Author: Phoebe Maltz Bovy

by Phoebe Maltz Bovy

Lena Dunham was an anxious child:

My parents are getting worried. It’s hard enough to have a child, much less a child who demands to inspect our groceries and medicines for evidence that their protective seals have been tampered with. I have only the vaguest memory of a life before fear. Every morning when I wake up, there is one blissful second before I look around the room and remember my many terrors. I wonder if this is what it will always be like, forever, and I try to remember moments I felt safe: In bed next to my mother one Sunday morning. Playing with my friend Isabel’s puppy. Getting picked up from a sleepover just before bedtime.

One night, my father becomes so frustrated by my behavior that he takes a walk and doesn’t come back for three hours. While he’s gone, I start to plan our life without him. …

In our first session, Lisa sits on the floor with me, her legs tucked under her like she’s just a friend who has come by to hang out. She looks like the mom on a television show, with big curly hair and a silky blouse. She asks me how old I am, and I respond by asking her how old she is—after all, we’re sitting on the floor together. “Thirty-four,” she says. My mother was thirty-six when I was born. Lisa is different from my mother in lots of ways, starting with her clothes: a suit, sheer tights, and black high heels. Different from my mother, who looks like her normal self when she dresses as a witch for Halloween.

Lisa lets me ask her whatever I want. She has two daughters. She lives uptown. She’s Jewish. Her middle name is Robin, and her favorite food is cereal. By the time I leave, I think that she can fix me.

The difference between Dunham’s childhood fears and everyone else’s is, in part, that hers were met with old-time New York therapy sessions out of a New Yorker cartoon and are… now featured in the New Yorker.

Which brings us to another issue, namely the anxieties Dunham herself inspires in a certain segment of the population. That segment being, I suppose, those who feel that all of life’s unfairnesses can be summed up in the fact of Dunham’s success. It’s a bit like how, for committed anti-Semites, every last one of the world’s problems can be blamed on Jews, with the crucial difference being that Dunham has – as far as I can tell – shrewdly incorporated these perceptions into her act. Many before her have passively resigned themselves to being the face of ‘privilege’; Dunham’s innovation is to not merely own it (as someone like Gwyneth Paltrow does) but go with it.

One can never just appreciate a cultural product Lena Dunham has created. One must always defend doing so, in anticipation of the ‘but-all-that-privilege’ detractors. The latest – and possibly strongest – apology comes from Jacob Clifton, who hones in on the key issue in his response to the essay:

We have a propensity for taking women, young women especially, at face value. Young women are not alone here: Dave Chapelle quit comedy when he realized the racists weren’t laughing with him, but at him; Kurt Cobain killed himself in part because his rapist fans were winning. I get infinitely more laughs with jokes about theater than I do about football. Taylor Swift continues writing singles about the haters because we’ve convinced ourselves that she isn’t making conscious choices to write about love, an abiding subject in poetry for a while now, but in fact just writing her diary for our consumption.

Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Lyle Lovett, Johnny Cash: Those are artists, because their experience—of white heterosexual masculinity—is after all universal. Everybody can identify with the love of a good woman, the vicissitudes that attain thereof, but nobody wants to hear about some dumb white girl getting dumped. …

Reading this first excerpt of Lena Dunham’s forthcoming book, preceded as it has been by a year’s worth of death knells and straight-up unadorned hating, I was irritated. Of course I was; it’s irritating as hell. But the funniest and loveliest thing about Dunham has always been, to me, the deadpan irony of exactly those choices. Tiny Furniture is every bit as self-excoriating as the first season of Girls was, and just as confusing for those of us (most of us) who find it hard to switch gears, to hear that register at all: The one where a woman telling you the worst things about herself is an attempt to bridge the gap, to create art that transcends selves, rather than to simply confess.

by Phoebe Maltz Bovy

A reader writes:

Bless your heart, Phoebe, for attempting to curb the tide of parental overshare. I am a parent of young children, and I post pictures of them and the occasional adorable quip they make on Facebook. Honestly, I post more than I should of them, but I try very hard to limit it to only the nicest photos of my kids, and not too frequently, for the exact reasons you discussed. I do not want my kids to be searching for jobs and have a potential employer know about their childhood doctors appointments. I appreciate having someone out there pointing out the long term effects if parental oversharing, so thanks for… sharing.

The two genres of parental sharing you mentioned really only account for the high-end posts (I.e., the Times and the Atlantic are the publishers). There is a plethora of other parental overshares on the so-called mommy blogs. So many kids with digestive problems and mothers trying to help their kids understand God and stay-at-home dads trying to be clever and funny. And the larger blogs have sponsored content (albeit often clearly labeled). I once read a post by a woman whose blog received a sponsorship from a razor company, and she talked about the first time her tween daughter shaved. Ugh. And that doesn’t even begin to get to the quick shares on Facebook of potty training successes and failures. Please keep up the good work of reminding people not to start embarrassing their children until they are a little older, like our parents did.

Even with my limited knowledge of colloquial American English from places outside the Northeast, I know that “bless your heart” implies that my cause here is a futile one. Which, alas, it probably is. But this response is reminding me of an important clarification regarding just what that cause, as I see it, involves.

When it comes to parental overshare, two issues get confused. First, there’s the excessive-to-some presence of babies in one’s Facebook feed (a common complaint of many who don’t have kids, whether or not by choice). Second, there’s the question of large-scale privacy violation. “Mommy blog” complaints fall somewhere between the two. Sometimes people are offended by the mere presence online of content that isn’t news, opinion, or mansplanation about the serious issues of the day, and it’s basically part of the standing grievance that exists against all ‘lifestyle’ content. Other times, it’s that some of these blogs are sharing identifiable information about kids, including that which is embarrassing, medical, or both, and are – as this reader notes – doing so for profit.

Anyway, social-media sharing and “mommy blogs” are easier targets than serious publications taking on serious parenting-related issues. But the parental overshare that’s a real concern is precisely the sort that isn’t so readily declared irrelevant. The point here isn’t to dismiss certain types of (largely female-oriented-and-produced) content as boring or frivolous. It’s normal, in an age of online photo-sharing, that family photo albums would be digital, and would include kids. It’s normal to be some mix of bored or annoyed by what long-lost acquaintances put on Facebook, but – as Maureen O’Connor eloquently explained – it’s not unethical to post things others find uninteresting. The issue, as I see it, is not that children are owed a complete digital invisibility of the sort that’s near-unachievable in this day and age. Rather, it’s that parents shouldn’t be profiting from their children’s secrets. There shouldn’t be something to gain, professionally, by breaching that trust.

Another response gets it exactly right:

Tufekci is correct that change needs to come from editors. As it stands, someone with a toilet-training essay to sell will find an outlet; someone with an essay not about toilet-training will be nudged by the market to include an anecdote along those lines. The business model needs to change. Since the demand for really courageous articles of this nature appears insatiable, this will take an act of courage-in-the-non-sarcastic-sense from the gatekeepers themselves.

by Phoebe Maltz Bovy

So the most egregious example of parental overshare that I’ve yet encountered has just appeared. Depressingly, it’s in the same publication as my own first published piece on the topic. It’s from a father who caught his 9-year-old son looking at porn:

His eyes darted back and forth, as if looking for an escape hatch inside his own head.  He was formulating a plan, something to get out of this situation, and then he stopped. His brow furrowed.

“Wait,” he said, sitting back upright. And then he followed up with possibly the sweetest thing he ever asked me, given the context. “What’s porn?”

I couldn’t help but smile. His defense hadn’t been self-preservation so much as it was genuine confusion. “It’s videos and pictures of people having sex,” I told him. He slumped back into embarrassment. “Oh. Then, yes. I looked at porn.”

Totes adorbs! Oh, and the author’s writing under what we can assume is his real name, and provides his son’s name and nickname. In case this wasn’t traumatizing enough for the kid, we also get specifics of his surfing habits:

My brain registered the title of a web page in the middle of the history list before my eyes really focused on anything.

8:41 PM    http://www.bimbos.com    Free XXX Vids: Sheila, The Queen of Ana…

I expanded the Page Title column to see the whole thing and was dismayed, but not surprised, to find that Sheila was not the Queen of Analogies. There were several more pages visited in rapid succession, all featuring women giving jobs that had nothing to do with our nation’s unemployment rates. Finally, the browser history showed, a Google search for “sex videos” had led to brief visits in the Internet’s nether regions before he’d apparently seen enough. I called his mother the next day.

What’s so jarring to me is now normal this sort of essay has become. No one bats an eye! Everyone’s happy to discuss their thoughts on this father’s approach to childrearing, happy to have the ‘so how does one address porn with young kids?’ conversation, and somehow missing that the most private moments of a specific child’s life are not fodder for an article in a much-shared publication. And the worst of it is, the father here totally got that this wasn’t a public moment. Recounting the talk, he writes, “‘So, I have to talk to you,’ I told him, once we were inside the car and away from other ears.” Other ears? Does the Atlantic‘s readership not count?

Inspired by this article, a parental-overshare checklist, to go through before pitching a story about your kid:

• How would you feel if such an article existed about you? As in, from your childhood, by one of your parents? How would you have felt if you’d discovered such an article at 14, 17, 22?
• Is what you’re sharing something you’d feel you had the authority to share, on that scale, about your best friend or partner?
• Is there a way to address this issue without talking about your kid? Who is identifiable even if you’re a woman with a different last name from said kid? Who, even if reasonably unidentifiable (i.e. no first or last name given) will still read the article and know exactly whom “my daughter” refers to?

by Phoebe Maltz Bovy

Parental overshare essays can subdivided into various subgenres. One of those is the very successful parent of an academically-mediocre child. The essay may be about the parent coming to terms with the fact that Junior will not get into to a college William Deresiewicz has strong feelings about. The author inevitably becomes a better person, and parent, in the process, and should be congratulated.

Another subgenre is the child with a difficulty of some kind. Not a problem so severe as to prevent the child from ever having the capacity to read the article. (Those parents suffer enough, and should feel free to share as they see fit. As should parents of adult children who are merely responding to the children’s complaints about them.) But something that’s either medical or just highly personal, that taps into whichever cultural concerns, and where the parent-writer can tell him or herself that they’re really doing a service, as if awareness-raising somehow cancels out the potential destruction of their child’s reputation. While the parents who write such pieces surely do so in part out of concern for their children and others in the same situation – it’s not just professional aspiration and a desire to write what the market plainly demands – these pieces make it so that a child will grow up with his or her identity already being associated with some biographical detail he or she might have preferred not to share, or at least not to lead with.

Rachel Simmons merged these two subgenres into a personal essay about being an academic superstar with an underachieving child. Except that the underachieving has a medical component – her child, she explains, is developmentally delayed, if still quite young. It’s ambiguous from the article whether this is a condition that will long affect her kid, or whether the tragedy is that her daughter may turn out to be of average intelligence. But one almost has to guess it’s the latter, given how much of the piece is devoted to the author’s own brilliance:

I was a classic “amazing girl”—driven, social, and relentlessly well-rounded—reveling in the fruits of post-Title IX America: an all-metro athlete in high school, Rhodes Scholar at 24, best-selling author by 27. My anonymous sperm donor is an (allegedly) gifted musician.

And:

I’ve spent years in therapy excavating my endless, often fruitless drive to overachieve. I have learned that being successful hasn’t made me happy. It’s just made me successful. I even call myself a recovering overachiever.

There’s more, but there’s also the title (and subtitle) that presumably someone at Slate chose to frame the piece: “The Achievement Gap: I excel at everything I do. I assumed my daughter would too.” This is being presented more as a story about a parent who fears a kid’s mediocrity than of one struggling with a child’s disability. Nothing in the piece suggests the daughter in question won’t one day read her mother’s article. And it’s that, and not the humblebragging, that I find objectionable.

It seems cruel to write, of your own kid, “It never occurred to me that my newborn daughter would be anything but extraordinary.” It’s saying that you think your child is ordinary. So not only will this kid have to grow up knowing that her late acquisition of verbal skills is public knowledge, but she’ll also have to contend with a public account of exactly how disappointed that made her mother.

by Phoebe Maltz Bovy

So many contenders for the Zoolander Award for fashion absurdity!

One reader nominates “The Kanye West $120 plain white t-shirt. Not absurd for the look but for the price and claiming it is somehow ‘fashion’. Not sure there is a better example of how much of a con the industry can be at times.”

This has potential. The only problem is the one the reader notes, namely that the shirt itself is inoffensive:

https://twitter.com/WayUpHere/status/361213679905157120

Another reader nominates some boat shoes that look as if oil – specifically, BP oil – had spilled on them. This does visually prefigure the mud shoe, but because the proceeds apparently went to charity, it seems somehow wrong to give it the Award. And yet, boat shoes (said as someone who does, in fact, own a pair). The preppy-filthy combination does have a whiff of Derelicte about it.

But I think we have our winner:

From a swanky lingerie shop in NY:

Because we all need $525 Mickey Mouse ears.  Because they’re sexy? Ummm…

What did it for me was the e-commerce site’s product description:

Fantasy-inspired couture headpieces made by hand in New York City by milliner Heather Huey. Custom sizing available upon request.

• Hand-wrapped vinyl wire headband
• Vinyl covered fur felt mouse ears
• One size

“Vinyl covered fur felt mouse ears,” for $525. Yes.

by Phoebe Maltz Bovy

One of the many tributes to the late, great Lauren Bacall can be found in The Jewish Week, whose angle is, understandably, a Jewish one. Gabriela Geselowitz provides an eight-item checklist of Bacall’s most Jewish details. What interests me most is the seventh item:

People would act surprised when they learned she was Jewish.  Tired of people telling her she didn’t “look” Jewish, she said, “And I’d think, what’s with this Jewish thing? Is it terrible to look it? Not to look it? Does it mean you have to look like Shylock?”

A mainstay of the Jewish press is and long has been the did-you-know-this-blonde-starlet-is-Jewish? story. Did you know that Bar Refaeli, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Scarlett Johansson are Jews? If you’re Jewish, you’ve probably heard this many times, and if you’re not, either you don’t care, or you run one of those other sorts of websites devoted to listing Jews.

I suppose this genre is meant to be of some kind of comfort to Jewish women and girls, who know all too well that we are not exactly stereotyped as ravishing. Pop culture is full of references to the unique appeal of non-Jewish women to Jewish men, but Jewish women… tend to get points only for not looking or seeming Jewish, whatever these mean. The American romantic comedy basically is a Jewish man (sometimes played by a non-Jewish actor – see Jason Biggs’s career) and a non-Jewish woman (who can, in turn, be played by a Jewish one – see Natalie Portman in “Garden State”). Or maybe the point is to reassure Jewish men that they need not marry out to find the conventionally beautiful wife of their dreams. (Obstacles to marrying a woman who looks like Bar Refaeli – let alone like Lauren Bacall – would seem to extend far beyond the possibility that such a woman wouldn’t share one’s religious persuasion.)

I mean, I get it. There are many fine reasons for avoiding the expression ‘looking Jewish.’

To begin with the obvious, anti-Semitic stereotypes often include visuals, and if the idea is that looking Jewish means having a hooked nose that reaches down to one’s navel, or some kind of grotesque hand grasping the entire globe, it’s understandable why few would want in. Like Bacall evidently said, who wants to look like Shylock?

Then, within the Jewish community, is the question of exclusion. Jews who don’t fit the more neutral stereotype (i.e. not horns or claws – just… a white person with dark hair, more or less) end up hearing from other Jews that they don’t count, which could, I’d imagine, get old, or get really annoying if you’re someone who doesn’t merely identify as Jewish, but wishes to be active in Jewish communal life. It’s not really a drawback in society at large, of course, to not look Jewish. Certainly not when it’s the sort of not-looking-Jewish that so fascinates the Jewish press, namely looking non-Jewish but white. Anyway, most American Jews, but not all, are of Ashkenazi (Eastern European) ancestry, and even among those of that background, we don’t – as the saying goes – all look alike.

And yet. For those of us who do look Jewish – ahem – how we’re received in the world is impacted by this perception. This is just… a fact of lived experience. It may not even be a thing – as in, I’m agnostic on whether there actually are more ‘Jewish-looking’ people among Jews than among the white population at large. That’s not the point. The point is that a stereotype exists, and those of us who are immediately understood as Jewish are those who happen to meet it. And it’s approximately as reassuring for me to hear that some Jews have hair much lighter and noses much smaller than my own as it must be for those in equivalent (if not exactly parallel) boats to learn that Alexa Chung’s career is doing well, or that Zoe Saldana – a woman of color, but… – was cast as Nina Simone.

What I’m asking for, then, is not some kind of outrage over the plight of the Jewish-looking Jews. It’s not really a plight at this point, just a life experience. All I’d like is to find some way to reclaim ‘Jewish-looking’ that isn’t too terribly insulting to Jews who do or don’t meet that description.

Objections? Agreement? Tangentially-related musings? Send them to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

by Phoebe Maltz Bovy

New teenage drivers are all alike; every new adult driver is tragi-comic in his or her own way. Katha Pollitt’s 2002 New Yorker essay (paywalled) remains the foremost text in the field of Late Bloomer Studies, Auto Division, but that doesn’t stop the rest of us from trying. I’m sure I have my own such essay in me, but the memories are too fresh. So I will instead present Elana Berkowitz’s account of being a displaced New Yorker first learning in her 30s:

For my first solo outing, I drove to a national forest outside Los Angeles for a hike. Distracted by all the mirrors to adjust and dashboard gauges check, I overlooked one very critical thing — the gas light. I ended up stuck at the top of a very steep and winding road with no fuel and no cellphone reception. Screaming in panic, I descended in neutral, hitting the occasional guardrail, until I found a gas station. Having never pumped gasoline, I fumbled nervously with the levers and buttons as other drivers giggled and stared. I vacillated between annoyance and mortification, until all I could do was burst into a fit of laughter.

Yikes! (I still have never pumped gas, but that’s because NJ law forbids us from doing so.) But Berkowitz sees the experience as a positive one:

We’ve all read about the risks of diminishing brain plasticity with age, making it more difficult to absorb new information. When people heard I couldn’t drive, they’d respond with “But it’s so easy.” Yes, maybe it was easy to learn when you were 17. As we cross the threshold of 30, we reconcile ourselves to the fact that if we have not yet made progress on becoming an astronaut or an accomplished cellist, it isn’t happening. But learning something new that had seemed impossible has filled me with possibility. (And, also, filled me with tears. Yes, I cried learning how to drive, but it was only once and I guarantee it was warranted.)

She only cried once! I’m impressed.

But for an outrageously positive spin on being an unlicensed adult, turn to Matthew Schneier’s recent lifestyle story about the New Yorkers – himself included – whose non-driving is an inconvenience principally because it gets in the way of their vacation plans (NYT):

Not driving did not hold me back from covering fashion weeks in London, Milan and Paris. But this Fourth of July, it did pose a problem when a caravan of friends trundled to Hebron, N.H (population 600).

There was no way to get there without driving, and nowhere, save the post office and general store a few paces away, I could conveniently reach once we had arrived. Thus began my weekend of anxious dependency, one that echoed many summer weekends before it. No alternative plan could be made when the majority of the group headed out for a hike. No sightseeing was possible farther than the dusty center of the town square. I arrived when they arrived, and left when they left.

I summered, in sum, at the mercy of my friends-turned-captors, and let me take the opportunity to make clear that I appreciated deeply their kindness and (to be frank) amused indulgence.

Schneier found a woman who may actually be too glamorous to drive – a problem I wish I had, because as thrilled as I am to have a license, driving is – as I’d say if I were more glamorous – quite a bore:

“I’ve just gone by the motto, ‘Some people drive, and some people are driven,’ ” said Melissa Bent, 36, an art adviser. “I’m the latter.” Over the years, she has become adept at plotting clever ways around her inability. When, as a gallerist, she needed to travel to Los Angeles, she would hire a local art student to be her chauffeur (upside: they knew all the local galleries). And in Boulder, Colo., where she was calling from on a recent July afternoon, she was discovering the bus system. (“You wouldn’t believe the guffaws from all the people,” she said.)