Tag: false analogy

The Bruni Bible; or How to Write a New York Times Editorial

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Frank Bruni’s accession to the position of New York Times editorialist was announced in May by Andrew Rosenthal (no relation to former chief editor A.M. Rosenthal) (just kidding, he’s his son).  The op-ed page editor suggested that Bruni was qualified by virtue of his ability to provide a “sharp, opinionated look at a big event of the last week, from a different or unexpected angle, or a small event that was really important but everyone seems to have missed, or something entirely different,” presumably involving a medium-sized event.  Further lending gravitas is that fact that the former restaurant critic’s NYT career has “spanned…part of a papacy.”  (This is true of many events, but it does sound impressive: “We’ve been sitting here for part of a papacy, waiting for our appetizers!  This service is atrocious!”)

In the six months that followed, the papacy-spanning pundit has been called “a pretty bad columnist,” denounced as inane, unreadable, and an unqualified poseur, vilified for his lack of arithmetic skills and contempt for substantive issues; it’s even been suggested that he doesn’t know he’s writing for the Times at all.

But I believe he does.  Oh, he knows it all too well.  Whatever his faults of relevance or coherence, Bruni’s work is distinguished for its firm grasp of the New York Times house style — that mélange of  dad-joke whimsy, inspiring truisms, fake sociology, celebrity snark, magnificent scorn for the lowbrow,  and horse-race election reporting, all united by a pervading tone of NPR blandness and upper-middle-class obliviousness.  Frank Bruni’s writing could appear scrawled on a bathroom wall, or crumpled in a bottle that washed up on the beach, or blazoned in the sky in letters of fire, and you’d still be like “is that from the New York Times?”  (Although you might mistake it for Gentzlinger.)

So by understanding Bruni’s literary techniques, we’ll understand the essence of the Times editorial page.  In no particular order, here they are.

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What Not to Wear: From Hot-Pants Trashy to Pinafore Classy, the New York Times Way!

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It may sometimes seem like women face an impossible task:  Whether it’s motherhood, professional life or just walking down the street, ladies are vulnerable to the conflicting demands and judgmental expectations of society.  A woman is  liable to be judged on tiny details — of speech, behavior, even the clothes she wears — and must negotiate the conflicting dangers of being labeled too butch or too feminine, too assertive or too timid, too prudish or too sexy.

But if you think that sounds hard, it’s nothing compared to what New York Times writers have to deal with.  Just look at the first sentence of Ruth La Ferla’s article “Women Enjoy the Cool Comfort of Summer Dresses“:  “Trends come and go, but the dress persists, secure in its status as a metaphor.”

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Why Does the New York Times Hate Fun?

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The New York Times has a strange idea of fun.  They seem eager to give me, the reader, tips on enjoyable things to do with my free time.  But the activities suggested aren’t always so relevant to my interests.  I could become an influential industry bigwig, then spend years befriending club promoters and buying $1000 “bottle service” to earn myself a permanent spot on the guest list at a trendy night club.  I could go to an exhibition of designer nightstands featuring such artists as Sting.  (“I liked the idea to let men conjure up their story for the nightstand. It’s almost role reversal,” says the curator.) Or stop in at a racist country club to sample a delicacy called a “frozen tomato” that consists of “essentially tomato ice cream (except, instead of cream, it’s got cream cheese, cottage cheese and mayonnaise), served in a round scoop on a lettuce leaf with a dollop of more mayonnaise on top).”  I could collect Victorian taxidermy, or knit Brobdignagian cozies for public statuary.

Still, for every bizarre activity that they praise, there is another relatively harmless pastime they disparage.  Why?  Maybe it’s too lowbrow.  Maybe it’s because the fans of said pastime are presumed to be illiterate proles who don’t understand the consequences of their actions.  Or maybe it’s for the opposite reason — the pastime is question has gotten too popular with the hip, trend-chasing urbanites whom the writers fondly imagine comprise their core readership.  There must be something dangerous about it.  But what?  In a selection of recent articles, we’ll explore how Times scribes find fear in the benign.

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Bunch Drunk Love: On the Unintelligibility of Manohla Dargis

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In theory, I should enjoy the New York Times Arts section. Its writers aim to cover all of forms of artistic production, from ballet and jazz to pop music and reality TV, from an approachable yet intellectual perspective.  I love all those things!  (Except jazz.)  I like to stay informed about art and literature; these writers like informing me about art and literature.  They’re urbane, culturally literate city dwellers; I’m an urbane, culturally literate city dweller.  They have a superficial familiarity with Max Weber, Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes; I have a superficial familiarity with Max Weber, Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes.*  What could go wrong?

*Actually, I know all about Roland Barthes.  I was just saying that to be nice.

Well, we’ve already seen what can go wrong.  The writers are a little too excited about how urbane they are, a little too eager to let you know they know about philosophers and literary critics; most of all, a little too anxious to distinguish themselves from an imagined class of fellow Americans who enjoy pop culture in an uncritical, unironic way.  Those buffoons!  So the Times critics cluck their tongues at the common people’s affection for Snooki.  They scold Real Housewives of New Jersey fans for “abusing [free will].” Et cetera.

Too often, their writing is full of signifiers of Intelligence and Important Ideas — philosopher names, abstract concepts, compound-complex sentences that are hard to read — and lacking in the clarity and precision that might serve to convey actual intelligence and ideas.   A fine example of this problem is Manohla Dargis.  She seems to mean well, and is often praised as a smart broad with high standards.  But every time I read one of her reviews I end up being like “what the hell is she talking about, this is unintelligible, just tell me what the movie is about.”

Aside from this guy, though, people seem give her impenetrable writing a pass, just because it’s got big words in it.  It’s a shame!  We’ll go through her latest together, and you tell me if I’m wrong.

“‘Bridesmaids,’ an unexpectedly funny new comedy about women in love, if not of the Sapphic variety…”

Why would it be “of the sapphic variety?   The phrase “women in love” doesn’t convey “…with each other” to me.  Maybe Dargis is trying to allude to the famous novel Women in Love, but mistakenly believes it’s about lesbians?  Also, what’s with the euphemism?  You sound like Playboy’s Party Jokes circa 1972.  “A butch young lady of the sapphic variety entered a men’s haberdashery shop and told the limp-wristed assistant, “I’m looking for something sturdy in a brown tweed trouser.’  The fey young man replied, ‘aren’t we all!'”   It’s 2011!  Just use normal words!

“…goes where no typical chick flick does: the gutter.”

This is a long sentence, although by no means the longest we’ll encounter.  Is it even true that “typical chick flicks” don’t have toilet humor?  It seems like these days, every rom-com has a scene where, like, a guy accidentally sits on a huge black dildo… while he’s trying to pull it out, a dog vomits on his crotch… he accidentally presses a button on his cell phone that calls his mother-in-law… she hears the noises, thinks the guy’s wife in in labor, and drives right over… anyway, I guess I wouldn’t know.  I’m not a huge connoisseur of fart jokes like Manohla Dargis is.  Zing!

“Well, more like the city street that Lillian, a soon-to-be wife played by a wonderful, warm Maya Rudolph, dashes into…”

So it doesn’t descend into the gutter, but into a city street, shots of which appear in almost every movie?  You just ruined your own disingenuous rhetorical flourish!  Seriously, is this not the clunkiest sentence?  I’d rewrite it as “More like a city street.  Lillian, a soon-to-be wife, dashes out of an upscale New York salon…” No, that’s clunky too.  “The city street onto which Lillian (a warm, wonderful Maya Rudolph) dashes, its ineluctable gutters bespeaking an earthy, Rabelasian symbolism…”  Actually, I don’t care.  This movie contains a scene where a woman in a wedding gown does something zany.  No tortured syntax required.

“…dressed in the kind of foamy white gown that royal weddings and the bridal industrial complex are made of.”

Dargis is attempting satire, but it isn’t really working for me.  Saying these things are “made of” wedding dresses is like saying America’s obesity crisis is made of cheeseburgers, or that unprotected sex is made of herpes.  Better to have written something like  “the kind of foamy white gown that make or break royal weddings (and that keep the bridal industrial complex going strong).”  Actually, still annoying.  The problem is the phrase “bridal industrial complex.”  It’s one of those expressions where the first time someone hears it, they think it sounds so clever that they just have to work it into a conversation right away.  Congratulations, you noticed that weddings are big business.  How incisive.  This is a movie review and a Marxist critique of the patriarchy, in one!

“Suddenly realizing in a salon that she’s been hit with food poisoning, she flees like a runaway bride,except that it isn’t a man who’s making her, uh, run…”

Because a person using terrestrial motion to proceed rapidly on foot is said to be “running,” while a person with digestive difficulties is said to have “the runs.”  Funny!  How old are you, twelve?

“…but the giddy, liberating humor of the writers Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo.”

How bold: a movie character doing what it says to do in the script.  Unless this is one of those self-referential movies where the writer starts appearing as a character in her own work and arguing with the protagonist about what’s going to happen to them and stuff?  So you’re saying this film crosses diagetic levels to self-reflexively meditate on its own narrativity, and there’s poop jokes?  We’re living in a golden age of cinema.

“That may sound disgusting, perfect for the reigning naughty boys of American screens…”

I get what she’s saying here, but the way she says it’s “perfect for” them, it sounds like she’s planning to give Maya Rudolph’s intestinal distress to Judd Apatow for Rosh Hashanah.

“…and it is, a little.”

Goddammit!  If you use a cliché phrase like “this may sound X,” you’re supposed to explain that it is, in fact, not X.  That’s the whole point of the phrase.  You’re not supposed to limply conclude that the thing is exactly what I may have thought it was.  Although, I wish Ross Douthat would start using that strategy.  “Beltway insiders think Mike Huckabee is too big a stupid, homophobic, racist, Cracker Barrel-y Jesus freak to be president.  They’re right.”  Now that’s an editorial I could take seriously!

“Given how most wedding pictures enforce the hoariest clichés about the sexes, the go-for-broke outlandishness of Lillian’s pratfall — nicely handled by the director Paul Feig, holding the shot as she sits in a deflated puff of white — is welcome.” I still don’t know what’s “outlandish” or “nicely handled” about the scene… maybe it would help if you quoted a line of dialogue or described some of the shots, instead of writing down familiar phrases with some of the words changed around?

“In most wedding movies an actress may have the starring part (though not always)…”  “Most” and “may” already imply “not always.”  What’s with the parentheses?

“…but it’s only because her character’s function is to land a man rather than to be funny. Too many studio bosses seem to think that a woman’s place is in a Vera Wang.”

Goddamn, replacing words in familiar phrases with other words is really Manohla Dargis’s downfall.  Altered clichés are to her what meaningless non sequiturs are to Randy Cohen, or outdated pop culture references are to Philip Galanes.

“There is a big dress here, of course…” Why are we still talking about the dress?  Get to the bridesmaids!

“…an aggressively foolish Gordian knot of silk and wit that slyly speaks to how women need (and want) to be packaged as brides, dolled up in satin and all but lost in a cloud of tulle and the appreciative din of family and friends.”  The dress is shaped like a knot?  It “slyly speaks”?  It’s made up of “silk and wit”?  Great description… very vivid… I can see it in my mind’s eye.  All this yoking together of a specific thing and an abstract thing in one phrase (e.g. a “cloud of tulle” and an “appreciative din”) is very headache-inducing.  It’s like a more convoluted version of “colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”

“The movie doesn’t push hard in that direction — more than anything, Ms. Wiig and Ms. Mumolo want to make you giggle and snort — but they get at the layers of insanity in weddings as well as the joys. They ask the question facing every modern woman who jumps at the chance to enact the latter-day equivalent of being passed from man to man, father to husband, if without a bushel of dowry corn and 12 goats: How do you survive getting down the aisle?”  If a woman has her own job and apartment, how is her wedding the “equivalent” of being passed from man to man?  A symbol, maybe, but not an equivalent…  also, where did the goats and corn come from?  Are we talking about, like, primitive tribes now?  Does Manohla Dargis think being given away by your dad is an African thing?

“With a little, or rather a lot, of help from your friends, or so say the filmmakers, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till misunderstanding, jealousy, other people or just life us do part.”  I’m surmising that this is the part of the review where Dargis looked at her notes and realized she hadn’t written down any dialogue, plot points or scenes besides the food poisoning one.  Her notes from the screening all said things like “woman writers <—– FEMINISM?????” and “doodoo jokes:  perfect for naughty boys of Hollywood?!”, and she realized the only way to reach her word count was to start writing down familiar phrases with some of the words replaced. “Till death do us part’ isn’t always true!  The Beatles didn’t consider that some people need a lot of help from their friends (because they’re neurotic)!  Life’s a beach, and the protagonist of this film just stepped on a discarded heroin needle!”  Manohla Dargis, you can use that line if you want.  I know it’s gold.

“To that intimate end…”  Oh, to that end.

“…Lillian, after announcing her engagement, asks Annie (Ms. Wiig) to be her maid of honor.”  Here Dargis describes the plot.  John Hamm is seen “playfully riffing on his persona as the thinking woman’s brute,” and “figures into her life with humor and almost too-true pathos,” whatever that means.

“A lanky-limbed blonde who evokes Meg Ryan stretched along Olive Oyl lines, Ms. Wiig keeps her features jumping and sometimes bunching.”  I can’t even picture Meg Ryan “stretched” to look like Olive Oyl if I try, let alone spontaneously think about it when I look at at Kristin Wiig.  She looks pretty normal to me.  However, I hope the filmmakers use “Ms. Wiig keeps her features jumping and sometimes bunching!” as the quote on the movie poster.  It’s the must-see face-bunching comedy of the year!

“She’s a funny, pretty woman, but she’s also a comedian, and she’s wonderfully confident about playing not nice.”  Funny, but also a comedian?  Why doesn’t the New York Times’s chief film critic know what “but” means?

“It would be easy to oversell ‘Bridesmaids,’ though probably easier if also foolish to do the reverse.”  In other words, you could make the movie sound better than it is… but you could also make it sound worse than it is.  That sentence has a wonderfully Brooksian ring to it.  It would be easy to give an inaccurate impression of something if you described it inaccurately.  Well, don’t do that!  How about you just tell me how good it is?  I must warn you, I usually judge a film’s quality based on how successful the actors are at keeping their features jumping and bunching.

“It isn’t a radical movie (even if Ms. McCarthy’s character comes close)…”

A character in the movie comes close to being, herself, a radical movie?  I told you this was some metareferential shit.  “Tom Stoppard in the house!”

“It’s formally unadventurous; and there isn’t much to look at beyond all these female faces. Yet these are great faces”

“LOOK AT… ALL THESE… GREAT FACES!” — The New York Times.  “Hey, wanna go see Bridesmaids?  I heard it has great faces, and they know just when to bunch!”

By the way, why does every Times review of a mainstream comedy have to include a token remark about its lack of visual innovativeness?  Hall Pass is “stubbornly visually unevolved,” Please Give is “visually unmemorable,” Get Smart is visually painless, Your Highness is not “interested in doing much visually,” I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry is “about as visually sophisticated as a parking-garage surveillance video.”  Comedies featuring bongs and Saturday Night Live cast members aren’t really aiming to forge a new visual aesthetic and change the way you view the world forever, so you can stop deducting points for that.  Actually, all those reviews are by Manohla Dargis.  She also always talks about Judd Apatow, even in reviews of movies that don’t involve him.  Apparently he “has carved out a niche and inspired something of a subgenre with movies about funny, smutty but sincere man-boys puzzling their way through adult heterosexual relations,” and furthermore is “the king of… sublimated man-on-man affairs.”  The woman has a real love-hate relationship with the naughty boy of Hollywood comedy.  The only way to make her happy would be for Judd Apatow to make a visually stunning, Kurosawa-esque epic that takes place at a lesbian separatist commune.  COMING THIS AUGUST FROM PARAMOUNT PICTURES:  I Love You, Bitch.  Growing up.  Growing out of hegemonic gender essentialism.  Growing soybeans.

“Contra Christopher Hitchens and his 2007 assertion in Vanity Fair that women are not funny, they offer irrefutable proof that along with producing and starring in a hit TV series (thank you, Tina Fey), women can go aggressive laugh to aggressive-and-absurd laugh with men.”  I dunno, it seems like if Christopher Hitchens wanted to believe women could be funny, he could have noted the existence of Jane Austen, Katherine Hepburn, or Joan Rivers (among many others [hey, I’m using parentheses!]) decades ago.  I don’t think he’s even trying to be reasonable.  If this review prompts Christopher Hitchens to go see Bridesmaids and admit he was irrefutably wrong, I’ll eat my hat.  While he’s at it, maybe he’ll admit he he’s a supercilious, tumor-ridden old warmonger who gets off on feeling superior to people.  Don’t hold your breath!

“All they need, beyond talent and timing, a decent director and better lines, is a chance.”  Well, if they don’t have any talent, then they’re not in a position to “prove” women can be funny… and if they don’t get good directors or lines, they’re not really being given “a chance”… couldn’t you have just written “all they need is a chance”?  Oh fuck it, this is almost over.

“It helps if the director has a clue, and if everyone involved sees women not just as bosoms with legs, but as bosoms with legs and brains.”  So in Manohla Dargis’s utopia of the future, people still won’t notice that women have heads?  In life as in her work, her standards really are too low.

Confidential to David Brooks:  You can block me from your Facebook page, but you can never silence my voice!   And coming soon:  Why does the New York Times hate fun?

The Sentences of Stanley Fish

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Stanley Fish is a professor of humanities and law.  He’s hella old, but instead of retiring to Florida, he did the next best thing:  Got a job writing editorials for the New York Times.  Oh, and took an academic job in Florida.  Before that, he taught at UC Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, Duke and University of Illinois, Chicago.  During his protracted journeyings around this great nation, he’s built an intellectual reputation for advancing anti-foundationalism and extreme relativism.  Not the fake kind of relativism, where it just means you like gay people and disagree with Glenn Beck, but the real kind, where you go around like a dickhead telling everyone that truth doesn’t exist and human nature is just a bunch of historically contingent cultural norms.

Looking at his Wikipedia page, I find that critiques of his philosophical stance are legion.   For instance, Judith Shulevitz reports Fish “rejects wholesale the concepts of ‘fairness, impartiality, reasonableness,'” Terry Eagleton “excoriates Fish’s ‘discreditable epistemology’ as ‘sinister,'” and Martha Nussbaum says he “‘relies on the regulative principle of non-contradiction in order to adjudicate between competing principles,’ thereby relying on normative standards of argumentation even as he argues against them.”  I’m glad someone finally said something!  That’s basically what I was going to point out myself, but I didn’t want to be the first to one bring it up.

Knowing that Fish’s discreditable epistemology and regulative principle of non-contradiction have been duly addressed, we can turn with an easy conscience to this blog’s rightful concern: His writing for the Times.  Specifically, his sentences.  Fish is a master of sentences, having authored the recent volume How to Write a Sentence. So it’s fitting that we look to his methods for guidance and instruction.  What kind of sentences can a world-famous Milton scholar,  teacher to generations of young minds, and distinguished commentator for the Paper of Record turn out?

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Crazy Love II

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Love has always proved a difficult subject for NYT writers to tackle.  Having existed for over 50,000 years, long before the beginning of recorded human history, it cannot be convincingly described as a “trend.”  It could even be said defy trends, outlasting all epochs, regimes, reigns, administrations, and empires.  It’s a human universal!  That is all very inspiring, but poses difficulties for the Styles scribes, who have a paradigm that — while perfectly serviceable when men’s eyebrow grooming appointments go up 8 percent between 2009 and 2010, or some such — lacks explanatory power when dealing with with time frames in the tens of thousands of years.

Are trend pieces the only option?  No.  If you want to explain the vagaries of affection to Styles readers, you could turn to another perennial format, the one that I call “article about a press release.”  Specifically, an article about a press release about a scientific study, a study that is about something of interest to Styles readers.  Creating an AAAPR(AASS) is easy, because all you have to do is read the one-age press release, paraphrase what it says, and add in some Jersey Shore references.  You don’t have to weigh conflicting opinions and reach an independent conclusion, or read a bunch of relevant scientific work in the field, or even read the one scientific work that the article is about.  Just summarize the press release, and bam, you’re a Science Reporter, using all kinds of cool words like “hypothesize” and “control group.”  Science is great!

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Wrong: A Typology

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Some of the problems with the New York Times are nebulous and diffuse.  The writers’ tone can seem kind of smug and suck-uppy.  They write about rich people too much.   They care way too much about iPhones and hipsters and artisanal axes and stuff.  Yet none of these things are wrong, exactly.  It’s not incorrect to write that a man in TriBeCa is crafting beautiful handmade “urban axes,” as indeed he is.  Yet some claims and ideas in the Times aren’t just annoying; they’re concretely, satisfyingly wrong.  That is what we’ll be looking at today.  How many kinds of wrongness are there in Times articles, and what form do they take?

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Unethical, Unsustainable, Untolerable

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Some time has passed since my last post, and now we must face a poignant milestone together:  Randy Cohen’s last column.  In this goodbye essay, he gives us a window into his world, summing up a decade’s worth of his adventures reading people’s letters and trying to have thoughts about them.

Over the years, Cohen has been fortunate enough to have thousands of readers request his opinion, then slaver over how great he is.  So naturally, he begins by discussing his hate mail.  He got a lot of angry letters, but it’s all good:  “Ethics is a subject about which honorable people may differ. I was less sanguine about readers who disparaged not my argument but my character or my shoes or my nose, attacks that generally concluded, ‘You should be ashamed.’ I blame the anonymity of e-mail. And underprescribed medication.”  I’m not sure you’d have to be off your meds to find Randy Cohen’s face to be objectionable; have you seen the guy?  It’s a little tactless to blame him for it, though.  If anyone should be ashamed of how Randy Cohen’s face turned out, it’s God!  They should take it up with him!

Randy Cohen
Randy Cohen.

But I’m not here to make puerile digs about people’s looks.  Especially when Cohen himself is striving so hard to be fair.  “From time to time, readers persuaded me that I was — what’s that ugly word? — wrong. Then I would revisit a column and recant my folly. I first did so when readers powerfully asserted that yes, you could honorably take your own food to the movies, despite a theater’s prohibition.”  Why would you even think they couldn’t?   “Ye shall not eat of the Raisinets that are in your purse, nor shall ye touch them, lest ye die” is not a serious moral edict.  I don’t recall forbidden Jujyfruits being mentioned in the Bible — or in the Q’ran, the Code of Hammurabi, the Dialogues of Plato, Thomas Aquinas’s Commentaries on Aristotle, the Tractatus Logico-Philisophicus, Atlas Shrugged, Skinny Bitch in the Kitch, or anywhere else ethical doctrines are to be found.  So what’s the deal?

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Happiness the Sunday Styles Way: A “Hard Look” at the Way We Live Now

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The New York Times has much to offer that is not worthy of hatred.  Within the US, International, Local and Business sections, there is a wealth of informative coverage of the world around us — “news,” if you will.  Why, then, do we return again and again to the Styles section, again and again to be disappointed?  What is the true purpose of the Styles section?  What is it doing next to all those other sections, and why can’t we just throw it away?  Well, I’ll tell you why.  The Styles section (and the Magazine, and T the fashion magazine) is far from extraneous.  These sections have news to transmit, albeit more ineffable and subjective than that which you’ll find in the “A” section.  The tidings they bring are about our lives, here in the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century:  How are mores and manners shifting? how are we changing? how is technology changing us? and how we should feel about it all?  These sections help us make sense of it.  Their subject is (hip, urban, upper-middle-class) humanity itself.  They may be vapid, but they are dear to our hearts.

But what answers do the Styles section and the Magazine really give?  Below, I analyze a selection of pieces from this Sunday.  I will extract the conclusion or “moral” each piece offers, and we’ll see if any patterns emerge.

We’ll start with Randy Cohen’s latest.  Randy Cohen writes a column called “The Ethicist,” in which he advises readers on morally significant decisions.  His qualifications to do this are that he has a B.A. in music and is an “Emmy-winning humorist,” although I suppose he’d be just as ineffectual if he had a Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard.  There’s something reassuring about his lack of credentials, though.  If you don’t like Cohen’s ethico-philosophical worldview, you can feel free to ignore it, because he’s just some guy.

I remember Cohen best for the column in which he asserted that “nobody should attend strip clubs, those purveyors of sexism as entertainment. Strip shows are to gender what minstrel shows are to race.”  That’s a nice analogy, because think about it.  Minstrel shows were a form of traveling variety show enjoyed by multiracial audiences in the 1800’s and early years of the 1910’s.  They gave many talented black musicians, actors and comedians a chance to succeed as professional artists, yet also forced them to perform degrading caricatures of blackness for the benefit of their white spectators.  If everyone had boycotted minstrel shows, these black artists would have been able to… go back to cotton sharecropping!  Thus bringing about an end to racism.  Similarly, boycotting strip clubs would help the women’s movement by putting a bunch of single moms out of work.  Why am I comparing these two things, again?

Don’t get me wrong, I think Cohen should following his personal moral compass on this issue.  As a feminist, I would never want to go to a strip club with Randy Cohen.

This week Cohen is at it again with the milquetoast-y pronouncements.  Someone writes in saying they don’t spank their kids, but have been asked by friends to spank their kids “when they are playing at our house and misbehave.”  Cohen says they don’t have to:

Many parents are militant in defense of their putative right to discipline their children as they see fit: with a sound thrashing. But conversely, your friends may not impose their Neanderthal parenting practices on you…. When you [tell them] that, you probably ought not mention that spanking is banned or restricted in 22 countries. Such facts will only irritate them. (And you should avoid the word ‘Neanderthal.’) Parents can be so prickly. Here in America, most people believe it is a fine thing to beat children, as long as you employ the accepted euphemism, ‘spanking,’ and are the child’s parent. (A similar justification was once applied to spousal abuse.)

Actually, I kind of love that Randy Cohen exists.  It is a rare writer who can make a person like me — someone who goes to graduate school, drinks Starbucks Via and gets one hundred e-mails a day from MoveOn.com — feel like a flag-waving mama grizzly Hell’s Angel rebel.  Don’t tell me not to spank my kids, you pantywaist!  I’m not gonna let some Liberal fascist feminazi communist Canadian Al Gore-hugger tell me how to raise my kids!  I almost can’t wait to have kids, just so I can start spanking them (moderately) (in cases of extraordinary disobedience).  Don’t Tread on Me!  Live free or die tryin’!  You’ll pry this imaginary gun out of my cold, dead hands!  I’ll put a boot up your ass, it’s the American way!

Moral: Don’t spank kids, don’t go to strip clubs.

Up next, “Out and About:  Cruising the Caribbean.”  This piece argues that “cruise ship food doesn’t have to be bad.”  “Qsine’s approach is high tech and high concept. The menu, with a lineup of small bites — or food to be shared — is presented on an iPad, through which each diner scrolls to select his favorites….  For dessert, the options are presented in a Rubik’s cube-like puzzle. Shift the boxes around and reveal ‘The Cupcake Affair,’ four cakes with do-it-yourself sauces and garnishes.”

Moral: The next time you’re planning a luxury cruise, hold out for one with gourmet meals.

“TV Right-Sizes 3D” by Virginia Heffernan. “In deciding whether to buy one of the new, ludicrously cool 3-D TVs — some of which won’t even require special glasses — ask yourself a serious question: Do you like your entertainment in front of you, inside your body or all around you?”  Um… are you sure that’s really what you meant to ask me?  That’s a very very… intimate topic!  A penetrating question, if you will!  I’ll take the second one.

Moral: Buy a 3D TV immediately, unless you’d rather just fuck.

Social Q’s.  Someone writes in to Galanes complaining that their daughter (apparently of high school age) is dressing “trampy.”  He responds: “We don’t want your little girl mistaken for a hooker as she waits for the school bus. Horns of a dilemma, right?”  Anyone who would mistake a student waiting at the bus stop for a “hooker” is probably not a reliable arbiter of youth fashion, anyway.  Galanes suggests a way for the parent get perspective on the situation: “Drive over to your daughter’s school and take a hard look at what the other girls are wearing.”  Yes.  There is no more welcome sight on the high school campus than an adult cruising around the parking lot, taking a “hard look” at the female students.  You might want to take the family van, in case a couple of those girls needs a ride!  Teenage girls can be shy, so don’t hesitate to ask.  Some of them might need painkillers for their menstrual cramps, so try yelling “WANT SOME DRUGS?” at them to get their attention.  Let me know how this goes.

As for the daughter in questions, “set reasonable limits: blouses three inches above the nipple line.”  Nipple “line”?  It’s a circle, Galanes, a circle!  I knew none of these guys had ever seen a naked woman.  “And save those mini minis and four-inch heels for 11th Avenue, not home room.”  Is anyone else creeped out by all these references to someone’s “little girl” becoming a prostitute?  Galanes is not an “edgy” humorist; he cannot transition easily from anodyne gags about old sitcoms to statutory-rape jokes.  Also, the vast majority of women you see wearing skimpy or revealing clothing are not prostitutes.  Galanes must be a barrel of fun at cocktail parties, though.  “Pardon me, madam, that’s a lovely pair of boots!  Didn’t I see you wearing them earlier on the corner of 28th and Lexington?”

“”Keep her safe, but let her express herself, too.”  “Safe”?  From what, nipple-line frostbite?  Oh wait, I get it… from rapists, against whom the only impregnable defense is modest clothing.  No man would be so beastly as to victimize a woman with the mouth-watering three inches above her nipples covered up.

Moral for girls: Don’t dress trampy, or bad men will rape you.  Moral for parents: Go to the high school and check out all the trampy chicks!

“What ‘Modern Family’ Says About Modern Families,” Bruce Fiedler.  “In his 1964 book ‘Understanding Media,’ Marshall McLuhan helped define the modern age with his phrase, ‘The medium is the message.’  Were he here nearly 50 years later, the critic would hardly be surprised to discover that in the most talked-about sitcom of the moment, the medium has become the punch line.”

Moral: You should watch Modern Family because it holds a mirror up to your techno-savvy, upper-middle-class lifestyle.  Also, Bruce Fiedler is an intellectual.

“MTV’s Naked Calculation Gone Bad,” David Carr. This article chronicles the problems MTV has caused by itself by airing the controversial show Skins.  “What if one day you went to work and there was a meeting to discuss whether the project you were working on crossed the line into child pornography? You’d probably think you had ended up in the wrong room.  [DRAMATIC PARAGRAPH BREAK.]  And you’d be right.”  Wouldn’t I actually be wrong, if I worked for MTV, and we were being accused of violating child pornography statutes, which is what this scenario is all about?  Oh, never mind.

Carr is in a moral panic about this show.  To be sure, “MTV didn’t invent ‘friends with benefits’ [or] oral sex as the new kiss.”  Man, I’d like to see a profile on the guy who invented oral sex as the new kiss.  Now that’d be a trend piece I could get behind, am I right?  LOL!  That guy is responsible for so many cold sores.  Here we are wasting time on this stupid Skins show, while a much more sinister figure lurks in the darkness of anonymity.  He’s like the huge cocaine kingpin who gets rich and hangs out on a yacht in Miami, while all the little neighborhood crack dealers get prison time.

“The self-described ‘Guidos’ and ‘Guidettes’ of ‘Jersey Shore,’ MTV’s breakout hit, have probably already set some kind of record for meaningless sex.”  Gratuitous Jersey Shore reference alert!  The “record” for meaningless sex was probably set by some gay dude on Fire Island in 1978.  Still, it’s helpful to have David Carr around, weighing in on how much “meaning” other people’s sexual experiences should have.

“MTV leaves it to real-life parents to explain that sometimes, when a car goes underwater, nobody survives and that a quick hookup with cute boy at the party may deliver a sexually transmitted disease along with a momentary thrill.”  Or… they could just use condoms?  I am not joking right now. Actually kind of mad that the paper of record is resorting to scary metaphors straight out of an abstinence-only classroom to demonize young people’s sexuality.

Moral: Don’t watch Skins; don’t have sex or you’ll die of STDs and drown in a car.

“On the Street: X Factor,” Bill Cunningham. This is that weird collage of half-inch fashion pictures.  “Every era has a defining stance, and at present, it is standing with your legs crossed, like a model or a dancer en pointe.  The key to the look is the ankle boot, some with platforms and stiletto heels.”

Moral: You’re not standing right.  Go buy some Christian Louboutin ankle boots.

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Meta-moral: The lesson I take away from all this is that we live in a time of great opportunity, yet also great danger.  This era is exciting, because innovations like 3D televisions, gourmet Caribbean cruise cupcakes, and Christian Louboutin booties are available to all, except people who don’t have a combined total of $16,299.98 to spend on them.  It is terrifying, because raunchy television shows, hookup culture, unrestrained oral sex and scantily clad young women are undermining the very fabric of the society in which we live.  Yikes!  But no matter how bad things get, pseudointellectual theorizing and half-assed social commentary are here to stay.  The Styles section will never die.