Wikipedia’s Women Problem by James Gleick | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books

There is consternation at Wikipedia over the discovery that hundreds of novelists who happen to be female were being systematically removed from the category “American novelists” and assigned to the category “American women novelists.” Amanda Filipacchi, whom I will call an American novelist despite her having been born in Paris, set off a furor with an opinion piece on theNew York Times website last week. Browsing on Wikipedia, she had suddenly noticed that women were vanishing from “American novelists”—starting, it seemed, in alphabetical order. In the A’s and the B’s, the list was now almost exclusively male:

I did more investigating and found other familiar names that had been switched from the ‘American Novelists’ to the ‘American Women Novelists’ category: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ayn Rand, Ann Beattie, Djuna Barnes, Emily Barton, Jennifer Belle, Aimee Bender, Amy Bloom, Judy Blume, Alice Adams, Louisa May Alcott, V. C. Andrews, Mary Higgins Clark—and, upsetting to me: myself.

The word that came to mind—and the Times used it for the headline—was sexism.

And who could disagree? Joyce Carol Oates expressed her view on Twitter: “Wikipedia bias an accurate reflection of universal bias. All (male) writers are writers; a (woman) writer is a woman writer.” Elaine Showalter tweeted in response that this was not what she’d had in mind in titling a book A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers: “Wikipedia is cutting down on American writers category by taking women out of it! A new step backwards.”

At Wikipedia, all hell broke loose. (Let’s pause here to flag the phrase, “at Wikipedia.” Wikipedia is a notional place only. It is not situated in a sleek California corporate campus, like Google in Mountain View or Apple in Cupertino, but instead distributed across cyberspace.)

These kinds of debates are usually bruited and argued on Wikipedia’s “Talk” pages, which are set aside for discussion by editors. After the Filipacchi article, Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s cofounder, created a new entry on his personal Talk page under the bold-face heading, “WTF?” Wales does not give orders or directly cause things to happen. He is more of a noninterventionist god. He is often referred to simply as Founder (capital F) or Jimbo. Anyway, he wrote:

My first instinct is that surely these stories are wrong in some important way. Can someone update me on where I can read the community conversation about this? Did it happen? How did it happen?

Heated argument broke out on a page set aside for discussion of changes to Wikipedia categories. Categories are a big deal. They are an important way to group articles; some people use them to navigate or browse. Categories provide structure for a web of knowledge—not a tree, because a category can have multiple parents, as well as multiple children. Wikipedia lists 4,325 Container categories, from “Accordionists by nationality” to “Zoos in the United States.” There are Disambiguation categories, Eponymous categories—named, for example, after railway lines like Norway’s Flåm Line, or after robots (there are two: Optimus Prime and R2-D2)—and at least 11,000 Hidden categories, meant for administration and therefore invisible to readers. A typical hidden category is “Wikipedia:Categories for discussion,” containing thousands of pages of logged discussions about the suitabilities of various categories. Meta enough for you? Some categories under discussion now are Avenues, Omniscience, and “Equestrian commanders of vexillationes.”

It’s fair to say that Wikipedia has spent far more time considering the philosophical ramifications of categorization than Aristotle and Kant ever did.

On Wednesday a formal proposal appeared for discussion: “Propose merging Category:American women novelists to Category:American novelists.” Nominator’s rationale: “As per gender neutrality guidelines, gender-specific categories are not appropriate where gender is not specifically related to the topic. This subcategory also creates the unfortunate side effect that Category:American novelists contains only male novelists.” Many users quickly posted comments agreeing. One user “struck out” two of these votes, on the ground that they appeared to have been submitted by “sock puppets”—new identities created by an existing user for purposes of deception—or at least by people who had created new Wikipedia accounts specifically for the purpose. Yet another user objected to the striking out of the votes:

These are people who have bothered to get involved. By pushing them out of this conversation, you are contributing to the continuing inability for newcomers to feel comfortable here. Especially women. Which is of course, the subject of the article being discussed.

Which, of course, it was. Wikipedia is periodically accused of being a boys’ club. “Around 90 percent of Wikipedia editors are men, and it shows,” New Scientistsaid earlier this month. Many Wikipedians agree and would like to do something about it. A large majority of commenters voted “Merge.” Some deployed the terms “ghettoization” and “back of the bus.” Then again, a few are voting for ghettoization—or as they say, “Diffuse women but not men,” diffuse being the term for sending members of a parent category out into a subcategory. At least it’s arguable that “women novelists” is a category of cultural and sociological interest. It was noted that Wikipedia features an extensive article on Women’s Writing in English, as part of Wikiproject Gender Studies and Wikiproject Women’s History.

“We should not let the media impose their view of political correctness on Wikipedia,” wrote Petri Krohn, who identifies himself as a Finnish “writer and Internet commentator.” He added—I think with a straight face—“We might also add some generic warning on American people category pages that they mainly contain white males and one should look into the subcategories.”⁠

To ask Jimbo’s question: how did this happen? It turns out that a single editor brought on the crisis: a thirty-two-year-old student of history named John Pack Lambert, enrolled at Wayne State University and living in the Detroit suburbs. He’s a seven-year veteran of Wikipedia and something of an obsessive when it comes to categories. He creates a lot of them. Last year he briefly created Category:American people of African-American descent. Then he raised hackles by recreating the defunct category American “actresses,” a word that others felt belongs in the same dustbin as “poetess.”

On April 1 Lambert started working alphabetically through all American novelists and moving the women into Category:American women novelists instead. First he did Patricia Aakhus, at 5:44 PM. Two minutes later, Hailey Abbott. Then Megan Abbott—pausing also to add her to Category:University of Michigan alumni. Then Diana Abu-Jaber, Alice Adams, Lorraine Adams, Renata Adler…. He did English women novelists, too; also Australian, German, and Moroccan. At 8:51, he created a new category, Nigerian women novelists, and put Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie there.

By the end of the day he’d gotten to the D’s: so Daphne du Maurier is now an English woman novelist. Like most people, she falls into multiple categories; she is also a “bisexual writer,” a “British historical novelist,” a “Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire,” an “English person of French descent,” an “English short story writer,” a “writer from London,” and an “LGBT writer from England.” But not (as of this morning) an English novelist.

And so it went. The next day Lambert was briefly sidetracked by a discussion of whether there should be a Category:Jeans enthusiasts (for “celebrities and famous people who are always wearing or frequently spotted wearing jeans”), but then he got back to work and A. L. Kennedy, till then a Scottish novelist, became a Scottish woman novelist. On April 3 he created a category for Greek women screenwriters; so far it has only one member.

The debate that broke out when Filipacchi’s opinion piece appeared is still running, and the issue appears to be more general and pervasive than most had originally thought. Throughout Wikipedia, in all kinds of categories, women and people of nonwhite ethnicities are assigned only to their subcategories. Maya Angelou is in African-American writers, African-American women poets, and American women poets, but not American poets or American writers. Many editors are saying that people need to be “bubbled up” to their parent categories.

Lambert vehemently disputes suggestions that he is motivated by sexism (or racism, as the case may be). He cites principles of Wikipedia categorization: arguing, for example, that huge categories should be broken up and “diffused” because they become useless for navigation. “This whole hullabaloo is really missing the point,” he told me. “The people who are making a big deal about this are not being up-front about what happens if we do not diffuse categories.” Others argued that laypeople are simply misunderstanding the purpose of a big category like American novelists. “It is really a holding ground for people who have yet to be categorized into a more specific sub-cat,” said a user called Obi-Wan Kenobi. “It’s not some sort of club that you have to be a part of.”

The editor who originally created the American women novelists category—a Londoner named Gareth E. Kegg—voted to merge it with American novelists and said that he had hoped the category would be “an inspiration to young women to know how many others have written before.” He was appalled, he said, “that there are less Wikipedia articles on women poets than pornographic actresses, a depressing statistic.”

A user called lmurchie created a new category: American men novelists. Immediately other Wikipedians objected. A distinctive feature of the Wikipedia culture is the development of shorthand for various rhetorical devices. For example, an editor has only to say, “A new user created this unhelpful WP:POINTy category, compounding our problems,” and everyone knows that WP:POINT is a link to a page describing a behavioral guideline, titled “Wikipedia:Do not disrupt Wikipedia to illustrate a point.” When one editor argues that it’s unfair to address discrimination only for the American category, another can retort, “Objection: This is the Slippery Slope Fallacy,” with the relevant hyperlink embedded. It’s all very efficient. You can write (and someone did), “It looks sexist, it sounds sexist WP:QUACK.”

For some reason the first two members of Category:American men novelists were Orson Scott Card and P. D. Cacek, who was also categorized in “American science fiction writers” and “American horror writers.” It took about fifteen hours for someone to realize that Cacek, whose full name is Patricia Diana Joy Anne Cacek, didn’t belong. As of this writing, she is back to being an American novelist and an American woman novelist. Ernest Hemingway is now officially an American man novelist—manly indeed. F. Scott Fitzgerald will be relieved to know that he, too, made the cut.

By the end of the week, swimming against the tide, John Pack Lambert was still removing names from American novelists and adding them not just to American women novelists but to Category:African-American novelists, Category:American historical novelists, Category:American surrealist novelists, Category:19th-century American novelists, Category:American Chicano novelists, some of which he’s creating as he goes. This morning, American Chicano novelists contains only one page, Oscar Zeta Acosta. Acosta also belongs to Hispanic and Latino American novelists, American writers of Mexican descent, American politicians of Mexican descent, Writers from California, People from Modesto, California, and People from El Paso, Texas.

People of Wikipedia! You have a problem.

And Amanda Filipacchi? It seems some Wikipedians need to check the policy onshooting the messenger. The article about Filipacchi is undergoing a flurry of editing, not all well-intentioned. Her categories keep changing. Lambert created a new category, American humor novelists, just so he could move her into it.

npr: (via She Works: The Only Woman in the Room : NPR) NPR’s Nina Totenberg on being the only woman in the room: “My first piece of advice is get another woman in the room. And my second is demand respect. You should get it. You don’t have to be a man to get it. You don’t have to be a flirt to get it. Just be yourself and if it’s not working for some reason, just say so.” Photo Courtesy of Nina Totenberg
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npr:

(via She Works: The Only Woman in the Room : NPR)

NPR’s Nina Totenberg on being the only woman in the room:

“My first piece of advice is get another woman in the room. And my second is demand respect. You should get it. You don’t have to be a man to get it. You don’t have to be a flirt to get it. Just be yourself and if it’s not working for some reason, just say so.”

Photo Courtesy of Nina Totenberg

If You Want to Be Married Young, You Should Marry While Young

The notion that the declaration of marriage can make a human, with all their hard flaws, into something as abstract and moist as a “soul-mate” strikes me as off.

Over at Slate, Amanda Marcotte and Julia Shaw are debating the virtues of marrying young. I found myself agreeing with a lot of what Shaw said, but this brought me up short:

Sometimes people delay marriage because they are searching for the perfect soul mate. But that view has it backward. Your spouse becomes your soul mate after you’ve made those vows to each other in front of God and the people who matter to you. You don’t marry someone because he’s your soul mate; he becomes your soul mate because you married him.

As long-time readers of this blog know, I have a somewhat contentious relationship with the idea of marriage. I’ve been with my wife for 15 years. We got married two years ago, mostly because I was afraid of exactly what happened to me two weeks ago taking place, and there being some confusion about who was charged with my affairs. If we were religious, we probably would have married right away.

At any rate, I entered the long-term, monogamous portion of my relationship when I was 23. My son was born when I was 24 and my partner (now wife) was 23. The seal was our son. We were pretty clear that our 20s—as they exist in the popular American mind—were over when he was born. Whatever. We weren’t doing shit but drinking and smoking anyway. Besides I thought she was sort of cool. And she thought I was sort of cool. And we both thought cool people might make a cool kid together. 

And knowing that you don’t meet cool people every day, and knowing, too, that coolness is a force in the universe which cool kids don’t always understand, and that four cool hands are cooler than two, we thought it imperative that we play some Al Green, and, like, stay together, and, like, make sure that cool kid become a cool dude.

Here is where I relate to Shaw—the act of making the boy was the act of making me a man. Before creating family, I was prepared to subject myself to any number of stupid things. Knowing that other people suffer when you suffer has a way of leading you from childish things. (If you are cool.) 

And that’s been good. But it’s been good with a lot bumps in the road—some of them existential. I don’t know how it is for other people, but my sense is that any long-term relationship, any long, happy marriage, has had points when its primary advocates could see the end. And not a theoretical end, an actual end; a path untaken, but very much possible.

Where I differ with Shaw isn’t in the advantages she sees in marrying young, but in the certainty and determinism. The notion that the declaration of marriage can make a human, with all their hard flaws, into something as abstract and moist as a “soul-mate” strikes me as off. Even if it’s on for you, to declare it as such for the world strikes me as surely off. 

To decide to romantically cohabitate with another person for the rest of your life, to make a family with that person, is to go to war. To borrow the language of my mother—you had best love their dirty drawers, because you will be seeing them. And it strikes me that you should understand that cool people fail at being cool together all the time. Sometimes they fail for lack of morality, but very often not. 

That women—with all they have to lose in this world, having to struggle to secure the kind of things that the other half of the world takes for granted (the body, for instance)—would be particularly discerning about such a decision, that they would wait until accumulating some amount of power, financial and otherwise, seems logical. The dynamics of power—societal and personal—are inseparable from marriage. Those of us who’ve, thus far, managed to navigate those dynamics should probably be more thankful than boastful. May our days ever be thus.

nomnomnamaste: I don’t normally post stuff like this. I feel like it’s personal and I’d feel bad or awkward if the other person ever found out. But I thought in this case it was OK because this right here, is called being a great person.  I met the guy who sent this message at a bar recently. We ended up spending a couple hours chatting and he asked for my number and called me a few days later and asked me out. The date was fine and he’s a really nice guy, but the connection just wasn’t there for me. So when he asked me out again I ignored it. Two days later he sent the message above. Guys reading this: do this kind of thing more often. It’s hard and scary to put yourself out there but it will pay off in the long run. Also, ladies take note: love resolution #6 - don’t give everyone a chance. This man needs to parent. I wish more guys were like this. 
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nomnomnamaste:

I don’t normally post stuff like this. I feel like it’s personal and I’d feel bad or awkward if the other person ever found out. But I thought in this case it was OK because this right here, is called being a great person. 

I met the guy who sent this message at a bar recently. We ended up spending a couple hours chatting and he asked for my number and called me a few days later and asked me out. The date was fine and he’s a really nice guy, but the connection just wasn’t there for me. So when he asked me out again I ignored it. Two days later he sent the message above.

Guys reading this: do this kind of thing more often. It’s hard and scary to put yourself out there but it will pay off in the long run.

Also, ladies take note: love resolution #6 - don’t give everyone a chance.

This man needs to parent. I wish more guys were like this. 

(via datebynumbers)

Source: nomnomnamaste

LIFE AFTER STEUBENVILLE

“My life is over. No one is going to want me now.” That is what Ma’lik Richmond, who is sixteen and was found delinquent (the juvenile court equivalent of guilty) in the rape of a sixteen-year-old girl from West Virginia, said at the end of his trial in Steubenville, Ohio. He also cried. Richmond will be held in juvenile detention for at least a year, and perhaps until he is twenty-one; his codefendant, Trent Mays, who is seventeen, will serve an extra year on a charge of distributing child pornography, for taking and sending around a picture of the victim, naked. The reactions to Richmond’s breakdown, and to the conviction itself, have been divided. There has been a loud yelp not only on Twitter and around Steubenville but also, fairly outrageously, in CNN’s first report, about how tragic this is for those teen-age boys. Poppy Harlow’s exchange with Candy Crowley focused almost entirely on how “two young men that had such promising futures, star football players, very good students, literally watched as they believe their life fell apart.” Harlow mentioned that the charges were serious and that the victim was young, but talked about the prosecution as a sort of injustice against her, too: “The last thing she wanted to do was sit on that stand and testify. She didn’t want to bring these charges. She said it was up to her parents.” There was no note suggesting that the judge’s verdict might have vindicated that decision, or that maybe sixteen-year-old girls in places like Steubenville would be a little safer now.

Worse, one could take away the impression that a nice girl doesn’t press charges, rather than that nice boys do not, as was the case in Steubenville, take a girl who has drunk too much and bring her from party to party, assaulting her in a car on the way, until they end up in a basement where they strip and assault her again, and try to make her perform oral sex—except that she is not conscious enough—and then take photographs of her naked body. They do not text “yep” when asked if they had sex with her, or “I shoulda raped now that everybody thinks I did,” but “she wasn’t awake enough”—as Mays did, raising the question of whether he didn’t think it could be rape if she was passed out—and then text the girl to complain about being taken off the football team and tell her “I’ll just never do anything nice for you again.” Nice—but nice people at a party watching all this can’t let it happen, let alone send around pictures and videos with brutal captions afterward, and then leave their friend to look at them as she frantically wonders what happened to her in the hours she can’t remember. And nice policemen and nice football coaches don’t act like they hope it will just go away until the pressure of bloggers and social media (and the hackers of Anonymous) pushes them to act. And all of these people cannot then carry on as though the one who caused the trouble was the sixteen-year-old girl who was raped—and who, according to testimony in the trial, has been dropped by her friends, ostracized, and put under every sort of pressure—and not the rapists.

There was a good deal of anger in response to the CNN report, which, again, it fully deserved. A Gawker piece by Mallory Ortberg, for example, made the sensible point that “Their dreams and hopes were not crushed by an impersonal, inexorable legal system; Mays and Richmond raped a girl and have been sentenced accordingly.”

But one can go further. Where is the challenge to the idea that their lives really are “over”? There is something deeply harmful in all of the adults reinforcing the idea that the lives of teen-age boys are destroyed when a girl says what they have done. There is also something incomplete about just replying that they deserved the consequences (as much as they do). For one thing, it can mean asking a sixteen-year-old to be the one to judge the weight of her own trauma. It isn’t trivializing the seriousness of the sentence to say that teen-agers always think, when one door is closed, that everything is over, and that it’s the job of grownups to explain that it isn’t. A different life is not a worthless one. (Absent parents, not incidentally, are a theme of this story.)

There are more important and complicated questions beyond that, both practical and ethical. Telling those teen-agers that there shouldn’t have been consequences might mean another victim, in another town, years in the future. It also affects what sort of men the boys become, and one has to think that Richmond and Mays, too, have an interest in that. Does it destroy a teen-ager’s life to take him off the path of being an adult rapist? Perhaps it is too abstractly (even annoyingly) philosophical to ask what the “better” life is—one in which you have a remote shot at being in the NFL, or one in which you might be a person who treats others decently? Still, the question is worth asking.

It’s also the premise of a juvenile-justice system. Mays and Richmond were tried by a judgewho said, in giving the verdict, “I’m aware this is the first time they have been in trouble with the law. But these are serious offenses. If they were convicted in an adult court of these charges, they would be spending many years in prison.” He recommended that they be put in a youth facility. In CNN’s report, Crowley talked to an “expert” who said that the teen-agers would be “haunted” by being on the sexual-offenders registry for the rest of their lives. That actually depends on a hearing later and how juvenile authorities think they’ve done by the time they’re twenty-one. Those who are agonizing about wasted lives might spend their time on the inadequacy and, in many states, effective abandonment of the juvenile-justice system, and how kids who have done even less than these two are, too often, thrown in with adult offenders and written off. (As Rachel Aviv wrote in The New Yorker last year, “Each year, more than two hundred thousand offenders younger than eighteen are tried as adults.”) But first, they should think about a sixteen-year-old girl walking through a town in West Virginia, wondering if she has any friends in the world.

a-cautionary-tale:

Inception recast → Idris Elba as Cobb, Richard Ayoade as Arthur, Anthony Mackie as Robert Fischer, Zoe Saldana as Ariadne, Jamie Foxx as Eames, Kerry Washington as Mal, Forest Whitaker as Yusuf, Michael K. Williams as Saito, Jeffrey Wright as Browning, Danny Glover as Maurice Fischer, and Gina Torres as Miles

Inspired by this quote: “Imagine a film such as Inception with an entire cast of black people – do you think it would be successful? Would people watch it? But no one questions the fact that everyone’s white. That’s what we have to change.” - Idris Elba (x)

Would watch the shit out of this movie. Love love love these actors. 

(via pointy-earedbastard)

Source: a-cautionary-tale

npr: These cards, collected by Langston Hughes and held with his papers in Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, advertised “rent parties” to be held in Harlem in the 1940s and 1950s. Hosts of these gatherings opened up their apartments for a night, charging a fee to guests in return for live music, dancing, and socializing. Food was extra, and the accumulated cash went to help the hosts pay their rent. Sandra L. West points out that black tenants in Harlem during the 1920s and 1930s faced discriminatory rental rates. That, along with the generally lower salaries for black workers, created a situation in which many people were short of rent money. These parties were originally meant to bridge that gap. Langston Hughes’ collection of rent party cards : Slate.com Photo: Courtesy the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University. These sound like a good time and remind me of the rent party on “Good Times.” — tanya b.
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npr:

These cards, collected by Langston Hughes and held with his papers in Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, advertised “rent parties” to be held in Harlem in the 1940s and 1950s.

Hosts of these gatherings opened up their apartments for a night, charging a fee to guests in return for live music, dancing, and socializing. Food was extra, and the accumulated cash went to help the hosts pay their rent. Sandra L. West points out that black tenants in Harlem during the 1920s and 1930s faced discriminatory rental rates. That, along with the generally lower salaries for black workers, created a situation in which many people were short of rent money. These parties were originally meant to bridge that gap.

Langston Hughes’ collection of rent party cards : Slate.com

Photo: Courtesy the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University.

These sound like a good time and remind me of the rent party on “Good Times.” — tanya b.

TV’s New Wave of Women: Smart, Strong, Borderline Insane

By HEATHER HAVRILESKY

Published: March 12, 2013 

At first glance, this looks like a great moment for women on television. Many smart and confident female characters have paraded onto the small screen over the past few years. But I’m bothered by one persistent caveat: that the more astute and capable many of these women are, the more likely it is that they’re also completely nuts.

I don’t mean complicated, difficult, thorny or complex. I mean that these women are portrayed as volcanoes that could blow at any minute. Worse, the very abilities and skills that make them singular and interesting come coupled with some hideous psychic deficiency.

On “Nurse Jackie,” for example, the main character is an excellent R.N. in part because she’s self-medicated into a state of extreme calm. On “The Killing,” Detective Linden, the world-weary, cold-souled cop, is a tenacious investigator in part because she’s obsessive and damaged and a pretty terrible mother. And then there’s “Homeland,” on which Carrie Mathison, the nearly clairvoyant C.I.A. agent, is bipolar, unhinged and has proved, in her pursuit of an undercover terrorist, to be recklessly promiscuous.

These aren’t just complicating characteristics like, say, Don Draper’s narcissism. The suggestion in all of these shows is that a female character’s flaws are inextricably linked to her strengths. Take away this pill problem or that personality disorder, and the exceptional qualities vanish as well. And this is not always viewed as a tragedy — when Carrie undergoes electroconvulsive therapy, we breathe a sigh of relief and draw closer. Look how restful it is for her, enjoying a nice sandwich and sleeping peacefully in her childhood bed.

You’d think the outlook would be sunnier on some of the lighter TV dramas and comedies, which have also lately offered several strong and inspiring (if neurotic) female protagonists, from Annie Edison of “Community” to Leslie Knope of “Parks and Recreation.” Yet here, too, an alarming number of accomplished women are also portrayed as spending most of their waking hours swooning like lovesick tweens — whether it’s Emily on “Emily Owens, M.D.” (a knowledgeable doctor who loses focus whenever her super-dreamy crush enters the room), the title character of “Whitney” (a garrulous photographer who is nonetheless fixated on her looks and her ability to keep attractive romantic rivals away from her man), or Mindy of “The Mindy Project” (a highly paid ob-gyn who’s obsessed with being too old and not pretty enough to land a husband). Even a classical comedic heroine like Liz Lemon on “30 Rock” is frequently reduced to flailing and squirming like an overcaffeinated adolescent. The moral of many of these shows doesn’t seem so far off from that of those fatalistic female-centric magazine features that seem to run every few months; something along the lines of, “You can’t have it all, ladies, and you’ll run yourself ragged if you even try.”

We could take heart that at least women are depicted as being just as reckless and promiscuous and demanding and intense as their male counterparts, if their bad behavior weren’t so often accompanied by a horror soundtrack and dizzying camera angles that encourage us to view them as unhinged. The crazed antics of male characters like Don Draper, Walter White or Dr. Gregory House are reliably treated as bold, fearless and even ultimately heroic (a daring remark saves the big account; a lunatic gesture scares off a murderous thug; an abrasive approach miraculously yields the answer that saves a young girl’s life). Female characters rarely enjoy such romantic spin.

Their flaws are fatal, or at least obviously self-destructive, and they seem designed to invite censure. Time and again, we, the audience, are cast in the role of morally superior observers to these nut jobs. At times we might relate to a flash of anger, a fit of tears, a sudden urge to seduce a stranger in a bar, but we’re constantly being warned that these behaviors aren’t normal. They render these women out of step with the sane world.

When Nurse Jackie chokes down pills and cavorts with the pharmacist while her perfectly good husband waits around at home with the kids, we can see clearly where too much sass and independence might lead. When Detective Linden dumps her son in a hotel room for the umpteenth time and then he goes missing, or Dr. Yang’s emotional frigidity on “Grey’s Anatomy” leaves her stranded at the altar, or Nancy Botwin of “Weeds” sleeps with (and eventually marries) a Mexican drug boss, thereby endangering her kids, we’re cued to shake our heads at the woeful choices of these otherwise-impressive women. When Carrie on “Homeland” chugs a tumbler of white wine, then fetches one of her black sequined tops out of the closet, we’re meant to lament her knee-jerk lasciviousness. Her mania is something she needs to be cured of, or freed from — unlike, say, Monk, whose psychological tics are portrayed as the adorable kernel of his genius.

So why should instability in men and women be treated so differently? “If you don’t pull it together, no one will ever love you,” a talking Barbie doll tells Mindy during a fantasy on “The Mindy Project,” reminding us exactly what’s on the line here.

Don’t act crazy, Mindy. Men don’t like crazy.

Some would argue that we’ve come a long way since Desi treated Lucy like a petulant child or June Cleaver smiled beatifically at her plucky spawn. “Mary Tyler Moore,” “Murphy Brown” and “Roseanne” all demonstrated that a smart woman can have a life outside of cooking, cleaning and begging to be put in her husband’s show. They offered us female characters who failed to blend seamlessly with their surroundings — because they were willing to voice their doubts, confess their crushes, seek out sex and openly confront others.

But right around the time “Ally McBeal” hit the air, the attempts to unveil the truth of the female experience started to sail far past the intended mark. The independent woman took on a hysterical edge; she was not only opinionated but also wildly insecure, sexually ravenous or panic-stricken over her waning fertility. Surprising as it was that McBeal was once heralded as a post-feminist hero on the cover of Time in 1998, what’s more surprising is that since then, we haven’t come all that much further, baby.

Sure, there are lots of exceptions, like Tami Taylor, the self-possessed working mom of “Friday Night Lights,” or Hannah Horvath, the outspoken memoirist of “Girls,” or the intelligent women of “Mad Men,” whose struggles and flaws at least parallel those of the men swarming around them. But alongside every coolheaded Peggy Olson, we get hotheaded train-wreck characters like Ivy Lynn of “Smash” — women who, like the ballerinas with lead weights around their ankles in Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s short story “Harrison Bergeron,” can show no strength without an accompanying impediment to weigh them down, whether it’s self-destructive urges, tittering self-consciousness or compulsive pill-popping. Where Roseanne and Mary and Murphy matter-of-factly admitted and often even flaunted their flaws, these characters are too ashamed and apologetic (and repeatedly demeaned) to be taken seriously.

“Women have often felt insane when cleaving to the truth of our experience,” Adrienne Rich once wrote. There’s truth in these images of women, from the neurotic ob-gyn fixated on finding Mr. Right to the workaholic C.I.A. agent who feels adrift when she isn’t obsessing about issues of national security 18 hours a day. But why must these characters also be certifiable? Give Mindy a tiny slice of Louis C.K.’s poker-faced smugness. Give Carrie Mathison one-tenth of Jack Bauer’s overconfidence and irreproachability. Where’s the taboo in that?

Women, with their tendency to “ask uncomfortable questions and make uncomfortable connections,” as Rich puts it, are pathologized for the very traits that make them so formidable. Or as Emily Dickinson wrote:

Much Madness is divinest Sense —

To a discerning Eye —

Much Sense — the starkest Madness —

’Tis the Majority

In this, as All, prevail —

Assent — and you are sane —

Demur — you’re straightway dangerous —

And handled with a Chain —

“All smart women are crazy,” I once told an ex-boyfriend in a heated moment, in an attempt to depict his future options as split down the middle between easygoing dimwits and sharp women who were basically just me with different hairstyles. By “crazy,” I only meant “opinionated” and “moody” and “not always as pliant as one might hope.” I was translating my personality into language he might understand — he who used “psycho-chick” as a stand-in for “noncompliant female” and he whose idea of helpful counsel was “You’re too smart for your own good,” “my own good” presumably being some semivegetative state of acceptance which precluded uncomfortable discussions about our relationship.

Over the years, “crazy” became my own reductive shorthand for every complicated, strong-willed woman I met. “Crazy” summed up the good and the bad in me and in all of my friends. Whereas I might have started to recognize that we were no more crazy than anyone else in the world, instead I simply drew a larger and larger circle of crazy around us, lumping together anyone unafraid of confrontation, anyone who openly admitted her weaknesses, anyone who pursued agendas that might be out of step with the dominant cultural noise of the moment. “Crazy” became code for “interesting” and “courageous” and “worth knowing.” I was trying to have a sense of humor about myself and those around me, trying to make room for stubbornness and vulnerability and uncomfortable questions.

But I realize now, after watching these crazy characters parade across my TV screen, that there’s self-hatred in this act of self-subterfuge. “Our future depends on the sanity of each of us,” Rich writes, “and we have a profound stake, beyond the personal, in the project of describing our reality as candidly and fully as we can to each other.”

Maybe this era of “crazy” women on TV is an unfortunate way-station on the road from placid compliance to something more complex — something more like real life. Many so-called crazy women are just smart, that’s all. They’re not too smart for their own good, or for ours.

You Don’t Have To Be A Hot Mess In Your 20s

[For all of us who have their shit (mostly) together]

MAR. 6, 2013 

By NICO LANG 

Sometimes when I read articles on the internet about what it’s like to be a “young person,” I feel like I might be the most boring person alive. I don’t have a pill addiction, and I’m still not quite sure what Xanax is. Is it one of Jupiter’s moons, like Io’s wacky cousin? Or was Xanax the girl of the 21stcentury? I’ve never been that into partying or doing self-consciously wild things so I can nostalgize it later, like that episode of Girls where Hannah expects to have a Big Revelation after doing coke, only to find out the experience kind of sucks. I’m like a White Stripes song, single but not that broken up about it, looking but not desperate, lonely but I ain’t that lonely yet.

We look at this time in our lives as this point where we are infinitely uncertain and are still figuring ourselves out, where we are expected to try everything and make every mistake. In a weird way, it’s like we are encouraged to fuck up and be complete selfish assholes because we’ll learn from it later. When we make complete idiots out of ourselves, we have a way of bragging about it, as if we cracked the code. We’re unfinished now, but don’t worry. We’ll become finished later. However, for anyone who has seenYoung Adult, engaging in bad behavior doesn’t mean you necessarily learn from it or grow, and being a hot mess for the sake of being a hot mess won’t do you any good. You need some consciousness behind it.

When I watch Girls – which is ostensibly supposed to be about people like me, the Generation Getting Their Shit Together — I look at people I fundamentally can’t relate to. Although my mother wouldn’t let me get a job in high school, because (even though we were dead broke) she wanted me to focus on my school work, I’ve had two or three jobs my entire adult life and had to pay my own rent. During undergrad, I ran two different student groups, started another one and still held down an internship and suffered through an ill-fated job at a brunch restaurant I loathed. And I did it with a 3.9. When I graduated college, I didn’t crash and burn. I stayed busy. Ain’t nobody got time to burn.

I don’t hold myself up for being different or unique; I’m perfectly average and incredibly dull. In fact, I pale in comparison to my classmates. I went to DePaul University, where kicking your own butt was the norm. Two of my classmates started non-profits before they could legally drink, and my old roommate helped start a campaign for Fair Wages on campus for the school’s underpaid employees. I knew students who organized rallies, conferences and university-wide interfaith dialogues while holding down jobs, applying to grad schools and trying to have one of those things called a “social life.” Instead of burning out, many of them went onto to do the Peace Corps or Americorps, work for the Mayor’s Office or the White House (!) or have kickass internships with the UN (?) and at least two people I know have written books since graduating. Assholes. All of them. Beautiful assholes.

A lot of the people I know aren’t busy immolating themselves with booze: they are staying up late to cram for exams, putting the extra effort in to get that A on a paper and pushing themselves to achieve great things. Some 20-somethings are staying at home with their cat or calling their grandmother to check in on her, cooking for a friend who can’t afford food this month or volunteering their free time to do something more than sit on their couch. Sometimes they just go to bed early. The more you live as a 20-something, the more you find out it’s not that different than any other age. You just have less money.

Of course, not everyone around us is out there changing the world, and I know people who do have lives that are reflective of the Ballad of the Sad 20-Something. I know people who are struggling and hurting, and there’s nothing wrong with not having it figured out and feeling like life will never make sense to you. That experience isn’t unique to your 20s. I once asked a therapist of mine how old she was when she got her life together, and she burst into spontaneous laughter. She asked me, “What makes you think I have it figured out? You might have it more together than I do.”

People like those above give me hope that we don’t all have to be numbskulls in our 20s, folks who seem to have had their shit together since popping out of the womb. Forgodsakes, a guy at a neighboring college who founded his own software company and sold it for millions of dollars, before he graduated high school, and Zadie Smith wrote her first book when she was a teenager. We like to believe that people like these are wunderkinds, the kind of genius that we can never aspire to, but we only tell ourselves that as a way to keep us from achieving things. It allows us to continue to be a hot mess and not do anything about it.

But at some point you have to stop believing the worst about yourself and those around you and stop being your own worst enemy. There’s nothing wrong with your flaws; they are beautiful and a part of you, and you will always be a partially broken, not-quite-formed person. That doesn’t mean you can’t still go out and achieve great things, or that there aren’t parts of your life that are put together. Me, I can’t do relationships, at all, and I haven’t the slightest clue how to trick a man into liking me or what I would do with one if I trapped him in a relationship. Is it a Boxing Helenasituation? Should I work on my avant-garde amputation skills?

However, being single in my 20s (or at any age) doesn’t mean I that I don’t still have it all, in my own weird way. We expect that we will reach this magical point in our 30s where it all comes together, and I sometimes joke that I can’t wait to be 35. 2023 is going to be my year. But why wait that long to push yourself to achieve your goals? Why put off being the best version of yourself to a decade from now? Why not make the 20s your decade? Instead of being the stereotype that affirms the rule, don’t you want to be the exception? The only person keeping you a hot mess is you. You need to believe that you can be better than that. You need to believe in yourself.

2023 won’t be the year of Nico. 2013 will be the year of Nico. Join me. Let’s have our year, together. 


[Sorry, he had me until that last line. Know when to drop the mic, man]

The Good, Racist People

By TA-NEHISI COATES

Published: March 6, 2013

Last month the actor Forest Whitaker was stopped in a Manhattan delicatessen by an employee. Whitaker is one of the pre-eminent actors of his generation, with a diverse and celebrated catalog ranging from “The Great Debaters” to “The Crying Game” to “Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai.” By now it is likely that he has adjusted to random strangers who can’t get his turn as Idi Amin out of their heads. But the man who approached the Oscar winner at the deli last month was in no mood for autographs. The employee stopped Whitaker, accused him of shoplifting and then promptly frisked him. The act of self-deputization was futile. Whitaker had stolen nothing. On the contrary, he’d been robbed.

The deli where Whitaker was harassed happens to be in my neighborhood. Columbia University is up the street. Broadway, the main drag, is dotted with nice restaurants and classy bars that cater to beautiful people. I like my neighborhood. And I’ve patronized the deli with some regularity, often several times in a single day. I’ve sent my son in my stead. My wife would often trade small talk with whoever was working checkout. Last year when my beautiful niece visited, she loved the deli so much that I felt myself a sideshow. But it’s understandable. It’s a good deli.

Since the Whitaker affair, I’ve read and listened to interviews with the owner of the establishment. He is apologetic to a fault and is sincerely mortified. He says that it was a “sincere mistake” made by a “decent man” who was “just doing his job.” I believe him. And yet for weeks now I have walked up Broadway, glancing through its windows with a mood somewhere between Marvin Gaye’s “Distant Lover” and Al Green’s “For the Good Times.”

In modern America we believe racism to be the property of the uniquely villainous and morally deformed, the ideology of trolls, gorgons and orcs. We believe this even when we are actually being racist. In 1957, neighbors in Levittown, Pa., uniting under the flag of segregation, wrote: “As moral, religious and law-abiding citizens, we feel that we are unprejudiced and undiscriminating in our wish to keep our community a closed community.”

A half-century later little had changed. The comedian Michael Richards (Kramer on “Seinfeld”) once yelled at a black heckler from the stage: “He’s a nigger! He’s a nigger! He’s a nigger!” Confronted about this, Richards apologized and then said, “I’m not a racist,” and called the claim “insane.”

The idea that racism lives in the heart of particularly evil individuals, as opposed to the heart of a democratic society, is reinforcing to anyone who might, from time to time, find their tongue sprinting ahead of their discretion. We can forgive Whitaker’s assailant. Much harder to forgive is all that makes Whitaker stand out in the first place. New York is a city, like most in America, that bears the scars of redlining, blockbusting and urban renewal. The ghost of those policies haunts us in a wealth gap between blacks and whites that has actually gotten worse over the past 20 years.

But much worse, it haunts black people with a kind of invisible violence that is given tell only when the victim happens to be an Oscar winner. The promise of America is that those who play by the rules, who observe the norms of the “middle class,” will be treated as such. But this injunction is only half-enforced when it comes to black people, in large part because we were never meant to be part of the American story. Forest Whitaker fits that bill, and he was addressed as such.

I am trying to imagine a white president forced to show his papers at a national news conference, and coming up blank. I am trying to a imagine a prominent white Harvard professor arrested for breaking into his own home, and coming up with nothing. I am trying to see Sean Penn or Nicolas Cage being frisked at an upscale deli, and I find myself laughing in the dark. It is worth considering the messaging here. It says to black kids: “Don’t leave home. They don’t want you around.” It is messaging propagated by moral people.

The other day I walked past this particular deli. I believe its owners to be good people. I felt ashamed at withholding business for something far beyond the merchant’s reach. I mentioned this to my wife. My wife is not like me. When she was 6, a little white boy called her cousin a nigger, and it has been war ever since. “What if they did that to your son?” she asked.

And right then I knew that I was tired of good people, that I had had all the good people I could take.

This Story Stinks

By DOMINIQUE BROSSARD and DIETRAM A. SCHEUFELE

IN the beginning, the technology gods created the Internet and saw that it was good. Here, at last, was a public sphere with unlimited potential for reasoned debate and the thoughtful exchange of ideas, an enlightening conversational bridge across the many geographic, social, cultural, ideological and economic boundaries that ordinarily separate us in life, a way to pay bills without a stamp.

Then someone invented “reader comments” and paradise was lost.

The Web, it should be said, is still a marvelous place for public debate. But when it comes to reading and understanding news stories online — like this one, for example — the medium can have a surprisingly potent effect on the message. Comments from some readers, our research shows, can significantly distort what other readers think was reported in the first place.

But here, it’s not the content of the comments that matters. It’s the tone.

In a study published online last month in The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, we and three colleagues report on an experiment designed to measure what one might call “the nasty effect.”

We asked 1,183 participants to carefully read a news post on a fictitious blog, explaining the potential risks and benefits of a new technology product called nanosilver. These infinitesimal silver particles, tinier than 100-billionths of a meter in any dimension, have several potential benefits (like antibacterial properties) and risks (like water contamination), the online article reported.

Then we had participants read comments on the post, supposedly from other readers, and respond to questions regarding the content of the article itself.

Half of our sample was exposed to civil reader comments and the other half to rude ones — though the actual content, length and intensity of the comments, which varied from being supportive of the new technology to being wary of the risks, were consistent across both groups. The only difference was that the rude ones contained epithets or curse words, as in: “If you don’t see the benefits of using nanotechnology in these kinds of products, you’re an idiot” and “You’re stupid if you’re not thinking of the risks for the fish and other plants and animals in water tainted with silver.”

The results were both surprising and disturbing. Uncivil comments not only polarized readers, but they often changed a participant’s interpretation of the news story itself.

In the civil group, those who initially did or did not support the technology — whom we identified with preliminary survey questions — continued to feel the same way after reading the comments. Those exposed to rude comments, however, ended up with a much more polarized understanding of the risks connected with the technology.

Simply including an ad hominem attack in a reader comment was enough to make study participants think the downside of the reported technology was greater than they’d previously thought.

While it’s hard to quantify the distortional effects of such online nastiness, it’s bound to be quite substantial, particularly — and perhaps ironically — in the area of science news.

An estimated 60 percent of the Americans seeking information about specific scientific matters say the Internet is their primary source of information —  ranking it higher than any other news source.

Our emerging online media landscape has created a new public forum without the traditional social norms and self-regulation that typically govern our in-person exchanges — and that medium, increasingly, shapes both what we know and what we think we know.

One possible approach to moderate the nasty effect, of course, is to shut down online reader comments altogether, as some media organizations and bloggers have done. Paul Krugman’s blog post on this newspaper’s Web site on the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11, for instance, simply ended with “I’m not going to allow comments on this post, for obvious reasons.”

Other media outlets have devised rules to promote civility or have actively moderated reader comments.

But as they say, the genie is out of the bottle. Reader interaction is part of what makes the Web the Web — and, for that matter, Facebook, Twitter and every other social media platform what they are. This phenomenon will only gain momentum as we move deeper into a world of smart TVs and mobile devices where any type of content is immediately embedded in a constant stream of social context and commentary.

It’s possible that the social norms in this brave new domain will change once more — with users shunning meanspirited attacks from posters hiding behind pseudonyms and cultivating civil debate instead.

Until then, beware the nasty effect.

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