There's an extra quotation mark on the end that broke the link.
Damn you quick-triggered people. I'm still going to do a post on this article. Save your good comments!
Austen is one of the pioneers of the no-relationship policy.
Actually, the no-relationship policy is only revolutionary in our time. In the past it was quite common.
Actually, as I was reading the article (and writing the post) I was wondering whether and to what extent guys suffer from similar kinds of not-good-enough anxiety and overachiever syndrome. We've got a good sense of it in women, in everything from eating disorders to homeschooling the kids. Presumably in guys perfectionism takes different forms--workaholics? Or is there something that we do to boys that insulates them against this shit?
We could keep this thread for Austen, and leave you the high-school girls?
Leave at least one high-school girl for me, thanks.
Guys are under pressure to be cool, rebellious and tough. Meeting that male standard is objectively more destructive than any female standard is -- by the time you're 25 or 30 your life might be over. However stressful and destructive of self-esteem the female standard is, it doesn't turn you into an uneducated, unemployable jerk.
Yeah, leave me the high school girls. I'm writing the post now.
Besides 8, I suspect guys are more apt to get the "you're so smart" brand of counterproductive praise.
Being cool, rebellious, and tough may make men unemployable jerks, but it also makes them turn into Republican voters.
This is not the portrait of a woman who would have remained single at the end of the 18th century if she hadn't wanted to.
12: Who cares? I have no fucking idea what most 18th Century authors look like. I have idea what most authors look like. I believe Henry James was a gigantic fatass, but that's not why I feel imposed upon by any requirement that I ready any of his work.
Who cares?
But sensitive non-cyborg readers like to imagine that they're having sex with the author (or having a beer with him, if they're manly), so hot is good.
Which is where the articles in the Times about exactly how sexy Trollope was all come from.
Maybe women and gay men just aren't sensitive readers. Did you think of that?
It must be true, because I've never once in my life fantasized about fucking Charles Dickens, despite his unsubtle surname.
Aside from the stupid "must market all authors as hott, even the ones who are, you know, dead" thing, there's this pernicious cultural myth that being fat and/or ugly means that you must be miserable and unmarriageable. This doesn't even make any kind of numerical sense, because it suggests that plain and/or fat men don't marry anyone--the good-looking ones marry the good-looking women, a few rich ugly guys get married, and then the rest of 'em just figure "Hey, I'd rather do anything in the whole world than marry someone who isn't better-looking than me". And in time when almost everyone got married, that's really unlikely.
And of course, it's a stupid and pernicious myth now--you can be plenty happy/married/hooked-up even if you're fat and/or plain, in my experience, provided that you have a bit of self-confidence. That, of course, is the tricky part.
We can accept that Austen might have been a Cinderella -- underappreciated, with an elusive beauty of character and intellect that maybe took a little getting used to -- but the dreary spinster of the Cassandra sketch isn't anyone we recognize.
OH NOES. This article doesn't even make sense. In that same last paragraph, he says that if Austen wasn't part of the "hott" club, it would have been "unfair." Since when do we require that people who depict beautiful people be beautiful? Also, he fucking notes that she gives very little physical description of her characters. The reason we think of her characters as hot is because everyone cast in a movie or tv series about anything is hot. What an idiot.
I've covered this one. "You loser! Why don't you have any self-confidence! No wonder everyone despises you!"
Another ugly eighteenth-century woman author. She did get married, though.
re: 11
It also makes them dead.
Male self-destructive behaviour tends to be literally rather than metaphorically lethal.
re: 5
There's also a huge degree of social pressure on men not to admit to those kinds of anxieties.
22: I think The Simpsons covered it first, with Troy McLure's seminal self-help workshop: "Get Confident, Stupid!"
21: In point of fact, Darcy says that Elizabeth *isn't* very pretty. Austen says that Fanny Price is distinctly plain. Emma, I think, is the only one described specifically as "pretty." Marianne Dashwood is beautiful, but she's a supporting character.
I love in Arrested Development that their Girls Gone Wild !series is called Girls With Low Self-Esteem!
There's also a huge degree of social pressure on men not to admit to those kinds of anxieties.
Yes, and I wonder if that's more or less damaging than the social pressure to constantly minimize one's accomplishments. We know that women are damaged economically and professionally by being "modest"; I think they're also damaged psychologically. Men, I think are damaged psychologically by having to play Mr. Confident Guy all the time, but doesn't it actually work to their advantage socially?
Jane Austen's books seem to be packaged nowadays as high-society romance novels, but her view of the marriage competition is pretty darn hard-nosed, and the happy endings I remember seem to be a matter of pure luck. And the country gentry in "Sense and Sensibility" are not at all elegant -- fussy-genteel women and good-old-boy guys.
My Anne Hathaway concept didn't fly last time I floated it, but look at this picture (from Kotsko).
To me, if her secondary secondary characteristics were exaggerated another 10% you'd have an anime princess. Make her eyes 10% bigger and 10% wider set, her mouth 10% wider, fuller, and redder, her cleavage 10% deeper and her bust 10% fuller, and she'd be inhuman. It's like she marks reality side of the boundary between fantasy and reality.
And no, not a good Jane Austen. She could be one of those women who entrances a king and brings a nation to ruin, though.
I think that if guys survive their teenage butthead stage and develop a skill or get a profession, they're at an advantage because of their capacity for aggression. But a lot of guys really blow it pretty early.
re: 31
Yeah, I think that's right. The confidence/aggression thing is a real plus when you're an educated professional, but it stops a lot of people getting anywhere near that status.
In 2002 or 2003, Duke published a report on this stuff amongst their undergrads. All I remember of it (where "it" means "short newspaper articles about it") was describing the standard for women as "effortless perfection" - hot, smart, all that stuff, but it had to seem like it was natural and not a product of hard work.
What gets me is the way they describe her as "unlucky in love", when her books make it clear that love is often the undoing of a woman (or at least a secondary consideration) and material circumstance is the thing to plump for. Think of disasterous Lydia in P&P...
It seems so obvious, but I fell over with happiness when my friend at theatre school said "when the script says 'you're so beautiful, you're the most beautiful person in the world' it means that's what the character thinks - it doesn't mean you have to go cast the most beautiful person in the world so the actor can say the line. The person could look like anything, it isn't relevant."
But that is, in fact, how North American casting works. And then that thinking bleeds over into other areas.
I love certain French romantic movies where you can't tell at first who the leads are. You actually have to watch the film to find out.
31 - I concur, but I'd add the constraint that they also get some sort of credential. Men that bail off the path of good grades and long hours at 17 have a much tougher time than ones that do that at 23.
33: That "Never let them see you sweat" thing has been the guide for men since I discovered fire and moved from the tree to a cave. There's nothing new there except that it applies to women too now.
I totally didn't read the Austen article but from the first paragraph or so I got the idea that it was going to be critical of a tendency external to the article, to try and market Austen as a beauty queen. Was this a mis-perception? Did the article make a u-turn and become what it had started out to criticize? Or was the criticism just an excuse to bring in the beautiful-Austen trope?
When did the NY Times begin publishing The Onion articles as if they were serious journalism? I swear I thought it was an April Fools joke when I read this bit:
"Austen "wasn't much of a looker," Helen Trayler, the managing director of Wordsworth, told reporters in Britain. "She's the most inspiring, readable author, but to put her on the cover wouldn't be very inspiring at all."
Ms. Trayler added that she was also thinking of making over "George Eliot, who was frumpy, and William Wordsworth, who was pretty hideous." "
And the author can't even be consistent. He remarks in the next paragraph that contemporaries considered her "very attractive" and "like a doll." What the fuck? Was she pretty or not? Whose standards are you applying, anyway?
GAH. What a fucking piece of work.
The most insane thing in the Times article was the claim that we know less about Austen than about Shakespeare, citing Greenblatt's entertaining and well-informed book of pure speculation about Bill as evidence. For Austen we have contemporary letters all over the place, and among so much else we know that several of her close relatives lived in one of the most meticulously documented microcultures in history, the Royal Navy. Yet with Shakespeare, the evidence about the glover's son from Stratford is so thin that lots of non-entirely-insane people think he wasn't the playwright at all. (I am not one of those people, but could you imagine by contrast arguing that the historical Austen couldn't have been the person to write Austen's books?)
Duke published a report on this stuff amongst their undergrads [...] hot, smart, all that stuff, but it had to seem like it was natural and not a product of hard work.
No wonder they're depressed. They're failing on all counts.
DaveMB is not a not-entirely-insane person. Got it.
One of the things that I found interesting in the JA article was that it appears that no one took a look at contemporary fashion illustrations - the women in them look pretty much like that sketch of Austen her sister did - vide a picture from the 1798 Gallery of Fashion [1794-1803]. No 21st century supermodels...
My favorite part about this article is this:
These students are aware that because more girls apply to college than boys, amid concerns about gender balance, boys may have an edge at some small selective colleges.
So it's even harder for girls to get into good colleges nowadays, because so many more of them are getting into good colleges. For the NYT, if you are a member of a Designated Oppressed Group, your glass is always half-empty, even when it's overflowing.
