prude, end of story. Seriously.
[Her lawsuit generally sets off my bullshit detector, but we're taking her complaint at face value for the purposes of discussion here].
I agree with Halford.
929: Well, if we're talking 'less frequently' rather than 'never', there's padded bras and heavier fabrics -- it sort of depends on whether we're talking someone with unusually prominent nipples or unusually flimsy clothes. I'd still think a quiet word about "Maybe a cardigan" would be as far as you could reasonably go.
All this nipple talk is getting me kind of hot. Are we sure it's blog-appropriate? It's distracting me from a truly thoughtful take on the second and third wave feminist issues being raised.
Where were you running into trouble?
I wear a tie in my current job and did so in my previous job. In both cases, I'm unusual for this among my peers, and in both cases, my bosses complimented me on my choice (to the point of making it clear they thought something was wrong with my colleagues.)
People have strange ideas about clothes, and as someone who is indifferent to the subject, I realized I could just as easily be indifferent to proper dress while wearing a tie as I could without the tie.
932: Even the quiet word seems ridiculous to me. Nipple erections happen involuntarily, and there's wide variation in the human population as to how frequent and under what circumstances. Do people who sweat a little more than average, or blush easily, or sneeze funny also need a talking to?
So I finally checked out some of the photos of whatshername, and I have mixed feelings. My turn-ons: Shapely breasts, cleavage, erect nipples. My turn-offs: Banks, bankers, banking.
Do people who sweat a little more than average... also need a talking to?
Apparently so, in my experience.
Well, if we're talking 'less frequently' rather than 'never', there's padded bras and heavier fabrics -- it sort of depends on whether we're talking someone with unusually prominent nipples or unusually flimsy clothes.
Or merely excessive AC nearly year round in a southern climate.
True story: I wore excessively baggy t-shirts all through high school so that I could lean forward and my t-shirt would not reveal if my high beams were on or not. I couldn't figure out any other way to deal with the high AC problem. The whole thing was very traumatic to me.
Well, like I said, I could see it if the issue were that she was wearing unusually flimsy clothes. But it's about as intrusive, and as much of your boss's business, as "That shade of yellow green really doesn't suit you -- have you thought of buying some tops in a nice cream-color?" I can imagine a workplace where one reasonably might have that conversation, but usually it'd be none of the employer's business.
Do people who sweat a little more than average, or blush easily, or sneeze funny also need a talking to?
I blush easily. This causes all kinds of problems. For example, my face flushes like I've been drinking for hours before my brain gets a buzz.
sneeze funny also need a talking to?
As someone who sneezes funny, apparently so. (Not that an employer has ever commented. But apparently watching me sneeze is amusing, and I get comments.)
So the Dwarf Name roster so far:
Sifu: Sweaty
Heebie: Perky
Moby: Blushy (aka Lushy)
LB: Sneezy
We've got a fair number of contenders for 'Doc'.
938: Personally, I bring a (5-foot long, light weave cotton, flowy) scarf to work every day, which I toss about my neck and shoulders in a flamboyant manner, and take off and put back on as needed, in order to address any high-beam situation that occurs for a lengthy time, in order in turn to keep my partner from being distracted by my tits for too long, where by "too long" I mean that we're trying to decide how to proceed on this or that, and he's helplessly (apparently) glancing down at my chest a little too often and is losing track of the conversation. Scarf on!
It's because of the AC.
944: Your poor helpless partner.
Seriously, people who can't figure out how to function while in the same vicinity as an erect nipple shouldn't be allowed out in society. They're a danger to the public.
I went out on my lunch break and walked the city streets in search of visible nipples. Because I'm a scientist.
I didn't see any, and of course many folks weren't dressed for work. I'll continue to study this matter, but I suspect that nipple coverage is not the complex matter that some seem to believe.
On a hot summer day, outdoors. Weird.
This conversation is somewhat funny bc my office is probably one of the most casual law offices that you could find.
Court clothes are shed very quickly once you are back from court, and shorts and casual shirts are put on.
Shoes are often not worn.
I suspect that nipple coverage is not the complex matter that some seem to believe.
But so what? Knee coverage is probably even less comples. Should we therefore penalize those who don't cover their knees?
I suspect that nipple coverage is not the complex matter that some seem to believe.
But so what? Knee coverage is probably even less complex. Should we therefore penalize those who don't cover their knees?
944: Unless putting on the scarf conveys, "I see you looking at my chest so stop perving on me," there's not much chance of that working. After he's seen them, covering with something "flowy" is just going to be like meta-lingerie and make him hope that if you shift just right they'll peak out again.
948: Actually, I'm sure it was just weird luck. It's actually perfect weather for visible nipples: Warm enough that some were wearing halter-type tops, but cool and breezy enough for potential activity.
I'll keep studying this matter.
949: I still don't understand what you wanted said woman to do about her "problem". Did she frequently wear clothes substantially flimsier than others in the office?
I'm staying out of the nipple coverage sub-thread, because I've never noticed an issue at work in the 40 years since I got my first job. I assume British bras are made of sterner stuff than American.
he's helplessly (apparently) glancing down at my chest a little too often and is losing track of the conversation
Dude, your partner needs some better socialization.
946: Seriously, people who can't figure out how to function while in the same vicinity as an erect nipplecock shouldn't be allowed out in society. They're a danger to the public.
||
In case Stanley's around, self abuse is henceforth deprecated in the case of Stuart Cable.
|>
Isn't part of the problem of the visible erect nipples that it is also a sign of arousal? I think I would go crazy if like Eddy Murphy in "48Hrs" my dick got hard every time the wind blew. Not that anyone is "confused" and thinking that the plaintiff was sexually aroused by her job.
Seriously, people who can't figure out how to function while in the same vicinity as an erect nipple shouldn't be allowed out in society. They're a danger to the public.
A friend once told me that a man she was conversing with abruptly got up to turn off the lights. He came back and told her that her breasts had been distracting him, and it was better that he not be able to see them. He did not then put on the moves, but rather continued with the conversation while they sat in the dark.
957. Completely false equivalence. Nipples are a mammalian infant feeding organ, only secondarily and mainly socially sexual. If somebody was walking around flashing their clitoris at me (homologous to cock), I might react a bit more strongly.
957: As a high-school student, I certainly saw a reasonable number of unintentional/inappropriate boners on boys in class. Moderately funny the first few times I noticed it, but not really a problem for classroom functioning. I actually never quite figured that one out -- is the teenage-boy-involuntary-hardon thing about accidental arousal leading to an erection, or an arousal-free erection like nipples in a cold room?
her breasts had been distracting him, and it was better that he not be able to see them
Tricksy breastesssess, we hates them, we doesss.
962: What do you mean? It sounds like a great solution: people can wear what they like, but if they're all nipply they have to turn off the lights.
It's more like perma-horniness. Or, see 959 above.
is the teenage-boy-involuntary-hardon thing about accidental arousal leading to an erection, or an arousal-free erection like nipples in a cold room?
As I former teenage boy I will say in my experience there were very few waking moments not characterized by thoughts of sex. So, b.
963: I think it's mainly about having no tolerance yet for the amount of sex hormones raging around one's system, so that even slightly arousing things cause an outsized (laydeez...) response.
"if your headlights are on, our ceiling lights are off."
I thought it was a great solution as well, and was impressed that he used his entire environment to address the problem, rather than defaulting to clothes or willpower.
952: Nope. We're good friends, and it happens that he's male and I'm female. He's not perving, he's just noticing, and my putting on the scarf just returns his attention to the work-related matter at hand. It's really fine -- I'm not offended, and I'm not going to embarrass him. We've known each other long enough that for every time I might seem sexy, there's another time I've been kvetching about ... something very unsexy. Or we've waded through his relationship with his wife, or my latest relationship. 15-year-long friendships just are, or can be, that way. It's fine.
We've got a fair number of contenders for 'Doc'.
And no small number of Dopeys.
In any case, the high school girls of the world seem to be able to ignore the occasionally visible boners around them where it's polite to do so.
974: Yes, they generally only give attention to their dog's penis in the privacy of their own home.
972: Have you considered turning the AC up, leaving your scarf at home, and cheating him out of his half of the business? If he's that easily distracted, someone's going to take his lunch money one of these days, and it might as well be you.
and was impressed that he used his entire environment to address the problem, rather than defaulting to clothes or willpower.
Couldn't he just close his eyes? Why did he have to inflict his idiocy on anyone else in the room?
the high school girls of the world seem to be able to ignore the occasionally visible boners around them
Not if you're doing it right.
960, 977: You know, I try not to be too "Help help, I'm being oppressed," but unless the guy doing it was really non-threatening, this would creep me out badly. "I am so aroused by the sight of your breasts that I am unable to keep from talking about it inappropriately or acting bizarrely" is a disturbing thing to say to someone.
981: Followed by him plunging the room into darkness too.
I have what seems to be the opposite problem, re nipple-hiding, than the one assumed here: it's difficult for me to dress for fieldwork and not show
lumps. Note that this is a case of needing to wear what men wear, for practical reasons, with no customers, and having an additional burden of heat/constriction/worry. Padded bras by themselves aren't always enough, and fishermen's vests get caught on things.
When dressing in 'business' clothes, I am generally annoyed that one is required to be pseudo-sexy: to wear clothes that exaggerate
sexual features (heels, underwire bras, lipstick) but not to be 'too sexy'. The system profits because every woman is potentially guilty
of something undefinably unprofessional at all times, so that's that many more intimidated workers; and the psyche suffers because this is making object
sexuality OK and subject sexuality not OK. Argh.
I am trying to be sympathetic with what you seem to be saying, togolosh, based on how much I hated having to deny ever being attracted or horny as an
adolescent; but I lose all sympathy when you want to control all the women you might be attracted to... When one thing is hidden, the next most personal trait on
view gets fascinating and forbidden and evil. Face the nipple, scorn the pharma saleswoman, and deal.
976: You're so reasonable and matronly as a background state, and then you shark out with these things. Joy.
He plunged the room into darkness, then explained why.
It is odd, and the dude was apparently a modestly socialized RPGer. But not a scary one, so she wasn't scared. I still love that he came up with something different from "put on more clothing!" or "think about something else!". Notice that the burden of operating in the dark fell on both parties equally, which the standard two remedies don't.
976 is indeed a joygiving comment.
I don't think Matronly is a very good dwarf name for LB.
Precis, maybe.
Notice that the burden of operating in the dark fell on both parties equally
Which is exactly the problem. Her only sin was having breasts, and yet his solution burdens both of them.
984 is generally great, but I'm now wondering what fieldwork is? I'm thinking it's something hot and outdoorsy, so you're in tshirts and feeling overexposed, but I'm not sure that I'm reading you correctly.
988: Yep, both her breasts were burdened. That's exactly what I meant.
See, I just can't think straight when breasts are in the comment thread.
That's a problem from your starting point. For the people who start from "She should be in a burqa so he isn't tempted!", he has taken on more of the remedy than needed.
Whatever. I just love that he came up with a whole new solution.
I'LL NEVER BE YOUR BREAST OF BURDEN.
972: 952 wasn't the most serious comment I've ever written.
976: If he's that easily distracted
Eh, it comes and goes. Depends on a person's state of mind, I'm sure. Sometimes he's not distracted for days and weeks and months, years, even! Can't really pull one over on the guy, even if you wanted to. If there's a good old-fashioned political development at hand, something that invites an intellectual snarl, a bug-a-boo, certainly we'll have days of mutual carrying on about Goldman Sachs' shenanigans, the corporatization of American government and society, and whatnot, no tits need apply.
On preview: I see that 976 has garnered some kudos, which is weird to me. Look, my partner is my good friend. You don't have friends with whom there is occasional good-natured sexual acknowledgment? This seems normal and fine to me. I don't think the man needs to be excoriated for it.
I just can't think straight when breasts are in the comment thread
T/tt/es turn M/tch gay.
*That fruit is hanging so low you should be ashamed to pluck it, OK?
Couldn't even tell it was there.
inconvenient adolescent boners
See, that attitude right there is the problem. They aren't inconveniences. Every adolescent boner is an *opportunity*.
995: There's good-natured sexual acknowledgment, and then there's having trouble carrying on a coherent conversation with an old friend if her nipples are showing through her clothes. The latter seems, while so long as it's involuntary it's not worthy of excoriation or a moral failing, to put him way out on one end of the distractibility scale.
The Chinese character for "opportunity" is a combination of the characters for "danger" and "boner".
You don't have friends with whom there is occasional good-natured sexual acknowledgment
I find that if I don't cover up my crotch, all my friends just tend to stand there mesmerized.
And, whoops. Um, anyone who needs to get their last licks in should, but isn't 1000 around the length where the server starts creaking? Not that I know how to close a thread.
1000: Or so they told me in e-mail.
Every adolescent boner is an *opportunity*
I suppose you would take advantage of some geezers 4 hour viagra/cialis erection, too. Opportunist.
Perhaps covering up your nipples isn't the way to go, parsi, as he's obviously not getting the message. Try gluing a pair of googly eyes to your shirt right at nipple level.
Or perhaps a t-shirt that reads "take a picture, it'll last longer".
G'night all. Film of togolosh's workplace at 11:00
984:...I lose all sympathy when you want to control all the women you might be attracted to...
Again with this! I don't want to control anyone! I want unambiguous standards instead of this sloppy "professional attire" bullshit, which leads directly into the pseudo-sexy issue that bothers you. Clearly nipple visibility is a boundary case where some people feel it does not even register as near the boundary and others feel it is over the line. To me it seems past the line for an institution that seeks to present a conservative image, such as a bank. That doesn't mean any woman shouldn't dress as she pleases when not subject to such a dress code.
If there were a business suit equivalent for women this would all be a non-issue.
1003: having trouble carrying on a coherent conversation with an old friend
I didn't say he was incoherent, for heaven's sake. Just being distracted. I'm not sure why you're extending a mild characterization to an extreme one.
Oh. 1000. Have we achieved closure?
I've been rubbing my nipples wait for this thread to get to 1000. Now they hurt. Thanks guys.
It's like everyone is distracted and not listening all that carefully. I hate it when that happens.
I knew that if anything could bring the Unfogged server down, it would be the sight of an exposed nipple.
Not that I know how to close a thread.
First, you have to get Bob McM to post a comment saying, "I think Obama is doing the best that anybody can expect under the circumstances and we should all give him our support."
Oh, good. You all made it to 1000 when I wasn't looking.
The best part about this thread is that the guy from the space-saving furniture store will probably stumble upon it, think "Wow! 1000 comments about my store! Awesome!" and then start reading.
Well designed furniture makes probably makes his nipples jut out, so we'll have been some use to him.
On the allocation of burdens: There's a street parade in Seattle that has nude people in it, and before the nude people pass, come others crying 'Nudity ahead!' and offering paper bags to those who object. I have seen someone wear the paper bag in convincing seriousness and good will, and their neighbor told them when it was OK to come out.
parsimon, it seems normal and fine that your friend is occasionally attracted to you and you notice. It seems wierd that *you* feel obliged to manage yourself in response on such a brisk time-scale and without his saying anything. Privilege is not having to think about having privilege, so an interaction you have to think about is ... someone else's privilege. I'm not going to accept it as an unquestioned norm.
togolosh, I can't read your comments and not get that you want 'unambiguous standards' based on how *you* respond to other people. But altering their clothes doesn't do anything inside your head.
(My fieldwork is either digging trenches or auguring holes into the sweet sweet soil, ecstatic living skin of the earth; and then leaving sensors and wells in them and coming back regularly to extract samples. It's the first half that's hard to dress for -- there is no feminine for 'navvy'. Mostly I aim for 'I probably won't die'. I'm not nearly as prudish as kids these days (though I think I was more prudish about myself when I was a kid, so), but I read threads like these and get anxious about what everyone else thinks.)
I'm grooving on the Feminist Hulk's twitter feed that k-sky linked to above:
HULK SAY FEMINISM IS THE RADICAL NOTION THAT WOMEN ARE PEOPLE, PEOPLE WHO SMASH PHALLOGOCENTRISM WITH (BIG GREEN) FISTS!
HULK SMASH MASTER'S HOUSE! THEN HULK MELT DOWN MASTER'S TOOLS AND USE METAL TO MAKE ADORABLE LITTLE BASKET TO HANG ON FRONT OF HULK BIKE.
HULK'S PENIS NOT THREATENED BY FEMALE EMPOWERMENT. HULK SMASH MALE PRIVILEGE INTO HEGEMONIC SHRAPNEL!
ALSO, HULK THINK "HEGEMONIC SHRAPNEL" WOULD BE GOOD BAND NAME.
HULK NOT THREATENED BY ACKNOWLEDGING THE PERFORMATIVITY OF GENDER. HULK NOT REQUIRE MASCULINITY OR ESSENTIALISM TO LOVE HULK BODY.
This is good stuff.
1026: I'm more than happy to adapt to whatever the standard is. I'm not willing to be told that there is a standard, it's completely obvious and therefore will never be explicitly stated, and then get pilloried for thinking the boundary lies somewhere that some other people thing is too prudish, especially when there are obviously folks who share my understanding of its location.
1030: Well, how about trying to get over assuming that women who cross your notion of the boundary do so to be "consciously and deliberately slutty looking"?
1031: I have made it abundantly clear that the notion you find so offensive isn't my considered opinion. It's utterly irrational. My considered opinion is being formed by the things said in this thread by people who are actually talking about the subject rather than about me. My previous opinion had been that it's always best to assume these sorts of things are inadvertent failures to meet the ideal, but apparently the notion that there is an ideal is fairly contentious.
Everyone has irrational gut reactions that need to be overridden by understanding and basic decency. The way you figure out what they are and which gut instincts you ought to trust is by talking about them, not pretending they don't exist.
Everyone has irrational gut reactions that need to be overridden by understanding and basic decency.
Especially when they drive.
actually never quite figured that one out -- is the teenage-boy-involuntary-hardon thing about accidental arousal leading to an erection, or an arousal-free erection like nipples in a cold room?
Arousal, definitely. Sigh. I miss being turned on 24/7.
1034: Maybe you should move closer to me, PGD.
parsimon, it seems normal and fine that your friend is occasionally attracted to you and you notice. It seems wierd that *you* feel obliged to manage yourself in response on such a brisk time-scale and without his saying anything. Privilege is not having to think about having privilege, so an interaction you have to think about is ... someone else's privilege. I'm not going to accept it as an unquestioned norm.
Thanks for the somber reply, clew.
I wouldn't generalize my relationship with my work partner to any other male-female relationship; that is, in some cases such a situation might be indicative of male privilege.
In this case it is not. It's just me deciding that I don't feel like taking it up at the time. Really. I could say, or do, something: I could melodramatically cross my arms over my chest. My partner would blush tremendously; we'd stare at each other; we'd then both burst out laughing and he'd apologize and we'd laugh a bit more and then say, "So anyway, about the email from the person we were discussing ...."
This may not make any sense to the outside observer. The point in any case is that *I* don't feel obliged to manage myself. I don't have to.
In other kinds of working environments, this would and could work out very differently. But this is a two-person office, people who have known each other for 15 years.
I think Obama is doing the best that anybody can expect under the circumstances and we should all give him our support.
Everybody poops and has nipples
But not everyone poops out of their nipples.
Wrong about the other thing. 1039 to 1037 which was to 1021.
So you're still working on pooping out your nipples?
1037: McManus, that must have hurt, and yet: it wasn't enough to break the blog. How about: "Feeling good about Obama is more important to me than any mere matter of policy"? Do you think you could say that, Bob? Now, just take it slowly...
Mary Catherine is being really mean. I don't think I've ever seen anything so outrageous.
I voted for that tiny little guy from Cleveland.
I thought I had closed the thread.
Emerson wrote a good piece at Open :eft over the weekend on the Progressives and the New Deal.
Jon Walker of FDL is starting a series on the Anti-Saloon League 1893-1920
"Power in politics comes from the ability to destroy."
...JW, from above. Beautiful
Adam Binks at OL asked today how far can we go to reform the Democrats, how many seats can we afford to lose? Isn't there a limit where the monsters gain control, mustn't we compromise?
Lose them all. Then go after the Republicans.
There is no power to elect a good candidate, only to get rid of the bad ones. Only the "no" can assert existence.
"She should be in a burqa so he isn't tempted!"
Or perhaps that leads to vastly more weird situations.
