collected notes

I had a dispiriting conversation with a co-worker the other day about what an awful environment my school is, especially for freshmen. I was saying that I didn't understand why certain students - the ones who end up in a lot of conflicts with teachers and are doing absolutely no school work, zero, not even moving towards getting a single credit - come to school. He said he thought that for some students, school is better than home. It's safer and less scary. To put this in context, in the three weeks since the head of the school district where I work announced a zero-tolerance policy for threats and assaults on teachers⁰¹ under which any threats or assaults get a mandatory 10-day suspension, one kid has been suspended for hitting me with a door and two more have been suspended for threatening me. Our bulletin boards get torn down within a week, and, in one hallway, there's at least one plexiglass window punched out of a door every week. There are fights between students every day, and constant casual violence that's not quite a fight. It's hard for me to imagine wanting to be there, but I think my colleague is right.

******

Today a girl asked if I was pregnant. No. Are you sure? YES.² I told her I had my period, and she said, "Oh, that must be why you look pregnant."

To her, there was nothing weird about her teacher talking about her period. I can't even imagine being that comfortable with menstruation or body stuff at that age. It's a great virtue of a cultural pocket where lots of people get pregnant at all sorts of ages.

******

A friend from high school called on Tuesday night. Let's call him Kermit, which is clearly not his real name, but I can't come up with a descriptive pseudonym for him. I think it's because I've known him too long and in too many ways. Conveniently, that's also why I wanted to write about him. We've been friends for something like ten years. He was my prom date, he and I started a surprisingly effective single-issue political organization, he sent me letters when I was at camp in Canada, and yesterday he called to let me know that a political thing I passed on to him is going to pass. I was so happy to hear from him. So happy. And surprised, some, but mostly just happy. He's always been a really good friend to me, and I'm always a little surprised at how good a friend. Surprised? Because when we became friends, I thought of myself as someone who didn't have a lot of friends, and I didn't trust the world that much. Kermit is a prime counter-example for that.

******

He said, as have my parents, that he's proud or impressed or something about me teaching this year. I would feel better about that if I were doing something useful, not just baby-sitting my students through one more year of not learning any math.

******

Someone needs to leave a comment here.

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1. As opposed to before, when they were tolerated. I wish I were joking.
2. Do you have any idea how not pregnant I am? I only sleep with my girlfriend who can't get me pregnant, I have my period, and, just in case, I got a pregnancy test last Wednesday so I could get vaccinated against HPV.

ill-fated advice

I'm writing from class, which is kind of ridiculous. Then again, so is class.

The people facilitating a 3-hour workshop on working with English language learners for my grad school class are currently off on a tangent about how important constructivist learning and teaching are. Constructivist educational philosophy essentially is about people constructing and developing their own knowledge and integrating real-world situations with learning. It's great. It's how I'd like to teach. But there are two problems, both of them recently voiced by people in this gigantic lecture hall, both of them worse for people who are first-year teachers in disastrous schools.

1. I teach math, and there are specific mathematical concepts I need to teach. While math is everywhere, and I completely, 100% believe that students learn math much better if they see it as a formal way of writing the math that they already do in their lives, it's hard to come up with concrete applications that make everything make sense. Now, if I teach math for 5 years, I'll have a lot more; and there's no excuse for the crappiness of my area and perimeter lessons. But when people say, "Yeah, it's a lot of work, but it's worth it," you have to ask, "For whom? On what time scale?" For me, this week, it's not. I promise. Next week, maybe. Next year, definitely. In the long term, no question at all. But for my own sanity, I need to accept that this year I will teach many crappy lessons that don't fully lead to understanding. I wish I had fewer lessons focused on why it's important for me to teach that way, and more help figuring out exactly how to do that.

2. Another teacher pointed out that our students are mostly used to a mode of teaching that's all about direct instruction and transmitting information. When we try to have them construct their own knowledge, they're like, "You're not teaching!" Martin Haberman wrote about the pedagogy of poverty as a set of teaching methods that rewards rote compliance, but he also pointed out that it has benefits (in terms of safety and ease) for students, and that students often push teachers to use it by complying with the pedagogy of poverty and rebelling against anything else. It takes a while to dissolve this. In an environment in which other teachers are also asking students to question, challenge, and solve problems, that resistance goes away a lot faster. The whole school environment needs to be oriented around learning and problem-solving, not just one classroom. And not just because I'm lazy.

Also. Can I just say. Next person who says "frontloading", "scaffolding", or "differentiation" as if I'd never heard the words before gets a plastic fork in the eye.

things that have been said to me today

bad:
"Are you confused? one plus one equals two! two plus two equals four! pussy plus pussy equals dyke!"

"you alien-looking motherfucker"

"bitch" (x50)

good:
"Freedom Writers"

"you want to teach here?"

"you's a boss"

roll call

Declared candidacies for US president, with high-school yearbook style awards:

Democrats
Tom Vilsack: Most Boring Candidate.
Hillary Clinton: Most Polarizing Candidate.
Barack Obama: Best Smile.
Chris Dodd: Most Pointless Candidacy.
John Edwards: Best Hair.
Dennis Kucinich: Biggest Nerd.
Mike Gravel: Who the hell is that?

Republicans
Sam Brownback: Attila the Hun Memorial Senator.
Mike Smith/John Cox: Who the hell is that?

miracles are not a policy

I don't know where Tom Moore teaches, or what kind of teacher he is, but he's right on.

One thing I've realized this year is that teaching is full of lovely little moments. I've had a pretty hellacious year so far, I'm not a great teacher, and I still have those moments. And those moments - that's what's in the movies. To string them together into an incredible year, where your work fundamentally changes your students' lives, is an extraordinary achievement. Jaime Escalante and Erin Gruwell and the many, many others who aren't in movies are extraordinary. But the movies - at least if Tom Moore's article and the trailers I watched are to be believed - seriously underestimate the challenges they face, maybe because it's hard to make a moving and comprehensible movie scene out of 30 kids screaming at each other at the same time, or the process of trying to track down bathroom, elevator, and classroom keys, or an activity in which your students refuse to participate pretty much at all.

Worse, just as Moore says, is the idea that teachers can, should, must be heroes. Jaime Escalante and Erin Gruwell and all the other people who change their students' lives are extraordinary. There are 3.8 million teachers in the US. Asking them all to be superheroes and miracle workers is just another way to avoid the real problems of public education.

so, what do I think? #2

In that last post about changing public education I talked a lot about money, and I did something that annoys me when other people do it - namely, I bad-mouthed teachers at schools 'like mine.' This annoys me because, hey, you think teachers don't teach well? Here. You try it. Try teaching four periods a day with no office to send kids to, no curriculum for two of those periods, your personal safety in danger, fights on a regular basis, and your students 5 or 6 grade levels behind. Not so easy now, is it? There are a million things I know I should do and just don't, for all sorts of essentially personal reasons about needing time and energy spent away from school.

Last night, I was talking to a friend about her school, where there have been no fights since October 26, 2005, and where the principal mentions that at each Thursday's all-school meeting and there are three full-time deans who deal with anyone who's disruptive in class or talking about thinking about maybe fighting. This is what we like to call a 'support system.' I said that I had realized that at my school, with no support system, it is actually possible to create the support system yourself. I can't do it, but it can be done. She said, yes, but you shouldn't have to, and you can't as a first-year teacher. Which about sums it up.

Basically, being an excellent teacher at a failing school is an almost superhuman endeavor. I think. There are a few teachers who may be counter-examples, but I suspect they pull at least a few superhuman stunts. This is why I have so little patience with people who talk smack about teachers as if we're THE reason public education is so messed up. So why did I talk smack?

Well, mostly because it seems like the math teacher my students had last year just gave them a B+ for showing up. Because my brightest, most motivated students are still mostly behind - and I know it's not their fault because they catch up so damn fast. So. There are at least some really bad teachers out there.

sparks

I have to remember the good moments, because the bad ones are measured in hours.

Today, in the half hour before lunch, I offered my room to four junior girls who needed a place to work on math for a test prep class. One of them is the smartest most articulate wundermonkey in any of my classes, who's frustrated in my class because it's too slow: she was tutoring the others (which, by the way, she does amazingly, because she's also a natural at that part of teaching). When we got to the room, another girl was waiting - she spent the next twenty minutes writing down the homework she needed to make up. Twenty minutes in, it was lunch time. An 11-th grade girl who's way, way, way behind (in a class that averages 6 grade levels behind) and trying furiously to catch up (partly so she can be a good mom to her daughter) came in, got a calculator, and sat down with the girls working on test prep. A guy who's constantly trying to improve his grade from, say, a 92 to a 97 (which, at my school, is endearing rather than irritating) came in to catch up on back homework - I told him I'd give him extra credit if he taught inverse functions to the other girl who was working on homework and she did well on a quiz. A 9th-grader started working on a diagnostic test. Meanwhile, four people formed a line to talk to me about why they were suspended and what their grades were.

That was when the principal walked in. She said, "What class is this?"

It's not class. They're here because they want to be.

so, what do I think? #1

I teach high school math in a very poor, very violent neighborhood in a major US city with a really bad school system. I'm a first-year teacher, and it's a mess. My background is intellectual, upper middle class, focused on social responsibility, politically active, and liberal: that describes my parents and grandparents, and the parents of many of my friends. Almost none are teachers. Periodically, people ask what policies I think would improve the public schools. Recently, a stranger on a plane asked. This is the first of what I hope will be an occasional series exploring some possibilities. I'm interested in seeing how my thinking changes over the next year and a half.

To put one of my premises out there: I imagine, as I say these things, a conservative (like one I recently met on a plane) saying that parents should be responsible for these changes; that expectation is not reasonable or realistic, for reasons I might write about later, and really I think it's irrelevant. Do you want students in low-income districts to have the same educational opportunities as students in wealthy districts? Yes or no. If yes, saying parents should be responsible is a cop-out, unless you have a plan to make or help parents be responsible. Without further ado, the proposals.

1. More money. Schools in impoverished areas shouldn't get funding parity with wealthier districts - they should get double the per student funding. Among other things, parents in wealthy districts provide a vast number of resources that poor parents simply cannot provide: graphing calculators that students can use at home, buying college reference books, making sure their students get therapy or medications if they have mental illness, dental care, computers and internet at home - the list goes on. Money is not the only thing my students need, and more could certainly be done with the current budget, but let's be real: many of the people who refuse to throw money at the education of poor children are the same ones who throw money at their own children's education. They're not doing that for nothing.

2. More staff. See #1. Having someone constantly available to manage a student who's out of control (e.g. an office to send that student to) would free up a lot of my time to actually teach. Instead, what happens is that if a student disrupts or endangers the class, I write up a disciplinary referral and it gets dealt with later; if I'm really lucky, someone will be available to take that student, but those people all teach their own classes and are pretty overworked; they also don't have anywhere to put the student where the student will be supervised. In better-functioning schools, you can just send a kid to the office for cursing at you; in my school, no way.

More staff also means smaller class sizes, which, wow. That would be awesome. Thirty-three kids is a lot. Maybe even having two preps be standard - I have that this year, and it's great, and I don't know how I functioned without it for 2 months.

3. Better staff. The quality of most teachers is, well, not stellar. (I include myself in this, though I think one way in which I am unlike many of the other teachers at my school is that I really want to get better.) The recent NYT magazine article about the achievement gap and the KIPP schools casually mentioned that KIPP teachers work 15-16 hour days. That's great for the students, but it's not a national policy solution. You can get a few more smart, motivated, ambitious, etc, people into teaching by upping the mystique, and a lot more by making public schools better work environments, but to do this on a national scale you'll have to up the salaries. That kind of time commitment is what people do in I-banking, where they are making boatloads of money. I'd suggest making teacher schools something like law or MBA programs, where you worry about whether you'll get in and have to be intensely devoted to it for at least a year or two; I'd also suggest having teacher salaries start at $60,000 and go up to $150,000. You could even start lower if you were willing to make the ramp pretty steep. Teaching will never fully compete with Wall Street - that's not the idea. But you want a lot of talented people who have other options? You're going to have to pay for them.

I am not sure if doing that would produce a system where I wanted to work right now. For me, teaching was a step up financially, and I was fine with that. But realistically, money is a great way to attract people to a particular job, and while that kind of environment might make me less interested in teaching now, the money (and the doubtless improved work environment) might also make me more interested in teaching long-term.

4. Better management. See #3 and #1. Management at most public schools is abysmal. I have this fantasy of having professional development that's not a complete waste of my time, seeing the teaching schedules for half-days and special events before the day of, and getting feedback from observations. This, again, you have to pay for.

5. Better staff/management development. I'm going to write more about this another time.

6. For the luvva Pete, can I please just have a curriculum for every class? And maybe a computer in my classroom? And while I'm wishing for the impossible, how about paper for the flippin' copy machine?

Idlewild

What's most interesting about Idlewild (OutKast's gorgeous movie set in a semi-mythical Prohibition-era Georgia) is not what it owes to the past, but to the present. The score, of course - there's no way those songs would have existed 'then' - but also the dance scenes, floating somewhere between musicals and music videos, and the characters.

It's simple, really. Before there were gangstas, there were gangsters; before there was crack, there was hootch; before there was the club, there was the club. More complicated things, too: the role of women as simultaneous seduction and salvation, the dream of getting out, the fear and reality of violence, having to choose between being cool and having a future. Idlewild is about now, dressed up as then. Elijah Anderson's Code of the Street is about the same subjects, but it's not half as pretty.

home is....

Three full-time residents, three cars. Looking around a roomful of friends and realizing I've known everyone in it for over 10 years, except for the little siblings (I met them 8 years ago). Bonjovi on the radio. "You only bought two and a half pounds of green beans? That might be enough for your little brother.... by himself!" Constantly being interrupted. An orange and a penny in my Christmas stocking; also contact solution. At least two glasses of wine a night. The promise of the interstate. New bars with exciting beer lists and murals - what's happening to this place? My grandmother's artwork on the walls. Scraping the frost off my car before I can go anywhere. Buying rounds at the bar. My dad making cappuccino. Watching most of the first season of Big Love on DVD. My little brother at the computer. Being the only one up at 2 am. Borrowing cash from my mom to go out for a beer. Drinking cream soda and root beer. Apple pie. A golden retriever sleeping sprawled between the top of the stairs and the door. Strip malls. When the cop who breaks up the [very quiet] party is my high school biology teacher's son. Sleeping until noon. Homemade granola. Tonight's dinner question: what would you do about Iraq? They let you smoke in the bars. Almost certainly being safe to drive. My sister napping on the couch. Mexican wedding cookies, molasses-ginger drops, sugar cookies, and lebkuchen. Emmy Lou Harris singing "Light of the Stable." Knowing how to get everywhere. Do you want to talk to someone on the other side of the house? No need to go anywhere - just shout! Knowing that Git'n'Go used to be a QuikTrip. Winter grasses at the edge of the garden. The lieutenant governor coming over for brunch. Frustrating and comfortable. Drinking beer in an outdoor gear outlet store at 3 am because my friend is the manager, and the cops broke up the party at her house. Dancing to Journey. My friends' parents. Hearing about Catholic Worker houses. Hypothetical karaoke. More prosciutto than you could possibly eat. Drinking champagne. The dishwasher running constantly. Driveways with basketball hoops. Someone has to go to the grocery store every day. New kittens. Two dogs. Trading Christmas cookie plates with my friends' families. The gold dome of the Capitol building. Being surprised by how white everyone is. Driving past my high school. Reading articles aloud to each other. My mom asking what I think of the garden. Red pepper pasta sauce. Adriatic pita bread. Blessings for the road. Never wanting to stay. Never wanting to leave.

sex-neutral

In 2005, I borrowed a book called A Return to Modesty¹ and got kind of annoyed with it.

Conveniently, someone else has written the same book again, so I don't have to come up with new ways to be irritated. Dawn Eden² is older, and she became an observant Catholic instead of an observant Jew, but it's basically the same old same old. Some woman becomes religious, stops having sex, and realizes how much happier and more fulfilled she is when she's chaste (or celibate or modest or whatever) and religious. Next step: publish a book so all the rest of us can learn how to be just as satisfied with our lives.³

The arguments are oddly similar to the way polyamory advocates sound sometimes: "Why didn't I know about this before? I spent all that time trying to be [monogamous/promiscuous]! I never realized that I actually could sleep with [lots of people/no one] without being [skeevy/lame]!"

The most noticeable aspect of this interview with Eden is that the focus of her romantic life, both before and after she was celibate, was primarily on finding a husband and secondarily on relieving her insecurities about being good enough and lovable enough. Note that when she talks about her pleasure in sex, she says:

There were times when I would count how many men I had had sex with in one two-week period and thought, "I must be this really hot, attractive chick to attract so many men."

Also:

I used to believe that, if I knew that I would never get married, I would kill myself.

Not anymore, but now,

as I was writing, I didn't want to think of what would become of me if I didn't get married. It was too frightening to imagine.

It gives you a sense of how central the idea of marriage was and is to her life. Also of what she sees as the alternative.

If you desperately want one kind of relationship, and start pursuing something completely different, you'll be unsatisfied. No real surprise, then, that when she stopped sleeping around and started looking for something she actually wanted, she got happier. Chastity, in Eden's view, is about not pursuing sex, but instead pursuing serious relationships with people whose values you share.

Instead of following the pop-culture prescription, to single-mindedly pursue a man who's going to make you happy, I am suggesting women should be singular and concentrate on being the best people they can be and displaying grace as individuals and as women. In doing that they will become more giving, more appreciative of everyone around them, so not only will they be better able to have meaningful friendships and relationships, but they will also be able to enjoy this time they have as singular women.

Similarly, she says chastity made her a better friend: before, her romantic life and friendships were about activities, and now both are about values and intense personal connections.

I have no doubt whatsoever that this transformation happened in Eden's life. But check it out: fundamentally, none of this is about who you have sex with. It's about caring, respect, connection with other people. For her, that happens through her relationship with sex. FOR HER. But she, like a lot of conservatives, conflates values with sex; like Wendy Shalit, she assumes that because she fundamentally wanted marriage and preferred chastity to promiscuity, all other women want that too.

I think, honestly, that it's a failure of imagination on her part that makes this happen: for her, relationships are either permanent or superficial; either no sex until marriage, or promiscuity. It's a false dichotomy, not just because there are possibilities between those two extremes, but because there are possibilities that combine those qualities, or have neither of them. It's also a way of trying to get people to be less obsessed with sex that is, itself, incredibly obsessed with sex.⁴ Really, the most telling line in the whole interview is her summary of her message:

It's about having substance as a person, seeking out friends who have depth and substance.

But why exactly does that have to be about sex?

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1. By Wendy Shalit.
2. The Thrill of the Chaste.
3. Start following the Amazon links for those two books to find a few more. Their covers even look similar - part of a woman's face in some kind of old-fashioned painting.
4. The most extreme example of this I know is Westboro Baptist, who protest 'gay-friendly' organizations like the U.S. military with signs that depict sodomy using stick figures. That shit is weird.

whoa

"This unconstitutional darkness, we will stab at it with our dagger until we kill it."

what to eat, #4

Those who know me (and if you don't know me, why are you reading my tiny-ass blog?) know that about three quarters of my cooking is slapped together by remembering what someone once said was the right way to do something. The other quarter involves obsessively reading every recipe on the subject and calling my mom at least twice. This is the first kind of recipe.

Roasted Root Vegetables with Basted Eggs¹
What to buy
a buncha root vegetables. potatoes - yellow, purple, white, mixed fingerlings, who cares? but let me know how it goes if you try new potatoes or the big Idaho bakers; sweet potatoes; parsnips; beets; celeriac; salsify; carrots if you want, but I don't think they're much of an enhancement.

eggs. spring for happy local ones if you can, and goggle at the deep gold of the yolk.

a box of chicken broth. completely optional - you can also use veggie bouillon or water, but I really like the organic free range chicken broth at Trader Joe's, and think it makes the eggs better. you only use maybe a tablespoon for this recipe, so make sure you'll use it for something else.

What you should already have on hand
some olive oil
a little butter
salt
pepper
garlic
maybe some rosemary or chives or something, but don't stress

What you do
1. Roast the veggies. Turn the oven up to 450, then wash 'em, peel the skins if you don't want to eat them, and chop them up into half to one inch chunks. Put them in an ovensafe pan, toss in enough olive oil to coat them very lightly, and sprinkle the salt on (also lightly). Peel a few cloves of garlic and put them in the pan whole. They're gonna turn into practically spreadable, unbelievably delicious little nubbins of roast garlic. Stick the pan in the oven. Start checking on them after 20 minutes, and pull them out when they're all cooked through (soft, but not custardy).

2. When the veggies are done, make the basted eggs. (Side note: I have no idea if this is how you're supposed to make basted eggs, but it's working for me right now. This was my big revolution in egg frying - before, I was really bad at it, and always broke at least one of the yolks. This way? It works.) Melt a little butter in a small pan on low. Keep the heat really low! Otherwise the eggs will be too tough! Crack your two eggs in there when the butter's all foamy. Once the bottom of the clear white has turned actual white all the way around the egg (while most of the depth of the white is still totally clear) slide your spatula under the eggs so they don't stick. Salt and pepper the eggs, and put a little rosemary on them if you want. I love eggs with rosemary. Now add a slug of chicken broth (or water, or veggie broth, or whatever) to the pan, and cover it. What's a slug? Who knows.² Let it cook for a few minutes, or til almost all of the white is cooked. Flip the eggs over carefully, cook another few seconds, and slide them out onto a plate. Serve yourself some veggies, too. Yum.

3. Got buttered toast? You just made yourself an upscale diner breakfast for dinner.

I ate this 3 times this week - once fresh, twice with the left-over veggies reheated in a pan. I'm still not sick of it.

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1. Hat tip to the Gardener, who made the first batch of roasted root vegetables this is based on.
2. I feel like people laugh about 19th century (and earlier) recipes that tell you to put in a handful of this or a pinch of that, but seriously? That's what my recipes, and my mom's recipes, and most of my friends' recipes tell you too.

how you know parents are on your side

"I think you owe her an apology."¹

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1. Especially when closely followed by "Ain't no 'sorry.' What are you sorry for?"

what about misconception care?

While I could say any number of serious things about this article, all I can think is come on, preconception care?

hello, Gorgias

This Salon article - one of the ones you need to watch an ad to see, but worth it anyway - is all about rhetoric, sophists, and philosophers.

you have to ask why

There's this idea that seems to be ambling around the feminist blogs whenever people start talking about appearance culture. You might see it in the comments on I Blame the Patriarchy (it's probably in this comment thread somewhere), and I don't know where it comes from. To summarize: "Individuals decide who they want to please (and yes, there’s no reason it has to be men), and that.. is a healthy part of social existence. In other words, the problem isn’t pleasing people."¹

Ok. I'm going to try not to dump my irritation too heavily on this particular person's head just because he's got a convenient summary. But let's review. It's true, most of us like making other people happy at least some of the time. However, I think we can agree that pleasing people usually means fulfilling their desires. The one thing we can all agree on - Puritans, post-modernists, neo-Aristotelians, feminists, Marxists, maybe everyone except modernists and the occasional Third-Wave feminist - is that desire is not neutral. People want things for all sorts of reasons. Maybe it was on TV a lot when you were a kid.² Maybe you had a secret crush on your 3rd grade music teacher who always wore that kind of shoes. Maybe you're color-blind and like really really bright colors because you can see them. Maybe desires for sugar and sodium were evolutionarily advantageous to our primate ancestors. Desire comes from a lot of different places, and so when we think about pleasing other people - about our desire to fulfill other people's desires - we need to think critically about where that need to please comes from, and where the specific desires we want to fulfill come from.

It is my belief that most women's desire to 'look pretty' comes at least partly out of patriarchal bullshit on one side or the other. Kugelmass does say that there's a problem "that women are expected to do more to please men than vice versa," but I don't think he gives this problem enough attention. In fact, women are required to put vastly more effort into their appearance than men. There's the time spent picking out clothes so we look just sexy enough (but not too sexy! then we're asking for it!); even professional clothes are a lot more work for women. There's the grooming regimen: at the bare minimum, shaving legs and underarms a couple of times a week, skin care and moisturizing, styling hair, haircuts every 6-8 weeks or fairly maintenance-intensive long hair, and most women add on at least a few other things, like nails or eyebrows or make-up (in some places and jobs, these are required). There are the shoes, and anyone who's ever tried to find comfortable, professional women's shoes knows exactly what I'm talking about. Ah, you say, but women are free to reject these 'requirements' - they really are, at least mostly, about choosing to please other people. You yourself just ignore a lot of these so-called requirements.

That's true, I don't, but I'm under no illusion that I don't pay a price for it. There are a number of office environments - including some of the most prestigious and best paid - where I couldn't work looking like I do. There was a New York Times article in the last year or two in which women on Wall Street talked about how they resent the brutally uncomfortable shoes which they feel they must wear in order to keep their jobs, but which damage their feet permanently. Some of the benefits of meeting the requirements of conventional femininity are just things I'm personally prepared to do without: I'm queer - right now I'm dating a woman, but my queerness means that there are a number of straight guys who just aren't really dating options for me, and that includes most of the ones who care about all the beauty shtick; I don't want to work on Wall Street, or for a high-powered legal firm, or in most office environments; I'm willing to accept the incidental damage it will almost certainly to do to my career. This shit is coercively enforced, and while you can opt out of the work, you pay a price.

So that takes care of why women want to do their pleasing in this particular way; let's talk about why men (or heteronormative culture) enforce these particular standards. Hint: it's not handed down with our genetic code. There are a lot of specific standards, but let's look at three that have particularly elegant patriarchal implications.

1. Shave off your body hair. This makes women look young (pre-pubescent, ick) and powerless. Nuff said.

2. Wear high heels. This makes women actually physically powerless, because we can't run or move freely; it also damages women's feet. Compare to the tradition of foot-binding in China or corsetry in the Victorian era - it's just not that different.

3. Be skinny. There's much to be said here, but what always strikes me about the obsession with thinness is that women aren't supposed to take up physical or metaphorical space.

The people making the argument that it's cool to want to please people - Kugelmass included - seem to ignore the actual content of what it takes to please others, putting the beauty ideal in the same category as cooking your friend dinner once in a while or remembering your Mom's birthday. It's different, and it's different because the desires we're trying to fulfill are social, and systematically oppressive to women. Maybe the worst part is that I really believe that appearance culture is a collective action problem. Here's what I said on Bitch, Ph.D.'s blog:

As long as most people try and get as much as they can from it - by trying to be as conventionally attractive as they personally can - all the flack from it continues to fall on people who can't conform (fat folks, butch women, short men, people with less money). This, I think, is where Twisty's point about femininity being a survival strategy comes in: even if you identify as femme/femmey, even if you actually get some personal satisfaction out of wearing low-cut shirts/high heels/lace underwear, being femininely attractive still gets you cultural approval that other folks don't have access to and makes it harder for those folks to fit in (or survive) by reinforcing our messed up norms about attractiveness. So you have to weigh what you need to survive or feel ok in your own skin or your own life against the social effects, just as you do when you buy groceries and have to choose whether to spend another few dollars on having it be organic so you feel better about yourself or a little less money so you can make it to the end of the month without being broke. For each decision, it's about whether it's going to make your life better, and whether it's going to make the world a better place for you to live in.

You can't just say that pleasing people is fundamental to being social. You have to ask why you want to please those particular people, why you want to do it the way you do, and what effect it has around you.

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1. From Joseph Kugelmass, who introduces his post by saying "I really don’t want to fight a bunch of different battles when it comes to gender. I want to fight just one battle, for equality of the sexes. Which is why I’m sorry to report that I find I Blame The Patriarchy alienating, and have to respond to the latest post there." Sorry dude, you don't get to decide that there's only one feminist battle. Also, hey, you find I Blame the Patriarchy alienating? No way! You and 97% of the human race! And Twisty, she does not care. It's part of why she's cool.
2. In a fascinating bit of correlation, women who watched a lot of Disney movies growing up have notably more conventional ideas about gender than women who did not. (This from the prestigious journal, 'some chick in my grad school class.')

yes

“I came to teaching to touch lives and educate and be this enchanting artist in the classroom,” she says, “and I have done nothing but lose 10 pounds in a month and develop a disgusting smoking habit. These kids need something much greater than anything I can give them. They need a miracle — and they need a miracle like every day.”

so far

I've been pushed, shoved, and lifted out of the way, ducked around, called dyke and bitch, had my hair and shoes insulted, been told to quit, that nobody likes me, and that "I will hurt you," had my stamp, stamp pad, coffee mug, clipboard, transparencies, marker, pencils, and wallet stolen, been full-on cussed out 7 times by 3 people, been sorta cussed out at least every other day and usually a couple times a day, had my fingers slammed in my classroom door, had paper balls and pens thrown at my head, and had the plexiglass window in the door to my classroom broken out of its frame. And this is just what I remember.

Joy

You know what's awesome? Being the only one in the house so you can play Lucinda Williams loud at 8:35 AM. You know what's even better? Eating apple crisp and drinking tea and looking at the sunny October morning while you do it.