Euphemistic sophistication

Whenever a lowest-common-denominator straight male desire gets cast as sophisticated, my thoughts inevitably turn to the Seinfeld where Jerry's sleeping with his maid, and by the end of the episode accepts that he has, in fact, been paying for sex. His defense, when friends call him out on it, is that the arrangement is "sophisticated." This is a standby euphemism in hetero sex work marketing - there are gentlemen's clubs, and the silk robes, and fine European ladies (white women?), and men are going to be escorted, as though hiring a sex worker were akin to being accompanied to a cotillion. It's a way of drawing a connection between whatever Mr. Schlub is up to, and the activities of various French prime ministers. It's all incredibly sophisticated. If it were a movie, yellow subtitles would definitely be involved.

Which brings me to this latest entry, from Dan Savage's letter of the day. A 35-year-old woman is being cheated on by her 50-year-old husband, who was still with an earlier wife when they got together. There's a young child involved. What should she do? Buried in her letter, but crucial, is the following: "I don't care that much that he had sex with these women—in fact, I had brought up the possibility of having an open marriage, but he wasn't into it." Now why do we think this man, who slept with everybody and has no plans to stop, "wasn't into" the very arrangement that allows for such behavior? While the thing we're supposed to say in such a circumstance is that it's surely dude's sexual proclivity to sneak around, the common-sense reason is that there's a double-standard. Not for dude-the-individual. In society. A 'traditional' marriage model allows him, but not her, to have other partners. That's what he wants. For him to have a wife means to have a woman who's fully his, whose children are of course his, because who else?

Savage offers up a precedent for the letter-writer, should she choose to stay in her marriage: an elderly (now-deceased) British duchess married to a serial philanderer. This duchess, it seems, considered divorce a "bore," as well as - sniff - American. (Side note: why do upper-class British people find everything so tiresome? Or is that just on "Upstairs, Downstairs"?) And... I guess I'd be OK with "sophisticated" as a euphemism for that which is adult, that which only adults understand, and that which perplexes the simple, childlike bourgeoisie (of which I - someone who would have borrowed the DTMFA acronym if advising this woman - am probably a part), if it could just be used in a gender-neutral sense.

Sex and self-promotion, not in that order

I've written a bunch of articles this week for The New Republic. Please read them!

Also worth checking out - a Savage Love letter revealing the difference between gay and straight "monogamish" - specifically, that threesomes involving men and women have the potential to produce children. This - the fact that sex can, indeed, make a baby - has always struck me as a bigger deal than Savage makes it out to be, when it comes to his suggestion that straight people open their marriages. His advice to straight people on this can seem implicitly geared to a world not only where contraception is infallible, but where no one's at a life stage where they might actually want children - impacting both how reliably whichever contraception is used, and how inclined a woman might be to terminate an unplanned pregnancy.

This is a big deal because one of the reasons he promotes monogamish for straights is as a way to have couples stay together for the sake of the kids, even if doing so means having a companionate marriage and a piece (or several pieces) on the side. But the fact that someone isn't a primary partner doesn't mean they can't, in turn, bring about a pregnancy. It's not, of course, that a child born to such an arrangement is doomed for life, but even by Savage's own framework, it's a non-optimal situation.

Cool Girls are GGG

Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn's novel, is the story of a woman in her 30s who turns herself into the ideal girlfriend and, later, wife. Who does this so thoroughly that she ends up in what "Seinfeld" fans will recognize as a "serenity now" situation - that is, she's bottled up her actual feelings to the point that when they emerge, they do so with tremendous and dangerous force. Some of what "ideal" involves is predictable, clichéd - she maintains a small dress size and, when asked to uproot her life for her husband and to take on new caring responsibilities, does so without complaint.

But passive and beautiful is no longer enough. Today's ideal is a "Cool Girl" - that is, one who likes guy stuff (yay sports! boo shopping!) while looking flawless and feminine. (See of course Amy Schumer's parody. See also Flavia's commentary.) Under a façade of feminism and empowerment - girls don't have to like girly things! down with consumerism! makeup is gross! - women engage in the not-especially feminist act of going out of their way please men. The frustrating aspect about Cool Girl-ism is that it looks so much like liberation. From the outside, the two can be just about impossible to tell apart. (It's not necessarily Cool Girl if a woman on the slimmer end of the spectrum eats more than a leaf of lettuce. The myth of the slim woman who subsists on air is at least as damaging as the one of the effortlessly slim woman who can't get enough cheeseburgers. Not that there aren't slim women who eat very little or very much but... you know what I mean.)

You'll see that in the much-discussed Cool Girl speech, Amy Elliott includes, among the Cool Girl's traits, an enthusiastic appreciation of what just so happen to be classic hetero male sexual fantasies. A Cool Girl is sexually adventurous, but not really - her sense of adventure is about eagerly consenting to anything a man suggests, or anticipating a man's desires. Considering the plot of Gone Girl, one might add to this that a Cool Girl looks the other way when her husband's having an affair - it's just male second nature to see that one's wife is a bit older than she used to be and to sleep with someone younger!

I thought about this when I saw Dan Savage heap praise upon (and semi-claim credit for, not unjustly) a recent scene from "Broad City." The show has its Cool Girl moments, and the scene in question is one of them. Is it about a woman feeling empowered to try something new in the bedroom? Or is it about a woman doing something a man has asked her to do, something where there's (not to get too technical here) something in it for him but not for her.

And this brings me to my qualms about Savage's approach more generally. A lot of what he advocates - not all - amounts to asking straight women to cheerily agree to men's sexual requests. I say "amounts to" - he advocates this in gender-neutral terms, while admitting that women are socialized not to make requests of their own. And... as the "Broad City" clip only further demonstrates, Savage's ideas are more or less synonymous with what sex-positive means in our culture.

Naked Rufus UPDATED

As I sat contemplating the Mark Zuckerberg shirt story from every which angle, another whole shirts-and-sexism scandal was underway. So much so that "shirtgate" refers to something else!

In all (humorless) seriousness, I'm probably too late to the #gate on this one. The man has already apologized. The woman who called out his wardrobe choice is already getting threats. I'd known about the comet landing for a while before hearing anything about the outfit.

That said, there's a TBTB angle here, for sure. Not a literal hygiene issue, but... that sense in which a man gets to be a mad genius, too brilliant to follow even the broadest outlines of social convention when it comes to dress. But TBTB doesn't quite cover it. It falls more into a different framework: the notion that women are killjoys. Now, some individual women (and - you guessed it - some men) are killjoys, but that's not the issue. What I'm describing is something more like... Men will say that women are uptight, when the freedom men are asking for is one that women don't enjoy. Depending which men, the next step might involve men saying that it's just not in women's nature to want whatever it is.

I realize I'm being vague, but the "issue" could be anything on the spectrum from ogling to - to keep with the Dan Savage motif - "monogamish." Men will call women prudes, when what these women are actually protesting (albeit discreetly) is that whichever freedom is only being demanded for men. And men won't see this, either because it will be inconceivable to them that women would want equivalent freedoms, or because - and ding, ding, ding, this explains the level of anger among some Twitter-types - it's far too threatening to imagine that women might want the same things as men. Men would rather the issue be that women are humorless scolds than for the alternative interpretation to be true.

As for women's nature, we know that no woman would even think to own a scantily-clad-men shirt. Except, wait a moment. I'm a woman, and guess what? I own such a shirt! (Google "Rufus Wainwright" and "Marc Jacobs.") I'd forgotten about this shirt precisely because it's not a thing that one can wear. Certainly not to, like, work (well, maybe to some work...). I bought it many years ago, as a collector's item or home decor, not as clothing.

So! Maybe I do have a new angle on #shirtgate, after all. I say yes to the inappropriate shirts, but make the privilege gender-neutral, and not limited to rocket scientists. The cost-per-wear on Naked Rufus is abysmal, and it's time for that shirt to... come out of the closet seems the thing to type, but I believe that, technically speaking, that shirt is in a drawer.

UPDATE

The #gate continues, and I'm starting to think there's a YPIS angle as well. While it's absolutely reasonable that the idiotic shirt should be called out, the problem is what happens when the entire world seems to be calling something relatively trivial out in unison.

The question remains, however, what options exist that don't amount to a pile-on. Everyone's commenting simultaneously, and each of the individual comments are measured... but then what happens is, minor annoyance times however many thousand ends up sounding like OUTRAGE. While it could well be the case that obliviously wearing a sexy-women shirt at an important press conference is the very definition of unchecked privilege, the eternal YPIS problem is that privilege-checking has a way of quickly becoming bullying.

That said... I think there's a big difference between pile-ons whose inspiration is an ordinary citizen observed mid-misstep, and a public figure of some kind. This scientist is maybe borderline-public-figure, but let me put it like this: If he had, say, worn the shirt to some departmental meeting, and a photo of him wearing it had leaked, and that had been the inspiration for all manner of tweets and think-pieces, then yes, that would have been a problem. The shirt would have still been a mistake, but a social-media calling-out would have been a far greater one. That would have been bullying. But it's not as if this shirt-wearing were surreptitiously brought into the public record. 

Also: Hadley Freeman sums everything up nicely, as usual. And I will of course be tracking down this book about public shaming that she speaks of...

The same old song

Sucker for advice columns that I am, I've had to branch out from Prudie and Dan, because sometimes weekend NJ Transit trains take that long. Which brought me to this Mariella Frostrup letter, from a man who sure sounds like a winner:

I have a female colleague who has, over the past three years, told me she loves me and would like to marry me. The problem is that I do not love her and I have told her that. I used to be in a relationship with another girl, but we recently broke up. In April I was at a low point and my colleague visited me and we had sex, and now she is pregnant. The dilemma I have now is that she insists that I marry her because the child will need a father and a mother.

It goes on, but doesn't become much more sympathetic or, for that matter, straightforward. Was this woman confessing her love and proposing marriage before the two had any kind of sexual entanglement? Or were they seeing each other, and he considered things more casual than she did? Was this April visit significant because that's the hookup when Female Colleague became pregnant, or was it the one and only hookup between the two parties? All of this matters, because we're looking either at a massively unhinged woman who's asking an acquaintance who could very well not be the father to marry her, or at a woman whose what-in-quainter-times-would-have-been-called-boyfriend refuses to commit.

Frostrup (whose advice is pretty sound, I suppose, either way) seems to assume the former. I read the letter... as close as I could read anything on my phone on a Sunday night train, and I'd say it's 50-50. It's obviously in the man's interest to downplay the extent to which he may have led her on by, say, having had some sort of ongoing thing with her. I mean, in most ordinary life situations, when one party's in love and the other is not, the two are at the very least involved.

Anyway. The bigger takeaway here, for me, was that letters like this - stories like this, and it's one of so many - illustrate the problem with the so-very-now gender-neutral approach to understanding and giving advice on relationships. Precisely everything that's playing out in this letter is deeply wrapped up in both the sex and the gender of the participants. Their sex, because of the pregnancy that's resulted (something I don't think Savage's "monogamish" ever successfully addresses - birth control can fail, people who support abortion in principle don't always want to get one, etc. - not issues in same-sex relationships), and their gender, because of the same-old-song way this is playing out. She wants marriage and kids; he wants consequence-free intimacy with a woman who's either very bad news (but hot/available enough to be interesting for sex) or just far, far more into him than vice versa. We might speak of them as "partners," but to do so ignores both biology and deeply-ingrained social roles.

In lighter news

-A 32-year-old woman is enjoying college. Disagree with Dan Savage that the guy's into her, though - hard to pinpoint why, exactly. Maybe it's the comments, many of which are the sort of rationalizations women often give themselves - he's shy! he's afraid to ruin the friendship! - for why a guy hasn't made a move. While I'll accept that there are 20-year-old men interested in elderly women of 32 (#sarcasm, as one must note; I'll be 32 in under a year) attractive, I just don't get the sense that this 20-year-old finds this 32-year-old all that ravishing. On behalf of Team Women-In-Early-30s, I hope I'm wrong, though.

-More weirdness around adult women - and their uteri - being on their parents' health insurance. (Not lighter news, exactly, but not Iraq-war-announcement-of-erev-9/11, either.)

-Emily of Cupcakes and Cashmere answers a question I'd long been wondering about: How does one do that 'statement lip' look without looking otherwise washed out? I mean, I had seriously not known, but wanted to know. I now know. Useful information.

-According to the latest official Science, Ashkenazi Jews and Flemish Belgians are not related. Everyone in an Ashkenazi-Flemish couple is breathing a sigh of relief.

-The great closet-cleanse of late June was supposed to lead to a discovery of all the somewhat dressier, more glamorous clothes I'd wear if I weren't so lazy about such things. Instead, it unearthed a couple business suits from 2005, a super-elegant dress shirt with certain wardrobe-malfunction tendencies when combined with a cross-body bag (which is the sort of thing one wants to notice before heading out in that shirt, with that bag; what's done is done), some pants that were too small in 2006 and are lo and behold no more zippable in 2014, and other winners. Also a really spectacular shoe collection... if all of the shoes were in wearable condition. Few were.

So if the hoped-for end goal (shopping-of-own-closet) was out, maybe something was accomplished? At least now I know, in stark terms, what it is I don't own. And it's basically ever item that the Average American Woman supposedly owns a dozen of. Except for gray v-neck t-shirts. An infinite supply of those. And somehow, when browsing the e-commerce-sphere, I found myself gravitating to... more gray v-necks. Stacey and Clinton, consider yourselves summoned.

Reading Maupin through a Savage lens

There are no more "Tales" for me - I finally read my last (technically the second-to-last, but I'd read them slightly out of order) of Armistead Maupin's "Tales of the City" series, Mary Ann In Autumn. The storytelling is just fantastic, as always, and that much more moving if you happen to be a dog person, with a small poodle curled up at your feet as you read. (But fear not - nothing that upsetting happens to any dog!)

I knew from Twitter or however else that Maupin and Dan Savage are, if not friends, people familiar with each other's work. Savage talks about Maupin's concept of a "logical family" as vs. a biological one (i.e. you move away from your small-town family that hates you for who you are, and find friends in the big city who become family), and then, in this latest (well, latest-for-me), the late-middle-aged Michael explains that he allows his early-middle-aged husband Ben to have sex with other men because that's the "price of admission" (a Savage coinage, I believe) to be with this much-younger, good-looking, kind, and generally flawless man.

The novel - well, one of the major plotlines - ends up reading like a Savage Love opening monologue. We have on the one hand Mary Ann, whose marriage to a Republican has fallen apart after she's caught her husband cheating with her "life coach," and on the other, Ben and Michael, whose only rule is disclosure. So evolved! The straights - and this is pure Savage - have so much to learn from gay men! (Or maybe not exactly the "straights" - now that I think of it, there's only one straight woman among the numerous main characters, and that's Anna Madrigal, an elderly transwoman who'd had a wife and kid in a previous life. Female sexuality is fluid in these novels.)

It might have been an interesting exploration of what changes in opposite-sex relationships, i.e. of what happens when "monogamish" converges with age-old double-standards, or how, as long as it's assumed that men cheat for variety but women only when unhappy in their relationships, the double-standard is maintained. But instead we learn that Mary Ann cheated as well, so never mind. The only concession to gender, in this context, is that Mary Ann (as a representative of Women) gets chastised for not enjoying a particular sex act that gay men (according to the novel) always do, and not the one you're thinking of. Anyway, fiction! I'd better write my own if I want it to make my arguments about society.

Savage vs. Brooks

Dan Savage introduced his latest podcast with what was, I think, his most spot-on rant yet. But it wasn't so much a rant, nor was it all that much about sexuality. He began by recalling a particularly debauched New Years of his younger adulthood. It wasn't clear where he was going with this, but longtime listeners may have guessed, from the bar-scene he was describing, that he was retelling the story of how he met his husband. Then it becomes clear that was a different debauched night. Where's the story going then? Nowhere in particular, it seems, this far in.

Then he explains that New Years this year would involve staying in with his husband and kid, trying to stay awake till midnight. His point? Both are fun. Both are valid. But those who've reached the staying-in-with-family life stage have, he notes, a tendency to treat that as true adulthood, as the correct way to be. As versus the truth, which is that different things work for different people, at different times.

While it might be tempting to brush this aside as a middle-aged guru-to-youth attempting to stay relevant, it's actually a really important point, one I don't think I'd ever seen, other than at WWPD, where I've made versions of it on occasion. Although I may take this further than Savage - my point is that the younger you isn't acting entirely in the service of the older-you. You don't want to close off options, to do things while young that will really sabotage your life later on. But you also need to act in the best interests of the self that currently exists, and to trust that that younger self wasn't a complete fool. As in, say a woman who's 45 and single kicks herself for not marrying a doofus who asked (or might have, had she not broken things off) when they were 25. At 45, one just knows so much more about life, yet tragically can't go back and fix the mistakes of youth. Or: The 45-year-old self doesn't accurately recall what the dude from 20 years ago was like. She make long for the idea of having met a good-enough guy and settled down younger, but the specific problems with this guy, well, that's knowledge only available to the 25-year-old self actually living that relationship.

I thought of this in terms of David Brooks's column on pot. He and his friends went through a pot stage as adolescents. They enjoyed it for a time, then grew out of it because they realized it's kind of dumb. Because pot isn't the best thing ever, the government should discourage it. That means it needs to remain illegal.

Now, my first thought - and I'm shocked to see in the comments that it wasn't everybody's - was that the problem with pot being illegal is that the kids who get caught end up with this on their record. And this sort of mark on a record is going to have a bigger impact the less power someone otherwise has in society.

But then there's a separate question: Was young David Brooks wrong to enjoy pot? I ask not out of any particular interest in pot - that, specifically, was never my thing - but because it seems like he got something out of it for a time (had fun, bonded with a seemingly nice group of friends), and, like so many before and after him, emerged with his brain intact. (I've also known people who end up far too reliant on the stuff, but whether that's worse than equivalent alcohol dependence is its own question.) "[B]eing stoned is not a particularly uplifting form of pleasure," he writes, but the same could be said of "Designing Women," which was my great vice at the age when the boys I went to school with were most enthusiastic about pot. "Smoking was fun, for a bit, but it was kind of repetitive." Should we make "Designing Women" illegal, then?

Different things appeal at different life stages. The idea that once you get a bit older, you're in a position to declare the relatively innocuous choices of your youth immoral doesn't make sense to me. But then again, I'm not, I suppose, a conservative.

Heteroscriptual

A Dear Prudence-type question somehow ended up in Dan Savage's inbox, although not for the first time. This one's from a 28-year-old woman who's been with her same-age boyfriend, including living with him, for respectable lengths of time. She wants to get married, and has not made a secret of this. She's told him. She's told his mother. And he... doesn't want to marry her? Or maybe he does, but the script requires a bit of kicking and screaming from the dude, a bit of will-he-or-won't-he from the dudette, and that's where we're at. It's engagement season, I suppose, or at any rate, straight women-asking-gay-male-advice-columnists-when-dude-will-propose season.

From the limited information we get, it's not at all clear which it is. If we all mine our anecdotal evidence, we'll come up with examples of stories along these lines that culminate in by all accounts happy marriages, as well as others where there was an underlying he's-not-that-into-you, and they break up. Either we're at a particular moment in the standard-issue script that leads to marriage, or she should say, as Edina Monsoon does in a different context, "Me and my ovaries are leaving," and return to the dating pool with ample time left to have the bio kids she desires.

Savage's response is basically, oy the heterosexuals, and then he urges the letter-writer to just do the proposing herself. Which is a step in the right direction - this time around, he doesn't just agree that 20-something is too young for such decisions. Problem is - as the commenters point out, and as I mentioned here in response to the similar question there a while back - the woman kinda-sorta already has proposed. Philip Galanes, addressing a slightly different question (this would-be-affianced hasn't spoken up, it seems, but assumes her dude can read her mind), urges a female proposal that's a conversation rather than an ultimatum, although then there's Savage's letter-writer, who had that conversation, kept it open-ended, and got nowhere.

Savage is right that the heterosexual proposal is heavy on the gender roles, but if only it just came down to who generally asks the question! There are assumptions about the age at which men or women have the most options on the dating market. There's biology, but there's also the way that age enters into it even independently of any specific couple's desire to have biological children. There's the bizarre pseudo-feminist performance of independence and of indifference to all that wedding nonsense that women are urged to embrace specifically to inspire a man to propose. (And it gets confusing, because there are also the women who genuinely don't want to marry, this guy or at this moment or ever.) At the same time, even men who do want to get married need to at least resist the idea a little bit, or else they seem some combination of desperate and gender-non-conforming.

Ultimately, some of this isn't gender-specific, but just the common human desire to be with someone who could plausibly appeal to others as well. It's performed in different ways in men and women, but amounts to the same.

But the problem with the female proposal isn't simply that it switches things around at the last minute. It's that, according to the script, every woman effectively has proposed... to any man she'd refer to as a boyfriend. Even if she's never brought up marriage. Even if she's said she doesn't want to get married any time soon, because, heh heh, everyone knows that no women could possibly feel like that. (Hashtag: sarcasm.) His 'proposal' is really just a yes to the one she's already given, just by being female. Which, to repeat, is a problem, because we live in a not entirely scripted world, and sometimes women who give off every impression of not wanting to get married don't want to get married, and it's not actually a clever ruse to seem less needy or clichéd. But because the script demands female passivity, there's no way for a woman to announce she does or does not want to get married until a man has broached the subject.

The ultimatum - much-maligned for its lack of romance - is, in a sense, the female proposal. It brings a relationship to the point it would be in if a man had proposed and the woman had said no. The male proposal assumes a yes, while the female one assumes a no, because every man's answer is no until proven otherwise.

It's tempting, then, to suggest a non-ultimatum female proposal - and totally understandable that those looking at bizarre hetero courtship rituals from the outside would be like, why is this not already happening? - and granted, it's not that this has never happened. But as a rule, a woman who brings up marriage is perceived of as exerting pressure, in a way that a man doing the same is not. Until all these myriad underlying assumptions remain, equality in the kneeling arena doesn't seem imminent.

Maturity

-More Bloggingheads! This time I had the pleasure of chatting with Autumn Whitefield-Madrano about beauty. I compare hemming and hawing over Lululemon at 29 or 30 with doing the same over Adidas Sambas at 9 or 10.

-My current gym-and-laundry-folding accompaniment is "What Not To Wear," although even by my admittedly low standards for this sort of thing, it might be too formulaic. A woman dresses too sloppy/"slutty" (this isn't the Jezebellian, anti-slut-shaming universe, but the tell-it-like-it-is genre of reality TV), and her nearest and dearest summon Stacy and Clinton. She announces that she likes how she dresses, then is somehow magically convinced that her self-presentation indicates low self-esteem and a tendency always to put others first. She has her hair dyed some new color, not always more flattering but better for the dramatic effect, and emerges in an outfit that looks like it's from Ann Taylor even if it's not.

Apart from being repetitive, it's... kind of cringe-inducing, from the initial "ambush" on. There are only the slightest nods to personal taste, and (from the admittedly limited sample I've seen) no acknowledgements of variations in gender self-presentation. (Why can't the more masculine-self-presenting women get spiffied-up in more menswear-inspired clothes? Do they really need lip gloss?)

And I get why they have to do this, given how insulting the premise is ('surprise, everyone in your life hates how you dress, and your hair and makeup aren't so hot either!'), but they go a bit overkill on the body-flattery. They keep announcing that women have an hourglass shape and tiny waist, even when these things are so plainly not the case. I'd have thought most grown women would have long since come to terms with whichever ways we don't resemble swimsuit models, and that being told we have traits we don't would come across as patronizing or just silly. Couldn't they go with a generic and, because it's subjective, not-untrue 'beautiful'?

I was curious to see how others had overanalyzed the show - whether their overanalysis matches up with mine - and, kind of yes and kind of no. In an interesting piece, Greta Minsky argues that the show "co-opts feminist rhetoric to promote an anti-feminist agenda" - pretending to be about empowering women, while instead shaming their style as too lower-class or insufficiently corporate-America. On the one hand, yes, the show does exactly that. On the other, though, it's all very pragmatic. The advice is, people will judge you by how you look, and you want to be conscious in the choices you're making. If you want to project corporate, neither the sweatsuit nor the ill-fitting-lingerie-as-daywear will get that across.

In a way, then, it gets back at the "Frances Ha" maturity question: A part of growing up means getting past the idea that being true to yourself in self-defeating ways is some kind of sacred authenticity. Getting what you want out of life might involve a bit of superficial selling out, and that's not the end of the world. Not all quirkiness is self-defeating, so maturity also means figuring out which to hang onto. But there's a way that resistance to superficial conformity can be a crutch. Deciding that your fundamental being is expressed only by wearing outrageous clothes is a way to avoid facing the difficult challenges that going for whichever professional or personal goals might bring. The conceit of the show may be cruel, but its central message isn't entirely unreasonable.

-Random thoughts from the last Savage Lovecast:

1) I hadn't been following Santa-race-gate, because it seemed, as Savage says, remarkably idiotic. Racist in a way that doesn't even need to be spelled out. To the point where, what more could I add? But then Savage himself goes on this well-meaning tirade about it, the crux of which is, Santa might have been white because St. Nicholas was from Turkey, whereas Jesus couldn't have been, because he was Jewish and from the Middle East. Huh? An interesting view into Savage's own, somewhat unique ideas about how America defines whiteness, but the proper response was what he implicitly began with - that it's a bunch of racist nonsense worth noting only to raise awareness that racism in this country isn't over.

2) The call from the 21-year-old debating whether to enter a threesome with a couple she'd met online (what college these days has come to!) was indeed amusing for the no-longer-21 set. The dilemma was, would she possibly be attracted to them, given that they're... drumroll please... in their 30s? The oldest person this woman had ever been attracted to was, she emphasized, 26. Savage clearly found this hilarious, and went on about how "decrepit" these people must be.

Alas, it's a useful if bleak reality check for the ancient among us. Is 30 (-something) young? It's not as if the 30-plus can correct the under-25s who see 30 as old. It's subjective. And while it's certainly possible this 21-year-old has a warped idea of what 30-something looks like, it could also be that she has a very accurate idea, which is that these are likely people who look between 9 and 19 years older than she does, and that while this isn't a problem for many 21-year-olds, it would be for her. It's not necessarily that she imagines 35-year-olds look 85.

The campsite in the rye

Relationships at 18 can be weird. They can go wrong in specific ways that ones later in life can't, because things that seem like obvious red flags to someone with a bit of life experience (extreme interest, or extreme hedging) may seem charming to someone with little or none. But of all the terrible fates to befall an 18-year-old woman (yes, woman - more on that in a moment) in the boyfriend sphere, getting together with a famous writer, and then dumped by him, and then dining out on that story, to put it mildly, for the rest of your life, seems maybe not the worst possible outcome.

While the same things that make a relationship abusive (as vs. merely crappy) among older adults certainly count as such at 18, the mere fact of a relationship can't be statutory rape if both parties are adults. Which Joyce Maynard comes awfully close to claiming about her affair at 18 with the guy who wrote the book read by Americans who've only ever read one novel.

Maynard writes:

Some will argue that you can’t have it both ways: how can a woman say she is fully in charge of her body and her destiny, and then call herself a victim when, having given a man her heart of her own volition, he crushes it? How can a consensual relationship, as Salinger’s unquestionably were, constitute a form of abuse?

The possible answers to this rhetorical question: when the "woman" is a girl, and/or the man is her teacher/boss/older relative. Or when a relationship entered into consensually becomes abusive. Maynard suggests that "people in positions of power — mentors, priests, employers or simply those assigned an elevated status" are the problem, which seems far too broad. Relationships will often have an age or status mismatch, which doesn't somehow remove consent. Or can it?

This was the passage that jumped out:

I am as troubled by the use of the word “woman” to describe the 18-year-old object, briefly, of a 53-year-old’s affections as I am by the use of the word “lover” to describe my 18-year-old self, in the context of that relationship.

And, I'm not sure what to make of this. Yes, age of majority is a construct, and yes, it's possible to be 18, 19, 39, and hopelessly naive, and fall under the spell of a glamorous mansplainer who stands in the way of your education and friendships. But there's a difference between being an underage girl who merely thinks she's in a consensual relationship with a grown man who should know better, and being an adult woman who falls for a less-than-ideal guy. Also a difference - if a more subtle one - between being in an abusive relationship and voluntarily signing up for a certain power-imbalanced relationship dynamic.

Isn't it kind of unfair to the actual girls abused by older men (including girls who imagine they were in consensual relationships, and including whichever girls Salinger was also involved with) to retroactively declare an 18-year-old self - someone who was already living on her own as a college student - not yet a woman? To suggest that Salinger was equivalent to a professor or coach or some such, with power over Maynard in particular, when he was something far closer to a celebrity? Even if Salinger engaged in emotional abuse (maybe? unclear from the essay, but likely possible to sort out from other things Maynard has written; what we do learn of sounds a great deal less devastating than much of what I recall going on between those of 18 and thereabouts in relationships with fellow students), it was emotional abuse of an adult woman.

Dan Savage's "campsite rule" seems apropos: that the older partner in an age-and-power mismatch relationship - the assumption being that both parties are adults - leave the younger one in better shape than they found them. Also that there shouldn't be any promises made of more serious commitment than is being offered. The cultural-education bit seems fair - what exactly is the point of a fling with a famous older writer if not to have your tastes challenged? - but the dropping-out-of-college bit, not so great. But a violation of the campsite rule, while poor form, not in at all the same realm as exploitation of someone underage.

On Weiner and centaurs

The hip thing to do, in response to Weiner's infinite capacity to embarrass himself, is to adopt the stance that WWPD's most loyal commenter, Petey, does to all things, and be all jaded-like. Whereas the mainstream media, or tourists horrified by Times Square and not because of the commercialism, or those in strict religious sects, or who even knows... whereas the pearl-clutching contingent is oh so scandalized by Weiner's antics, where you want to be on this issue is, you've seen it all, or at least heard of it all, and Weiner's totally G-rated by your standards. Andrew Sullivan and Dan Savage both point us to Amanda Hess's Slate piece about, well, ostensibly about how in this day and age, everyone has stuff they wouldn't want revealed publicly, but also about how very dull and everyday Weiner's sexual interests appear to be. Seems he has a fetish for women's feet. "High heels! Can you believe this freak?," Hess asks sarcastically.

So there are two issues here. I'll start with the second. In this age of the Savage Lovecast, with the centaur fetishists and poly triads looking to incorporate a tail (without an animal attached, rest assured) into their lovemaking, in this age of Google, no matter what goes on or doesn't in our own lives, we who have not been living under a rock are aware that everything's out there. So a married man who carries out imaginary affairs on social media or via text with young but of-age women, this is not shocking from a proclivities perspective. People are into stranger things than that. (Even Dear Prudence brought us the incestuous male twins, and will no doubt arrive in centaur country soon enough.)

While a blasé attitude is called for when it comes to what goes on in people's minds, or (and fine, opinions differ) on their computers in a not-so-interactive sense (i.e. porn, as vs. offering a real, identifiable other human being an apartment), it's really not a given that every middle-aged man is doing what Weiner was. If some couples have arrangements where this is acceptable, fair enough, but I suppose I'm square enough (or, as Sullivan might say, female enough) that I wouldn't take for granted that this specific thing is completely typical behavior. On the centaur-to-missionary-position spectrum, yes, this is unremarkable. But not on the behaviors-one-must-put-up-with-in-a-partner one.

The first and more basic issue, then, is the question of private moments revealed. I'm not sure how relevant that is to a case of exhibitionism, of a man who on some level (erotic, power-games, some combination) enjoys risking scandal. This isn't as if someone was secretly recording his goings-on, or as if the NSA was like, hey, look what's on this guy's computer! Sexy photos of women in high heels! A family man has had thoughts about women other than his wife! What was notable was the indiscretion. He could have been sending really chaste but romantic messages to tons of women about how pretty he finds them, and it would have been similarly remarkable behavior for a married politician.

Nor is this a case of youthful stupidity catching up with someone. If you send an explicit photo (or consent to having one taken) when you're too young to have thought about the consequences, that kind of does - at least for those experiencing adolescence in the smartphone age - put you in the same boat as so many others your age, and not really indicate exhibitionism or even bad judgment. (Is there any other kind of judgment at that age?) I mean, it's not that Weiner wasn't caught, but that risking getting caught - or getting caught and then succeeding all the same - is his game. 

In any case, it would seem that the issue with Weiner and perversion isn't that we're such a uptight society that we can't imagine a married middle-aged man would fantasize about sex with some random 22-year-old woman. This is assumed to the point of beyond-cliché. It's that this little discretion, paired with so much ambition, suggests a perverse desire to be... not above the law, exactly, but to be someone to whom the rules of bare-minimum image-maintenance don't apply.

Naked men and French pastries

-Daniel Bergner, whose book I still need to track down, is soliciting information from women about whether they find naked men attractive:

How important is the visual to you? How does it play out in your sexual life? Is it essential? Peripheral? Do you bring home the visual turn-ons of the day when you get into bed with your partner? If the visual is important to you, is your partner aware of this? As always, please write from personal experience and be as specific and honest as possible, but stop short of pornographic.

This is, if nothing else, one heck of a writing assignment. How exactly does one talk about not merely "the visual" (which is nice and abstract) but the sexiness of naked people without this veering into X-rated territory? What could one possibly say, other than something that sounds like a description of a painting in a museum? It seems as though anything frank one could say on this topic would risk titillating, no matter the intention. As much as it would be great to get rid of the myth that straight women merely tolerate naked men in exchange for the social role of girlfriend or wife, it doesn't really seem like collected PG-13 anecdotal evidence would get us there.

-The NYT food-writer whose specialty is lentil-based cardboard (recipes that sound like they'd be great if whichever ostentatiously removed full-fat ingredient or animal-products were brought back in) has revealed a secret life as a pastry-cookbook ghost-writer. At least one vegan is furious. But in a sense, this kind of adds up. One of the rules of healthy eating is that anything's OK as long as it's French. White flour ceases to be poison when it goes by the name farine de blé. That's either because within the context of a traditional French diet, croissants seem not to pose a problem or because all of this is really about demonstrating class status with food choices. Or perhaps a bit of both.

 -A conversation between Dan Savage and Andrew Sullivan. Highly recommended. All the more so if you have a day "off" that you've devoted to turning the "study" in your apartment from messy-adolescent-bedroom to space-work-could-actually-happen-in. Makes the time fly.

When they got to the part about female desire being different, though, I tried not to preemptively wince. Were we really about to hear two men explain that women are like so? Because it started to seem to be going in that direction. And it wasn't even that they're gay - I'd heard both make this argument in the past.

As it happened, we only heard one do this. Sullivan asked Savage to agree that there are differences between men and women, suggesting that one would have to be all kinds of politically-correct (and not a tell-it-like-it-is libertarian) to dispute this, and Savage kind of agreed, but kind of laughed this off, agreeing vehemently that "gay men are men." But when Sullivan tried to insist that women are set on monogamy, whereas men inherently crave variety, Savage was like, no, that's not what the new studies are saying. And to his credit, Sullivan responded that this was the first he'd heard of it, but didn't insist that these studies were wrong, and did indeed seem open to the idea that social construction plays into what we think female sexuality consists of.

But what struck me was what Sullivan's claim that in heterosexual relationships, men are fine with cheating, but women are not, would imply. It would imply that, while women object to men straying, men do not object to women doing the same. Which contradicts not so much what gender-is-a-construction types may believe about women's vibrant and varied sexuality, but also what's been popular-to-the-point-of-stale cliché for ages: that (many but not all) women accepting that 'men have needs', while (many but thankfully not all) men are jealous and possessive. It would seem that these gender-normative men who are fine and dandy with fooling around are happy to do so themselves. That that's the "open" they favor.

So this may not be that much about women being like so after all. Men, as a rule, appear to have a different expectation of fidelity from female partners than from male ones. Is this because, on some primal level, babies? Is it because of popular assumptions that women would only stray if they intend to leave - that their betrayal is by definition emotional betrayal? The patriarchy (she says, burning her bra, so as to further rile the bra-fit sub-Reddit)? Whatever it is, it does sort of seem the missing piece.

Progressive like a girdle

WWPD readers have heard this before, but it bears repeating: my beef with Dan Savage's "monogamish" is that it pretends we live in a gender-neutral world. It pretends that there isn't a history of men - powerful ones especially - getting to fool around, without corresponding freedom for women. It pretends that a relatively recent feminist intervention - that women are financially independent and socially able to exist without a husband, and thus prepared to leave (and perhaps find someone else!) if dude takes up with whomever - is what we'd been experiencing for all of human history. That it would be liberation - not reactionary regression - if men were allowed to do whatever, and women stuck by them because The Children.

If "monogamish" were about acknowledging that men and women both may have a wandering eye, if it were about asking men who want a little on the side to be prepared for their wives and girlfriends to do the same, and about acknowledging that the whole "men are visual creatures" line is sexist bunk, we might have other objections to it (such as: hetero couples' potential to make babies; all humans' potential to be jealous; the benefits of not having to worry quite so much about STDs), but it might plausibly be deemed a progressive concept. But instead, Savage goes the easy route, readily assuming that women simply aren't noticing men nearly so much as men are noticing women. It's just in men's nature to want sexual variety, whereas it's actually built into women's DNA to enjoy cleaning the kitchen and doing Pilates. While Savage advises men and women alike to consider staying with cheating partners, especially if the couple has kids, gender-neutrality isn't enough. This is, let's face it, about reverting to an era when men could get away with cheating. Which... it's an argument. But how about we don't pretend that it's a progressive let alone feminist one.

Why do I bring this up now? Because a story about a story about political wifedom brings up monogamish in relation to Anthony Wiener's wife standing by him. The young people are, it seems, down with this.

"Young and impulsive"

Caryatis pointed me to this (relatively tame) Savage Love letter, from a 28-year-old man with a 28-year-old husband he'd been with since they were 24. I had known Savage to make arguments like this, and had tried to dig one up to link to here, but the trouble with podcasts is searching them, and I hadn't found any in his searchable oeuvre. Anyway:

These two men, apart from being 28, have a messed-up and possibly unfixable marriage. Sad, but seemingly unrelated to their age, which is unremarkable. As in, not worth remarking on, since as per the document Savage links to, the median age for a man to marry is 28. As Caryatis notes, we don't learn when this couple got married. For all we know, they married after five minutes at age 24. But "together" from 24 and married at 28 does not mean married at 24 and together since 17. To marry at a so-called reasonable age, after a so-called reasonable amount of time, you need to have met your spouse while too young to marry. Nevertheless, Savage takes the opportunity to launch into a speech about the "young and impulsive" who enter marriages all but doomed to fail:

According to the Pew Research Center, early marriage correlates strongly with divorce. The younger a couple is when they marry, the likelier they are to divorce. There are often other factors at play, of course, and there are plenty of people out there who got married in their teens or twenties and are still with their first spouses.

Well. It's good to know that on rare occasions, people who get married in their twenties do not divorce. Their twenties! You know the NYT Weddings pages, that sea of highly-educated 27-29.5-year-old brides? Some of those couples just might make it.

I mean, gah! How is this meant to work for women, this rule by which one cannot marry or even begin dating one's future spouse until age 30? Fertility isn't everything, but it isn't nothing, either. I'm not aware of a study saying that it's better to marry at 32 than 28, but I do remember hearing somewhere (intentional understatement - this is all one hears about) that IVF is best avoided if possible.

If Savage were talking only about gay male couples, fair enough, although same-sex marriage is kind of new to start imposing window-of-opportunity restrictions on it as well. (And are gay male college sweethearts who start thinking about marriage at 25 rightly considered "impulsive"?) But he's not. He's saying that 30 is the age at which anyone, male or female, straight or LGBT, can start even thinking about settling down without that being foolish.

"Bitches be crazy"

A while ago, I mentioned that Simon Rich had written one heck of a misogynistic humor essay for the New Yorker. The well-known problem with misogyny intended as humor is that there's no way to call it out without learning that one is a humorless feminist for not laughing along. More on that in a moment. In any case, I'd kind of forgotten about this, until I was out walking Bisou, listening to this week's live-taped Savage Lovecast. Special guest, Simon Rich. Reading one of the stories from his new collection. And which one? The very same one as had been in the magazine, the one about God having a girlfriend. She works in fashion, she's gossipy, needy, diet-crazed, and doesn't like it when he works late at his job, which is creating the world in six days, and thus kind of a big deal. But she's all, why don't you spend more time with meeeee, because that's how the ladies get, y'know? A stale set-up, with an original conceit. But because that's how it goes when one walks a dog in the middle of nowhere, I kept listening.

Anyway, re: laughing along, I probably did some of that, but I'm fully capable of laughing if put in front of an old episode of "Two and a Half Men." The bad-sitcom chuckle. Put me on an airplane and the bar drops lower still. Because of this character flaw, I can laugh at a joke about how women enjoy "lo-cal yogurt," just not in the same way as I laughed when Sarah Haskins mocked the yogurt-as-woman-feed phenomenon.

(This is all of it a separate phenomenon from appreciating great art that happens to have been created by a bigot, or that expresses bigoted views, an issue that itself needs to be divided between an understanding that everyone from back-in-the-day would fail at modern-day political correctness and a possibly different standard for that which is contemporary/recent. Rich is obviously talented, but this is not the kind of literature where that sort of thing applies. Contemporary literature where you are compelled to at least temporarily overlook bigotry, to me, means some kind of new insights or style or something. I could go on, but will save that line of going-on for my dissertation.)

This was my typically longwinded way of saying that there was that story, on a podcast ostensibly about being at the cutting edge of gender-and-sexuality awareness. Which seemed just odd. A term like 'heteronormative' doesn't even begin to describe the piece. And yet, not odd - very much of a piece with Savage's frequent portrayal of women as prim or naive killjoys. Savage reacted to the story/essay thing by asking Rich if, after reading this story (part of an anthology dedicated to said girlfriend), the author's girlfriend still performs oral sex on him. (Savage-speak for, 'she hasn't left you yet?') As in, Savage got that it was insulting, but what he did with that knowledge perhaps wasn't so helpful.

The podcast also included the usual advice component, and near the end, there was a question from a woman who knew she was a lesbian but wanted a second kid, and wondered if it was OK to stick around with her husband and only come out after having said child. Easy answer: no. But Savage answered instead with some enthusiastic, "Bitches be crazy," adding that when "bitches" want a baby, they're crazier still.

Here, I'm afraid my ridiculously low bar for finding something bad-sitcom amusing wasn't even met. I may have cringed slightly on account of Savage's painful attempt at sounding young and hip (even if he was possibly riffing off a Stephen Colbert routine?), or his ironic pose as a straight-guy misogynist, which we of course know is hilarious because Savage is gay and enlightened and does so much good (and he does!). Was it supposed to be OK within the context of a live performance that included a female dominatrix demonstrating something that must have made more sense not in podcast form? Whatever it was about, the "bitches be crazy" ending was just gross. But yes, it fit with the choice to have Rich read "Center of the Universe."

More thoughts on what this all means soon, perhaps, when the haze of the head-cold lifts, or bring yours to the comments.

That's "Nice"

Jezebel takes on the Nice Guy, a phenomenon I was reminded of recently after seeing "Anna Karenina." Levin - in the movie, and as much as I recall, in the book - is very much that type (setting aside the labor angle, which is kind of irrelevant to this issue). But I'm not sure Erin Gloria Ryan's description should be the official encyclopedia entry.

The basic idea is in her post - a Nice Guy is one who believes that if he behaves properly (anything from holding open doors for a laydee to claiming to espouse feminist principles), he is owed either women generally or a particular woman he's after. Male entitlement, in other words, but of a more nuanced variety. I'd only add - and this does seem key - that a Nice Guy absolutely straight-up does not think that if a Girl is Nice, she's owed anything from him. He's of course allowed to choose women on the basis of physical attraction, because without that, what on earth would a man be doing with a woman in the first place. It's about his niceness winning her beauty.

Where I part ways with Ryan (Gloria Ryan? I'm not even entirely sure how to do this with my own name) is, it's not always so easy to convey which sorts of male attention are creepy, and which are perfectly acceptable. For example: being asked out on a date can be creepy, or not, depending on various factors, such as if the man in question is your boss, your uncle, etc. But it is not inherently creepy a) for a man to ask a woman to go do something, or b) for him to want to take the relationship to a new emotional or physical level. Creepy is not taking no for an answer. Asking in the first place: not creepy.* So while some of the examples Ryan gives do seem nice-guy-ish, others not so much.

And the thing where guys on the street ask girls/young women to smile, this is plenty obnoxious, but seems of another category entirely. Oh, and while resenting others who get more dates than you do is an unattractive quality, it only seeps over into Nice Guy if it's expressed. As in, maybe dude feels it's unfair that guys who are better-looking and more successful than he is get more dates. (The adult world indeed isn't big on football players, but there are adult equivalents.) But unless he's bothering the grown-up football player's girlfriend about it, it's really a problem only within his mind.

Anyway, what makes this a tough conversation is, there's on the one hand creepiness, and on the other, a desire on the part of many women not to feel like Aura in "Tiny Furniture," i.e. sexually repellent. It's not always clear when a conversation is about stalking/harassment in the serious sense (and this stuff's plenty real!) and when it's about affirming that one does indeed leave an impression, turn heads. I mean, it's not actually so tough to sort out in individual situations - either an experience is/was frightening or it is/was flattering. But there are some women - thankfully no one I've interacted with in years - who use the "creepy" terminology to discuss things like how dreadful it is that so many entirely appropriate guys ask them out in not-at-all-lewd ways. And Ryan's chart itself is a bit ambiguous on that front.

*To return to the question of "partner" terminology for a moment, it probably is creepy for a man to ask out a woman who's married, engaged, or mentions a "partner" but not necessarily a woman known to have a boyfriend, given that this term is also used to refer to casual, two-month-type relationships in which both parties would be better off with other people, and in which nothing particular is lost if a break-up occurs. But no doubt Dan "Monogamish" Savage would have a different take.

"Positively Amish"

Is it "positively Amish" to get married at 25? How Amish was I, getting married at 27? Reform Amish, or Conservative?

Anyway, I thought it had long been established that same-sex marriage doesn't mean gay couples now must make things official, only that they might do so. That a man has the option of "my husband" if that's who his partner is, same as a woman does. Yes, we may bring out the tiny violins for the gay adults whose families now pressure them to tie the knot, but at least now (ideally) the pressure is to marry someone of one's own desired sex, not to enter a union bound to make everyone miserable. Yes, I understand that there's a contingent nostalgic for the time when "gay" meant "not bourgeois," but you still can be gay and not bourgeois. Anyway indeed.

But I do wonder - with June Thomas here, with Dan Savage elsewhere - what precisely we're supposed to make of female fertility. Social construction is, the woman does the cooking and cleaning. Biology is, if you're 45, no matter what your sexual orientation, it's gonna be kind of tough to bear a child. It's not terribly radical to point out that adoption and IVF are more complicated than the usual way, and that artificial insemination is bound to work better the more fertile the mother. Of course not all women want children, not all are physically capable of having them even at 25. But if we're talking societal norms, why should we want to get to a place where it's controversial to marry before 35?

WWPD reads the news (on her phone, while half-asleep on NJ Transit)

Just because it's not on WWPD doesn't mean I'm not following it. I too am watching the Middle East fall apart, and am not sure whether the Zionist stance - my Zionist stance - is to support Israel in defending itself or to wonder, big-picture, whether the current situation helps or hurts the goal of a two-state plan. Knowledgable people I respect are saying very different things on this. (Ideological diversity, a change from the recent days of "X and two more friends 'like' Mitt Romney.") I have no answers, and have come to the conclusion that this tragic mess isn't going to be solved on this blog, or likely any.

And yes, of course, the Real Housewives of Tampa. Here I'll weigh in from two angles, one silly and one serious.

The silly:

-Following L'Affaire Petraeus from the perspective of a grad student: I especially like the Daily Mail approach - that Broadwell's real sin was being a crummy grad student, and having not (yet?) finished her PhD. This might be reassuring to those of us who run a 30 minute mile, never served in the military, have not raised two kids while a student, but who, at least, are kind of OK at grad school.

-That's the thing with 19th century dissertation topics, right? On the one hand, I'll never be on the "Daily Show" talking about my research. On the other, it is physically impossible for me to have an affair with any of my subjects.

The serious:

-The Dan Savage argument, which as far as I know he has yet to make, but others are making it, but anyway, is as follows: 37, 38 years of marriage and one indiscretion, big deal. That's a monogamous marriage succeeding. Monogamish, meanwhile, assumes one of two scenarios: a young, hot couple both of whom have seemingly infinite romantic possibilities, or an older straight couple where it can be safely assumed the woman is no longer interested in sex. But then there's "furious would be an understatement," whose crime, as far as we know, was being 59 years old and not taking reality-TV-star pains to hide it. Regardless of what was going on inside their marriage, it seems obvious, viscerally, that she's been wronged. This is also, I suppose, what I find off-putting about the periodically-floated marriage-as-renewable-contract idea. Isn't part of the appeal of the institution that one can feel relatively confident that one has tenure, as it were, in one's relationship? Not that it's 100% guaranteed to last, vows kept, but that there would have to be an awfully good reason for that not to happen?

Dalliance parity

Oh, Dan. In what way is this - "Her marriage lasted 62 years, surviving Andrew’s long bout with alcoholism, as well as his discreet dalliances" - an example of ethical non-monogamy? Was she also allowed "discreet dalliances"? Divorce shouldn't be taken lightly, but until the era of dalliance parity arrives (which could well bring about more monogamy, with men realizing the deal allowing them but not their girlfriends/wives to stray is over), it's awfully important for women with less glamorously retrograde values to be able to extricate themselves from that sort of situation.