Best Sexism Analogy Ever

I think this is probably a good analogy for all kinds of careless or thoughtless behavior, not just sexist behavior. We treat other people too often as set pieces (or as you put it, NPCs) in our own lives instead of what they are, which is (sometimes similar, sometimes very different) versions of ourselves.

It is a good analogy. Better than and a step up from Scalzi’s because it recognizes the full force of gate-keeping, I feel.

I think Barnard students were already able to take some Columbia classes prior to 1983, and it’s not like I think it’s an excuse, but there you are.

I know you’re not excusing Your Harasser, but chances are, he’d probably met some women before he went to / taught at university*. How’d he get by, not-harassing up until then, I wonder? I know the answer, but I like the question.

(My revision strategy was much the same as yours, although the outcome was less phenomenal. First-draft, long form notes; re-writing and annotating the notes; condensing them; revisiting the literature; another bout of new notes, and repeat.)

*if only troublesome “co-eds” had the prescience and the decency to stay away, so many male lives might not have been ruined, inconvenienced, punctuated by bouts of casual and consequence-free harassment, &c &c

“In college I had a strategy of studying for exams that was fool-proof. I write quickly, and would take reams of notes for each class. Then when exam time rolled around I would re-write my notes in a condensed form (and re-read the main texts, because I also read fast.)”

I used that note taking strategy too for exams :-) I am not the fastest reader though unless it’s very easy reading or I’m scanning for information, but I take lots of notes from the readings which can subsequently be re-read and condensed.

NPC is a good sexism analogy and also applies to people who use other people instrumentally or don’t really see them as people in themselves. I went to a talk on evil and the colonial legacy the other day, and it was pointed out that an ongoing evil is that indigenous people did not consent to be governed under settler laws. The speaker mentioned Martin Buber’s work on conversation ( in I-Thou and other works) and said she thought that liberal theory – which was the model of thought underlying Anglo colonialism in Australia and NZ – lacks a concept of conversation, of listening to the voices of others, and of the need to take other people seriously.

11 year old girl who hangs out with my 8 year old boy– totally delightful kid but moderately Aryan looking–told me yesterday that she had just spent 3 hours alone playing Mein Kampf.
Took me several queries to find out, to my relief, that it was, in fact, minecraft. Bloody midwestern accent.

I had the weirdest disconnect when you used the acronym NPC as my first thought was non-profit corporation. Of course, that sort of works too.

The notes thing strikes me as perfectly normal behavior. When I was an undergrad I’d write up notes for a class and when I’d done a good job of summarizing them or whatever I’d pass them around and complete strangers would sometimes ask me for copies. And on days or weeks when I’d missed class I’d ask other random people taking the same class for copies of their notes. Lectures are super boring and unless I was writing up a study document or something I’d just generally try to skip them entirely.

Normal or not, the chances are the frat guy intended to put Belle’s notes in a file for current and future brothers to share, which makes it even worse.

Belle should have made a second set of notes that was just subtly wrong all over the place, and given that to the frat guy. :-)

1) I was a student at Columbia College in the mid-1970’s. At that time there were co-ed dorms and IIRC Barnard College students could enroll in all Columbia College courses for credit and vice versa. But Columbia had and still has a required core curriculum (surveys of literature, humanities, music and art) that Barnard didn’t share, and those classes were all-male, because Barnard students didn’t choose to take them. And students generally stayed on their own side of Broadway unless there was something they wanted, like a specific professor. So yes, a Columbia professor in the 80’s would not have had much experience teaching women.

2) It’s my recollection that we shared notes freely. I might not have agreed to give my notes for a whole term to a total stranger, but I did allow people I had just a nodding acquaintance with to photocopy notes and I expected the same from others. If a total stranger had asked for a whole semester’s worth of notes, I might have said no, but I might have said yes. I wouldn’t have thought of it as an offensive request.

I think this may be a generational difference. I was at Columbia at least a decade before you, Belle. The student strikes of 1968-72 were still fresh in people’s memories, and there was still a lot of rebellious sensibility among the student body. One of the manifestations of this attitude was the conviction that tests were oppressive and grades were bullshit. I never felt that I was in competition with other students. I wasn’t personally aware of actual cheating, but sharing notes was something like solidarity against the man.

3) Oh, and another difference – “frat bro.” The frats were in what seemed to be terminal decline when I was there. One frat I knew of was investigated by their national association because the members weren’t behaving like proper fraternity brothers and were running it as a rooming house – a coed one, at that.

Two things I learned here:

1) GPA above 4 = grade inflation is alive and well, even at Colombia.

2) Helping some slacker who blew off class all semester to pass (protecting him from the consequences of his actions) is an act of awesomeness. Because college isn’t about the process of learning and the love of gaining knowledge – it’s about passing and getting a diploma.

Your bragginess aside, I do like the NPC observation.

After years of taking notes and then forgetting them, I came up with a strategy — odd though it may seem — that worked for me through school. If I did not take notes, or look at the lecturer, but instead made complicated little line and number matrices on my notebooks, I found that I remembered the lecture nearly word for word, and could recall it on exams. The equivalent in reading was to read important passages out loud to myself.

JG

This one completly threw me till i rembered my comperative culture class, which did explain the oditiy to be offended by a requst for study notes rather well :-). For us its completly normal to share class notes, including sharing them with strangers, giving them to the stud representatives who shre them with everyone etc. In fact id be rather offended if the request is declined in particular from an a+ student.

Is this kosher? I found out by accident that one student’s lecture notes were way better than mine. So I asked her if she would supply them to me after every class. She did so cheerfully — to the extent of getting them all xeroxed perfectly, by the ROTC program!

Um — I was the lecturer. She is now very high up in the Department of Homeland Security. I still have the notes, though mine are now much better than they were, and I try to lecture a lot less than I did.

Belle, it’s easy for people to say what they would have done. But did they do it? Maybe some did, but come on….One time I was applying for a large, prestigious, hard-to-get grant, and while and there were a few of us sitting in a prof’s office, another student asked me casually to help him apply for the same one. I stared at him in disbelief, and refused. Some people are users.

I should add: I was also on the other side of the ledger, going to another university and graduating out of state much later in life. Being older, I probably seemed “foreign” to pretty much everyone there. Though it wasn’t really important to me at the time to “fit in,” I wanted to delude myself that I could, even in my 30s. Looking back, though, that was silly. I was definitely a fish out of water in that scene.

Fitting in. Humans are such a strange lot and mix of insecurities. It’s probably why we feel the need to join tribes — and the Greek system is perhaps the best example of early associations to ward off those insecurities. Everyone has them, but folks choose different ways of coping, blah blah blah. Even those of us who wanted to think of ourselves as “outsiders” and above the joining of tribes . . . . well, we kind of had our own, too. In books, perhaps, and about books, maybe.

Belle @36,

Thanks. That puts things in a much better context, at least for me. But from the original OP — before the follow up — the guy who comes off the worst, IMO, is your boyfriend of the time. My guess is you dumped him soon after, and I think you’re being far too nice with the “Not supportive, dude.”

Anyway, looking forward to future posts.

Can’t remember any notes sharing at Johns Hopkins in the mid-late 1960s. Might have been going on, but I didn’t see it.

I took notes, also doodled in my note books. Nothing special. However, one philosophy professor, Maurice Mandelbaum, gave excellent lectures. He’d put an outline on the blackboard at the beginning of class that was two or three levels deep and covered two boards. And he stuck to the outline. His lectures were so good, and the exams coordinated to the lectures so well, that you didn’t need to read the books.

“did he think you were an NPC?”

Slytherclaw to Slytherclaw — this is pure Slytherin mentation. He knew that if he never asked he’d be depriving you of an opportunity to say yes.

Richard Pryor used Holmes, occasionally the full John Holmes

#TeamHolmes

My prettier roommates got asked for their notes relatively often. One of them got a Spectator column out of it.

Just so, through the calumnies of time, it can be “I could care less” or “I couldn’t care less.”

No. Pedants are wrong on this.

Saying “I couldn’t care less” is self-contradictory (oh all right, Professor Austin, self-defeating-in-utterance, are you happy now). Because if you didn’t care about it at all, you wouldn’t even have made the effort to alert someone to the fact that you didn’t care about it very much. So anyone who says “I couldn’t care less” does at least care about it enough to express an opinion, even if that opinion is one of indifference.

“I could care less” is clearly shorthand for “I could, of course, care less than the very small amount which I do care (ie, there is a possible world in which I do not care at all, see above), but not very much less”. In other words, it’s saying “I care about this only enough to express indifference to it, which is not literally[1] the least amount it is possible to care, but is very close”. A perfectly sensible thing to say.

[1] don’t start

dsquared, That is interesting, but not how I think of it. I think both are fine because “I couldn’t care less” means just what it says, and “I could care less” is short for “as if I could care less” or “like I could care less”. I’m trying to think of something similar, but naturally can’t, on the spur of the moment.

I’m with Rich@11, I don’t see any problem with asking for the notes. If Belle@16 is planning on selling them for profit, fine, decline to hand them out for free. If the class is graded on a curve and you want to preserve your competitive advantage, fine, just say so and keep them to yourself until the end of the semester. But if you have put a lot of work into creating a useful resource, why keep it from others? The more people that learn the material the better, no?

“This was apparently considered ethical”

I don’t understand how it can possibly not be ethical. You are supposed to read textbooks for a course so that you learn the material. How is it any different to read some other texts?

The pleasure of transcribing is real. I was also a very fast writer and I am entirely sure that many of my excellent grades in college were due to my notetaking perfectionism. I also did the rewriting-of-notes-technique to study. I used to rewrite long passages in books or journals until I thought I understood them. Now that I’m older I realize that much of this was adaptation to my attention span–to create an attention-engaging challenge of writing down almost everything the professor said or writing when reading to keep my mind from wandering. I wanted to virtually reproduce the whole lecture from my notes later so I created lots of abbreviations and weird marks to indicate emphasis and tone.

I kept my college notes for over a decade—finally putting them in recycling was kind of painful. They were my only keepsake from college and the most meaningful ones.

I still love writing notes but I do it so infrequently by hand that I sometimes don’t know what I’ve written. The invention of the laptop ruined my skills but I’m still ritualistic about the pen I use (black, must glide smoothly–in college it had to be Papermate but now some gel pens are OK) and the notebook (looseleaf on a clipboard but I switched to legal pads in grad school). Notetaking might be a lost art. I lost it, anyway.

Daniel.
So you are telling us that, just as “literally” often means “not literally”, “I couldn’t care less” often means “I could care less”?

Sidney Morgenbesser Joke #4

#53 – “I’m fine with Belle’s not giving away her hard work for free.”
What does free have to do with it? Would it be more ethical to refuse to give it but be willing to sell it?

In the world that Belle is reporting on, notes were an item of value outside commerce that could be given freely as a gift as a manifestation of friendship, or as part of a reciprocal relationship of exchange (i.e. given in “gratitude” for a prior favor). The giver thereby gains status and establishes relationships of loyalty and moral indebtedness with other students. The notes had no monetary value but they were not free, and seeking them from a stranger, Belle reports, was a presumptuous and even hostile act.

This is what Belle is saying, I take it, when she says the request was sexist: that a powerful man felt that he had the right to demand notes from a woman without having the ability or intent to provide any of the social capital that the note-taker would normally receive in exchange. He wouldn’t, she implies, have felt the same entitlement if the note-taker had been a man.

But in that era, I think, the idea of a student selling notes to other students for cash would have been seen as repulsive.

Still, I’m no anthropologist, which is what you’d need to understand the exchange culture of an insular group like students.

Crooked Timber Particular. You never can tell* when it’ll roll on in.

*you can, though.

Erm, I do, and I did? And I’d do it again, thanks all the same, babe.

Saurs, demonstrating that you’re aware you’re asshole doesn’t make you not an asshole.

dsquared @ 48
Lynne @ 50
Bloix @ 58

WRT “I could care less”, I would suggest deriving it from a fuller version, “I could hardly care less”, with “less” standing in for the minimal amount expression, such as “give a damn” or “lift a finger”, meaning “not even the minimal amount”. E.g., “Like I could give a damn” or “As if I could lift a finger” seem like they would be possible, to probe Lynne’s tacit knowledge for a moment. ‘hardly’ expresses negation: “couldn’t hardly” would be a double negative. ‘care less’ would be a “negative polarity item”, like some others: we would not say, “I lifted a finger”, or “I gave a damn”, or “I budged”, or “I cared less”. The negative polarity items alone can apparently carry a meaning of negativity. (This is like Lawler’s explanation, except that I’ve added the relation to ‘hardly’.) (I’ve got to go, no time to edit, sorry.)

On topic, vaguely: I completely understand not giving the notes/study guide to a frat dude. It’s definitely what I would do too (in the distant possible world where I had legible handwriting and took notes that would be useful to another human being, rather than being some scrawled semi-code). If it’s just someone who needs the notes, or even if it’s because they’re lazy and didn’t bother to show up to class, etc.—then, fine, I can understand the opposition. But the almost systematic exploitation of other people’s work that frats rely on? Fuck that and fuck them.

js: “On topic, vaguely: I completely understand not giving the notes/study guide to a frat dude. […] But the almost systematic exploitation of other people’s work that frats rely on?”

Every now and then — all right, on every other thread — I write about how one of the factors holding the left back is some people’s unwillingness to let other people have more money even if it doesn’t hurt them. How is this any different? Let’s say that frats systematically exploit other people’s work: they are “welfare cheats”. You can’t deny them freely shared notes without also denying them to everyone else, assuming that the notes that you give to non-frat-dudes then get passed on to frat dudes secondhand anyways.

I mean, I wouldn’t deny anyone the joy of personally turning down the frat guy’s request. But it’s a problematic principle.

At Columbia the true “welfare cheats” were the ones who waited till the last minute to write a paper, and were like total ditzes, and still got an A! I know, right? (I’m still trying to match the effervescent prose style of my roommate with the Spec column. Sorry.)

Or maybe better as a Love American Style episode. I think I have a promising career as a screenwriter behind me.

Okay fine, people as NPCs. Not at all bad, something I think about, ya know, Lacanian Discourse Analysis, Levinas, Sartre, etc. Been thinking about it for hours. Some anime make the artistic choice of not “filling in” street level NPCs, leaving white blobs. XXXholic.

So…who has agency and who is the zombie in this thread, Belle Waring or anonymous frat boy of yore? Who is being objectified, categorized, reducted and abjected, here and now? Frat boy may have seen you as a prop in his play, but he isn’t around here today.

The serious person grapples with whether we are all NPCs in each others’ games.

“NPCs” ain’t bad in part because by subtracting agency from the NPC you pass agency onto the game designer or scriptwriter or “system” or Symbolic…but goodness, I don’t get mad and blame the storekeeper for not selling me the +7 sword or the street urchin for stealing my lantern fuel. Ok, yes I do. Funny about that.

The funny thing is when someone wants to transfer past slights or experiences of being objectified into a different and separate discourse as a form of capital. My working hypothesis is that a predictable reaction (or range of reaction) is expected if not demanded, which would make the readers into NPCs for the writer. Kind of a shared Imaginary.

bob mcmanus: “Okay fine, people as NPCs. Not at all bad, something I think about, ya know, Lacanian Discourse Analysis, Levinas, Sartre, etc. ”

If you want to track this theme back on the left, I think of William Morris. His “The Well at the World’s End” is supposed to be the first fantasy novel that takes place in an imaginary world, rather than a mock-medieval setting or some kind of fantastic setting on our Earth. So it grounds the whole 20th century fantasy genre in some sense. And one of the things that struck me about it is that it has an in-universe indication of who is a PC: some people have (are born with?) these medallions that make them want to go on the quest to find the Well. Naturally, those are the people who move around, who encounter everyone else as part of a more or less fixed setting. And if they succeed in drinking from the Well, they get a kind of heightened charisma: they become natural leaders and it’s assumed that most people will follow them.

Belle, we had 61 comments in a row where everyone was polite, friendly, and argumentative. Many people shared their own experiences of what Columbia/Barnard were like, what notes mean, what it means to exchange them. You were part of that conversation and people deferred to you. Some people got off topic but that wasn’t bad, there were lots of conversations going on. And some comments were stupid, and some were bloviating. Which is what even the best conversation is like, isn’t it.

Then someone who hadn’t contributed a fucking thing came along and said, you’re all fuckfaces and I’m not. Babe.

I get that this is not strictly speaking a feminist blog and maybe that pisses you off. If you want to write on a feminist blog, Feministe could use you. And if most of the commenters here including me were to comment over there, we would get our heads handed to us in minutes. Boy, are those comment threads policed.

But the commenters here don’t in the main police each other. So you get comments that may make you roll your eyes. That comes with the blog. I say this with full understanding that sometimes commenters say clueless and hurtful things. And with gratitude for your excellent, amusing, enlightening writing, which I have read with pleasure for years and hope to continue to read as long as the pixels do shine. And I’m sorry to hear about the teeth grinding.

But we don’t need some asshole to pop up from nowhere and tell us to shut up because we’re not what we know we’re not and don’t want to be. That’s not a contribution. That’s a derailment.

There’s a large population of non-frat-boy people who would benefit from sharing things, but—and give it up for the strawdude! we shouldn’t share because of the moral indignation that frat boys would then get the stuff too.

Clarification added.

Belle @85: Five Easy Pieces is a flawed movie but far better than Easy Rider. Like so much better.

I’ll have to watch it again to see, though probably not soon. I agree it’s definitely more in the line of what’s considered great (and more like what most CT readers probably appreciate, if they’re not, like Bloix, making an effort otherwise).

As if I were just standing there with an arrow over my head and you could press A to talk to me, at which point I would reveal information that’s crucial for the hero’s quest.

At the risk of sounding like Bob, and not very flatteringly (or seriously), I think some commenters have something basically neoliberal in mind, comparing you to a corporate software manufacturer who won’t share their source code. I admit I don’t really know why so many people have fastened onto such a narrow question of morality, so eccentrically applied.

Men would make much better women than the women we’ve got now, eh?

Then someone who hadn’t contributed a fucking thing came along and said, you’re all fuckfaces and I’m not. Babe.

Howls of derisive laughter, Bruceabe.

Plume,

You’re saying a blog post has to follow the rules you’d expect of a published novel? I think that’s kind of extreme. There may be rules for blog posts, sure, if you were interested you could probably find someone who’d explain them to you. But they’re nothing like the rules for a novel.

Dearest Belle, are you sure a bit of familiar Caló slang isn’t really a reference to Conan Doyle, the Easton Assassin, or a large-penised man from the 1970s?

Sincerely yours, a gender-neutral robot on the interwebs who is Concerned About These Things But Really (you wouldn’t believe the paces I put the dudes over at LGM through when they talk about “catsup,” this is not a cooties thing where I feel a pathological need to correct you because as I might have mentioned I am sex-blind)

It really is like rain on your wedding day, or a thread that proves the post!

To celebrate, the first verse of an entirely original ditty of my own making which belongs to me (I own it, and what it is, too, etc):

If I were a co-ed /
I tell ya what I’d do /
I’d share class notes with a douche-canoe or two /
(‘cos) A’hm crazy about (mah) patriarchy /
Cra-azy ’bout this patriarchy! /
I’ma fangirl this patriarchy until some internet toughguy tells me to pull over ‘cos I’m doing it wrooooooooooong

Oi, Bloix-babe!? Why don’t you piss off somewhere else instead? This is Belle‘s fucking blawgging home, bro. Asking her if she’d feel better at the little ladies’ corner, for her little lady feelings, so her little lady prejudices will never be challenged, is decidedly not on.

My buddies an’ me, we’re getting real well-known /
Yeah the co-eds know us and they give us their notes

Bianca @97,

No, no, no. I didn’t say or suggest it has to follow any rules, much less those of a novel. I just said it was fair to ask for a bit of elaboration, while repeating that she owes us nothing, etc. I brought up the novel bit as my own analogy, which apparently didn’t work, either.

Basically, I’ve been told, midst some general praise for my works in progress, that they need more scene-building here and there, and a person very close to me said she understood why this happens. That I see it. I see the world I’ve created very clearly. But the reader doesn’t, unless I transcribe it for them.

In the case of the OP, Belle had an experience that stayed with her and pisses her off to this day. She sees it all very clearly, and she knows what she knows. As mentioned above, she has “privileged access.” Obviously. But for the reader to see this too — we can’t ever be her, of course — requires a bit of scene-painting. Again, Belle doesn’t have to do this. There are no “rules” saying she has to do this. But “good connections” generally require it.

It kinda bothers me that it’s obvious not to share the good stuff amongst the peers. Circumstances alter cases and I get the point about freeloaders, but still. Something to do with why I live in the woods, I suppose.

“maybe I got it wrong and, given what sharing of notes is, which is a sort of South Sea Island gift exchange, the frat bro was being hostile and menacing.”

Coincidentally I heard the term “dochebag potlatch” recently , which might be apt.

Afaict the main peculiarity is that of the “frat boy’s” behaviour. This is what needs to be accounted for. From my (admittedly rough and ready) observations it seems that most people would prefer to die than ask a stranger for a favour.

I feel sick and miserable generally and maybe this is making me irascible/overly sensitive to perceived slights.

The hypothesis “nope, they’re just assholes” is in my opinion a long way from needing to be given up on.

What would have happened if Belle had just walked up to a randomly selected fraternity guy and asked him for a copy of some of the past course notes that they kept in their folder? I’m guessing they’d have said no, but surely the more relevant point here is that nobody has given that possibility a moment’s thought because it would never happen. Because, NPCs.

Belle – please, please, don’t go somewhere else to blog. Or blog less here. Blog more! Honestly, its taken me years to learn how to read your posts, getting used to your eliptical style and the fact that you used words I don’t understand, and I enjoy them so much, and I only read two other blogs, and that’s not going to change. If Daniel reads this, and is open to requests, I’d like him to blog more too.

I didn’t have an opinion about the analogy, because I’m still ingesting the idea of an NPC. I misread the initials at first, as NCP (in the UK I grew up in this stood for National Car Parks, or New Communist Party, a tiny ultra-Stalinist split from the CPGB based in Surrey, knowing the latter of which tells you something about the UK I grew up in, though it wasn’t in Surrey).

One nice upshot of the thread for me was finding the ROTC/DHS student on linkedin, and getting a nice email from her this morning.

Anderson: “One thing I’m gleaning is that some commenters here like having NPCs, tho they won’t admit it.”

This is elliptical enough so that it could mean anything. But in general I think that the argument that js claims no one here is making is not very far below the surface of some people’s comments. “Requests for stuff from strangers” = entitlement and treating other people as resources, right? Not in the context of a personal experience that (of course) can’t be challenged because it is personal, but generally.

Rich seems to put the notes on the level of a student asking another student for a pencil. “Requests for stuff from strangers.” Which is silly, at best, and even Rich knows this.

But another thing I’m picking up about some of these males’ responses is that they claim they wouldn’t feel Belle’s reaction, on the same facts. And probably not, I agree. Because they don’t live their lives being treated like NPCs. One bold adventurer’s request to another? No problem, fellow hero!

“It is perfectly reasonable to prefer that people talk about the ideas rather than disputing the facts of the experiences themselves.”

Yes, it is.

@115 YES.

@117 “The hypothesis “nope, they’re just assholes” is in my opinion a long way from needing to be given up on.”
Yes, I hope Belle will revisit that one.

Because they are freeloading, in school, where you are supposed to do your own work. It doesn’t map onto the economy at large. Nothing in Belle’s story suggests the guy was unfortunate in some way that he’d been unable to do his own work.

Dismissing ethics, honor, and pride as “psychological” – as if the mind were a negligible part of one’s existence – well, whatever.

“an afford” = “an affront”

dsquared already said exactly what I was thinking: the key issue here is reciprocity. Would random frat dude have given Belle a copy of his notes, presuming that he had any worth asking for? (We have some evidence on this matter: he wouldn’t be asking for notes if he had his own already). And if RFD was acting with an expectation of being able to cadge notes off obliging fellow-students, then we could say that RFD’s entire strategy was based around exploiting the hard work and good nature of others. This sounds plausible, doesn’t it? If there was a norm of mutual aid and assistance between students, what was RFD doing to uphold this?

There’s a reasonable counter-argument, which is that sharing lecture notes is pro-social and altruistic act, the kind of ‘baseline communism’ that society needs to function without devolving into dog-eat-dog hypercompetitive game. Fine, a reasonable position to take. But if you think Belle should have shared the notes, you also have to think that RFD and his friends should have done something of equal or greater value to benefit Belle or her friends, and that seems really quite unlikely. I have a deep and abiding belief in the potential of other people to defy our expectations, but in this case I think it’s pretty likely that RFD really was just being entitled.

With that out of the way: videogames! Adam Roberts made a good point up-thread, that videogame NPCs are a bit like the stereotypical notion of the ‘wife’ as someone who enables their spouse’s heroism, by taking care of the kids, house and so on (citing The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim). I should point out that Skyrim is somewhat more progressive than the quote indicates: the protagonist can be female or male, and non-human, and can marry individuals of either gender (though I do recall that there are no marriageable lizard-people). And most NPCs do have some sense of fairness – any quest that involves asking a person for information or access to some place or physical item normally involves have to perform some minor side-quest for them first. Aside from the basic “what’s the local gossip?” or “where’s the nearest blacksmith?” kinds of questions, NPCs generally expect something in return for their help.

Still, the fact remains that they’re put there for your entertainment – the Elder Scrolls series has been designed with this goal in mind for over two decades. Here’s a relevant quote from my favourite video game manual of all time, Daggerfall (1996):

You are the protagonist, the hero of the game – the story is what you decide to make it. There are going to be foils to your character: people who will try to stop some of your more grandiose goals, and people who are there to help if it serves them. But it is your aims and ambitions that frame the story. After all, role-playing games are plays in which the stars are members of the audience. Given a large, well-appointed stage, a supporting cast of improvisationalists, and an alert backstage crew, they are capable of anything. And the best thing we game designers and programmers can do is give you what you want, and get out of your way.

It sounds plausible to me that RFD and his ilk do view the real world somewhat like this. Other people can present interesting challenges, be dangerous rivals or provide helpful assistance. But as the protagonist, you have an expectation that if your role in the game ever comes under threat (by, say, failing an exam), you can rely on a helpful NPC to wander by with a handy healing potion set of lecture notes to bail you out.

(At the risk of going a bit meta, I suspect that the reason why Morrowind is the Elder Scrolls game that stands out as the most emotionally-resonant of the series is precisely because the game-world seemed much more indifferent to the player’s existence than the later games, thus allowing the player to assume the role of hero gradually without the illusion-breaking that happens when the world pushes you towards heroism: Oblivion opens with the Emperor telling you that the fate of the world is on your shoulders, and Skyrim with an attack from a dragon that leads swiftly to the discovery that you, the protagonist, are ‘dragonborn’, but Morrowind opens with your arrival at an Imperial immigration office, fresh off a prison ship. It’s a story of heroism for people who don’t like to be hit over the head with the assumption that they’re the hero).

me @ 30: reciprocity is an important part of the question.

d^2 @ 117: nobody has given a thought to the reciprocity question.

me @ 122: being “nobody” is a lot like being an NPC.

Stephenson-quoter kun @130: dsquared says the key issue is reciprocity.

NPCs: we’re everywhere.

134, there’s a Bloix exception.

JanieM: It does seem that you have caught me out. As the thread is fairly long, I read enough to understand that people were challenging Belle’s reasoning for not giving a copy of the notes, decided that I found this disagreeable, then skipped to the end and read back a few to figure out where we were up to, which is where I found dsquared saying pretty much what I had been thinking, so I acknowledged that in my comment. I didn’t pick up on the fact that you had made the same point earlier, despite you commenting to that effect after dsquared’s comment.

I can’t say for certain that I missed your original comment because it came after the point where I decided to start skimming, or if it’s because I subconsciously dismissed it (or that I read both yours and dsquared’s, and subconsciously gave greater weight to his opinion). Either way, I acknowledge your observation of the importance of reciprocity as being correct and much earlier than my own, or any other. Reading the actual comments in order certainly looks pretty bad, and although I can’t introspectively pinpoint a moment where I decided to ignore your contribution in favour of someone else’s, that nevertheless is a Thing That Happened and I should be more careful in future.

Belle, I’ve been thinking about this: ” how well does this map onto the constant demands random men make on women’s attention and behavior? “Smile!” This is a request for help changing the wallpaper of some rando’s world. Dudes will pull the earbuds out of your ears so that you must listen to them chatting you up on the subway. Yank out a stranger’s earphones and expect a happy new friend–what even?”

Really, a stranger has pulled the earbuds from your ears so he could talk to you? Really?? This is unbelievable. At least, I wish it were unbelievable. As for being told to smile, I couldn’t count the number of times that happened to me when I was a pretty young woman. Perfect strangers, always men, would say that to me on the street when I was walking along, minding my own business. It happened so often that I concluded that I must not have a neutral expression, that my default expression must be sad. It made me very self-conscious and resentful at the same time.

Reciprocity…well, I do have to pay the smith for the +7 sword, which makes the game more interesting and enjoyable than if all the goals were trivially easy.

Complications, nuances, intricacies of interaction are what makes games and life fun, and create socio-economic systems, but do not turn our NPCs into subjects. We simply map our own desires and goals onto the desires and goals of others in such a way that their desires and problems become useful to us. And usually of course, as in capitalism, we say that the interaction is good for both sides, I serve their needs and desires by fulfilling my own, etc.

Classic: eroge games and harem comedies: lead, maybe 70% of the time male, 30% female, is designed to be hopelessly bland nondescript without goals or character, his/her love-objects have all the backstory and most of the development and emotional depth. Yet the story still revolves around the main character choosing a best girl/guy, it’s his story. (Which is always about making someone else happy, at best ending with everybody happy. This is a win for him.)

What makes a NPC into a subject, from the external standpoint of the player or main, is not reciprocity or complication or history or emotional depth or empathy but our submission, our absolute and infinite denial of our own desires and subjectivity in service to the Others’. Everything else is just economics.

Puchalsky, albeit clumsily, does make an important point, about individuality vs community, identity/affinity analysis vs class struggle.

What is it with the frat boy and notes, we just damn it do not want to be used? A source of surplus profit and exploitation? There are fair exchange price schemes here: smiles, a little conversation, some recognition of my unique human worth, whatever the going rate.

Affinity socialities, identity groups, remain merchant communities of exchange and barter, where joining gets you membership privileges and expectations, and everybody keeps accounts, and those who don’t pay their dues are locked out and fair game for hunting season.

Reciprocity frankly does not work in large societies. Reciprocity becomes market exchange, basically. In the U.S., means-tested programs predictably take a beating and then go away, and only universal coverage ones stay.

This thread shows how it works: people decide that when someone says “Hey, some people share as part of their regular social arrangements: it’s not something that can be described with ‘Who does that?'” they must be personally criticizing Belle for not sharing with a jerk, so they teleport in and denounce this view which they’ve made up. Meanwhile the actual practice of sharing things freely is “entitlement” or “unethical” or some other word that implies that something wrong is happening.

People might want to think about why the actual professors here who’ve commented don’t have a problem with students sharing notes. They don’t seem to think there’s anything wrong with it, because really, the entire academic way life is based on sharing notes.

I’m just not getting this at all. What I see is people who are reducing a real life situation to a Roger Schank kind of AI scheme where all “transfer of object from one person to another” is equivalent. Thus, “at my university, it was common for students to form groups where only one attended any given lecture, and the rest shared their notes,” becomes “at all universities, it must be necessarily the case that students share everything they are ever asked to share, and by the way I and my friends are all the most moral people who ever lived, and in X other situation, powerful people share too, and who are you to criticize them by saying I’m wrong that you’re wrong?”

Bianca @144,

In my first comment, I asked for more details. I didn’t assume I understood the setup. Third comment, I mentioned that her reflection made her boyfriend come off the worst of the bunch. Didn’t bring up novels until #96. The previous few “weren’t consistent” with that because they didn’t bring up the topic, at all.

Honestly, I’m not getting your critique. Could be the fault of my poorly worded comments entirely for the miscommunication. But I don’t think so. At least not for most of it.

But I’ll try again. For me, Belle wrote about a memory she had that still pisses her off. And she’s obviously entitled to be pissed off. I’m just saying that we — or at least I — need a bit more to go on, regarding his behavior, if we’re to understand why this stayed with her and caused her to write the blog. That in no way, shape or form calls her memory into question. I assumed from the start that she had excellent reasons for thinking this was a sexist encounter. But being a nosy reader, I wanted to see what she saw that day, and I tried to get more details. Admittedly, I probably chose the wrong angle, by suggesting other possible explanations and my own analogy. That’s not always the best route toward the one in question, and it probably caused more static than intended. Boiled down, I just wanted to hear more.

Unlike many others here, I don’t have a problem at all with her saying no, and I do think it’s pretty odd to walk up to a perfect stranger to ask for notes. Though, that depends a lot on the approach. I think all of us, in our college years, did similar things, all too awkwardly, and often simply to make friends. It’s not that far from “What’s your major?” At least it can be along those lines. In short, in that encounter, there were two human beings. Both have their own stories to tell. Belle can tell hers here. We will never hear his. I just wanted more from Belle. Selfish, nosy me.

So, in an imaginary society completely unlike our own, Belle would’ve been acting inappropriately. Got it.

“Reciprocity frankly does not work in large societies.” Well, yeah.

But we live in large societies through our participation in smaller groups, some quite small, some a bit larger. Columbia university is not society as a whole; but it’s not one’s local neighborhood either. It seems to me that reciprocity is legitimately in play within that context.

Socialism, even liberalism, means if anything giving to people you don’t like without getting back. Yup, gonna get used.

We have had the “give to people like me who treat me the way I want and give back” for a long long time. Only the bosses have changed, and will change again.

154: So what was demanded in the thread was a discussion of how entitled males treat women (and maybe affiliated identities) as NPCs, and ain’t it terrible. IOW, feminism.

Guys are resistant to that stuff, because they don’t want to be NPCs in feminist discourse. Helpmates ain’t subjects.

It is of course interesting in the general universalizing style of most of the males here (including me), and the particularism (or even singularity) (it’s just Waring’s story, why can’t she tell her story, these commenters suck ) of the women. Feminism says that is the historical pattern of patriarchal intellectual oppression. I find the isolated anecdote as argument equally a rhetorical weapon and strategy, attempting to initiate a non-rational process, instilling empathy as a way to bypass intellectual discussions of policy and process.

JanieM: “superior self-righteousness about sharing notes”

BW: “As I say, I was obviously wrong about how people feel about being asked for outlines for class. But I think you can disagree with me on that front without disputing my impressions of the person who asked me.”

I wasn’t disputing BW’s impression of the person who asked her. But she followed that impression with “Who does that?” and with general incredulity about the idea that anyone regularly does that. When I write that some groups of people do really regularly do that — that, in my personal experience, which is just as unchallengeable as anyone else’s, it happens quite a lot — it’s not “superior self-righteousness about sharing notes.”

Plume,

I misread this

we — or at least I — need a bit more to go on, regarding his behavior, if we’re to understand why this stayed with her and caused her to write the blog.

and you’re right, that isn’t a statement that Belle’s story is emotionally colored. Sorry about the misreading. But why do you need to understand Belle’s emotional relationship to the story at all, her motivation for writing, and so on? She explains her motivation for writing perfectly well. Why do you think she needs to provide more details so you’ll believe the most important thing in the situation was sexism?

To be clear, if you had said, that sucks, and it happens to townies, too, I would have read your comment differently. But what you did was challenge Belle to prove that her description was accurate.

Bianca @149 and JanieM @ 150, Thanks for these. The thread has been feeling quite surreal.

To the degree a guy can be a “feminist,” I am. But I’m also a secular humanist. The two don’t have to be in conflict, etc. etc.

Yeah, they do.

Feminism is a committed political project based in women’s particular experience and dedicated to the liberation and empowerment of women, exclusively. It is not generalizable to the equal liberation of men or humanity, and efforts to draw humanist ideals from women’s experience is formal colonization.

You can’t be a Ukrainian Nationalist either.

The step from “asked for my notes” to “sexism” is a commitment, and a commitment and political project not in seeing sexism, but in stopping there, and not moving on to selfishness, or class/white privilege, or humanism.

Just exactly as moving from #BlackLivesMatter to #AllLivesMatter is a racist move.

Bob, in the sense that a fully liberated humanity includes women. In the sense that we make sure everyone gets out of (metaphorical and real) jail, not just “representatives” of certain groups. In the sense that we end all apartheid, not just some of it.

A “diverse” ruling class isn’t really progress, per se. Nor is a “diverse” underclass. Getting rid of class entirely is. Getting rid of those divisions is. That takes care of the empowerment issue, whereas a group-based plan can’t. As long as it leaves class divisions in place, “empowerment for all” is impossible.

Within feminism, there is the critique that it’s primarily for the empowerment of white, upper-class women. There is anger between feminists because of this. There is another when it comes to generations, sexuality and so on. All the isms have sub-ism battles, blah blah blah.

So my conception of “humanism” is to bag all of that and include the whole lot. But not under a Eurocentric or American or Enlightenment or Anti-Enlightenment banner. But literally, human qua human qua human. There is only one tribe. Our economic and social systems treat us as if we’re several different species . . . . The truly humanist critique is to say that’s insane.

As for being told to smile, I couldn’t count the number of times that happened to me when I was a pretty young woman. Perfect strangers, always men, would say that to me on the street when I was walking along, minding my own business. It happened so often that I concluded that I must not have a neutral expression, that my default expression must be sad.

For what it’s worth that happened to me a lot when I was a young man (and I still get that sometimes) and I used to be similarly self-conscious about my facial expression.

Bob,

Not sure how much of your comment is tongue in cheek, though I suspect most of it is. And, not quite sure about your usage of the post numbers here. But a surface rebuttal goes like this:

I haven’t and don’t appoint myself as universalizer, default or otherwise. It doesn’t take a universalizer to recognize humans as humans. Unless you do believe we’re made up of many different species.

I speak for myself, from my own perspective, as do you. I’ve read Nietzsche too, and anti-Nietzscheans, and post-anti-hoc-ergo-ad-hoc-Nietzscheans, etc. No one in this thread, that I can see, called Belle’s particular “good or bad.” The rest of that sentence really does appear as a send up.

On that note, it’s long past time to find some sunshine.

Academics is about “sharing notes” with, of course, attribution. So if fratguy entitled jerk who demands, which is how I read BW’s story, her intellectual property at the point of privilege was engaged in academic sharing his exam would have to include either an acknowledgements page or footnotes making clear that all these answers are dependent on BW’s labor. Admission of influence and the importance of others’ work is central to the academic enterprise. Anyone think that the fratboy would, in fact, acknowledge BW’s role in his (undeserved) grade had she shared?

Plus and also, as Anderson thus blogged, out education isn’t something that can be, as it were, taxed and redistributed like robber barons’ ill gotten gains. To argue that it is, is like the Fox Channel’s surfer dude buying shrimp, or whatever it is, in reverse.

And Plume, whose embryonic novel is being praised by all and sundry, the demand or request for more, to be honest, is evidence of lazy reading. BW, at least as I recall her posts, cleaver and insightful and funny so when she writes about some entitled jerk being jerkily entitled in regards of a demand for notes it’s the readers responsibility to fill the missing jerkiness by, you know, imagining how an entitled jerk would ask for notes. It’s true, she could have included a bit on how exactly the jerk came up to her and with no introduction or attempt at a personal connection his eyes cast either into the middle distance or scanning the surrounding for (female?) students for short shorted rearends, his backward facing cap announcing his love of lite beer and his pink shirt an adoration of alligators with collar upturned and his hair a testament to the enduring importance of Miami Vice for a certain kind of American male in a voice dripping with both condescension and impatience asked if he could, like, have her notes for the X class. But she chose not to and my day is slightly better for having the chance to think of how exactly a sexist jerk would, you know, express the privilege, condescension, and impatience implied but, thank the lord, not spelt out in the OP.

So, thanks, BW for another great post which not only illuminates how a “sharing economy” reinscribes the power of the powerful but also for the chance to think about, and see, how many are the ways that jerks are given the benefit of the doubt when justice and common decency demand condemnation.

Tom Bach: there’s no arguing with the Black Knight, I’ve decided. They’re all flesh wounds.

“So, thanks, BW for another great post which not only illuminates how a “sharing economy” reinscribes the power of the powerful but also for the chance to think about, and see, how many are the ways that jerks are given the benefit of the doubt when justice and common decency demand condemnation sexism.”

I think we’ve reached guillotine humor at this point. Or stake-burning.

But your sandwiches taste so much betttttttttttter.

So, if you’re the one writing the notes (in the form of coherent summaries) that other people want to use, you’re going to be one of the best students and don’t have to worry about the curve? I wonder where I’ve seen that before. And students will actually get a better grade if they do the reading? Oh the injustice.

So notes can help some people skate by and get a minimally acceptable grade with little work. (You’d think this would point out a problem with the tests, rather than simply with the students, but never mind.) I would say that they can also help a larger pool of students who are at risk of being confused enough by the subject so that their understanding really is improved over what it otherwise would have been by reading someone’s notes. You can’t help the second group without also helping the first.

Jesus H Christ on a friggin’ stick. This is absurd. All this earnest twiddling on behalf of some fraternal douchecanoe from days gone by. Before you know it Donald Trump aka The Donald will have become President and appointed lord knows how many douchecanoes to cabinet posts.

Lynne, just about anybody, sometimes with sexual intent (both women and gays), sometimes the crazy Jesus lady on the tube or the barkeeper in a club. Truth be told, my expression is a bit like Clint Eastwood on a bad day in photos and my wife does have to remind me to smile so that I don’t scare the in-laws. Nevertheless I did feel a bit ostracized and wondered if something was wrong with me when I was younger, a feeling that wasn’t helped by being a melancholic type. I’m sure this can be worse for women, though.

I just said it was fair to ask for a bit of elaboration, while repeating that she owes us nothing, etc.

There’s no “just asking”. The act of asking a question stems from the presumption that you’re entitled to, if not the answer then at least for the question to be “considered”. But you don’t have that entitlement; people are entitled to be able to ignore you.

But they can’t, if you’re asking a question. Even refusing you — even ignoring you — takes effort, effort that you’re not entitled to.

Being asked a question is not cost-free. Since noone has an as-of-right entitlement to even the labour of others in telling them to fuck the fuck off, noone has an as-of-right entitlement to ask questions. “I’m just asking” isn’t an adequate justification or explanation or excuse-for-your-actions: unless your questions are reasonable enough and important enough that you can show an obligation on the part of the person you’re asking to give them even a tenth of a second’s consideration, the questions are an unreasonable imposition and should not be asked.

This isn’t I think hard. Unless, you know, you treat people as not having any interests of any importance compared to your own desires, regarding other people as, you know, NPCs.

[the link to empathy problems and my theorised link between unrecognised empathy problems and politics I leave as exercises for the reader.]

[if you’re making an error the fact that you are making an error will — fairly obviously — be invisible to you, even under close observation.
A: “according to my brain, X+Y =>Z”
B: “actually, X+Y => W”
A: “I’ve just checked with my brain, and it tells me that X+Y => Z, so I’m afraid you’re wrong”.
This mechanism means that introspection is less helpful than you might think in spotting or identifying your own errors, and you should put more emphasis on what others are telling you and less on your own thoughts.]

If you focus your awareness only upon your own rightness, then you invite the forces of opposition to overwhelm you. This is a common error. Even I, your teacher, have made it.
— The Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam

Oh and Saurs, y0u were right, of course, to point out that I made what was a clear condemnation of sexism into something else. All apologies. Like most of us, I think, I am a prisoner of my own privilege and, without the aid of others pointing out my errors, would wallow in that endless whatsit of error.

Apologies, I’ve arrived pretty late at this party: for Belle with best regards:

from http://laudatortemporisacti.blogspot.com/ (11/26/014)
A Reason to Marry F.F. Bruce (1910-1990), In Retrospect: Remembrance of Things Past (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1980), p. 48 (on Alexander Souter at Aberdeen University):

He was much criticized for being more interested in later Latin than in classical Latin. He thought it right that his students should have at least an introduction to later Latin, so he regularly gave this to his second year class, working according to a quadrennial cycle, in which the set texts were (1) Apuleius’s Cupid and Psyche, (2) the first half of Tertullian’s Apology, (3) the second half of Tertullian’s Apology, (4) Augustine’s De Catechizandis Rudibus. One scholar of my acquaintance affirms that he married his wife, who was a student in the year after him, because he had the notes on the first half of Tertullian’s Apology and she had the notes on the second half, and he wanted to have the complete set.

Rich P.
Kind regards to you as well. Oddly enough, I wasn’t responding to what I don’t think others were arguing. I didn’t and don’t read the various post supportive of BW not sharing as being arguments for never sharing. You may, of course, do that. But given that your first post insist that asking for notes is perfect normal ignores the reasons provided in the OP for not sharing, I am less than convinced that you, writing before whoeveritwas you insist was elevating not sharing to an ethical principle, were in that post responding to them. Maybe you ought to read your first post and explain how moving the conversation from a specific act of not sharing for cause to an attack all acts of not sharing was trying, you know, to make a legitimate case of not sharing into an attack on sharing.

Saurs, yeah, I’ve been thinking Rich finds it ideologically questionable for a woman he’s never met NOT to make him a sandwich. Forward the revolution!

195: I love that blog.

Collin @189,

This is a blog, with a comments section underneath. To question our right to question is questionable, to say the least.

This is also not the barricades. No great battles won or lost here, no matter what one might think in their own self-righteous bubble . . . . which is all too often how these things tend to spin out.

But I’ll do some spinning as well.

Belle, IMO, has earned a presumption that she knows what she’s talking bout. Not an unquestioned one. No one gets that in my book. No one. But a presumption that she describes her life experience as accurately as she can.

As a general rule, however, it’s not the best idea to just accept what anyone says, cuz: “privileged access.” This, obviously, cuts both ways and gets some pretty despicable people off the hook. As in, it’s a two-sided sword. Should we cease all questioning of, say, a Darren Wilson, and just take his word for what happened in Ferguson? Me? I don’t believe a word he said beyond stating his name. Or Zimmerman? No way. Should we accept what Bush said about the reason for invading Iraq? Again, I didn’t believe him then and still question everything he ever said. But he had “privileged access,” right? And, of course, even in BW’s original scenario, what happens if the douchecanoe in question comes here, writes his own blog, tells his side of things? Is it then “wrong” to question his take? He, too, has “privileged access.” What if his version of events differs a great deal from BW’s? We’re going to have to question someone’s story then, despite “privileged access.” Does that make us monsters? Of course not. And to ask in order to learn more, to fill in lacunae?

Questioning stuff on a bulletin board is harmless. It’s not a “micro-aggression.” It doesn’t take away someone’s rights, deny them housing, a job, equal pay, custody of children, subject them to illegal searches or brutalize them in any way. It’s just words on a page, to be ignored or answered. To me, making a big fuss over something so incredibly harmless is absurd, and it points to a general devolution in American dialogue, where it seems everyone is trying to top everyone else in righteous indignation about something.

As my father used to say when I was a little kid, “Stop your whining or I’ll give you something to really cry about.” If that righteous indignation is all about the nerve that someone asks for more info on a bulletin board, in a polite and civil manner, which was the case . . . . that person isn’t going to be able to handle actually important shit, at all. Ever.

“Lacunae,” though, and the, erm, “filling” thereof. Subtext becoming text. Throbbing, engorged text.

Yes, yes, if we can no longer interrogate Belle Waring’s preconceptions about her own experiences, the fascists and the self-righteous will have truly… erm, “indignated” themselves but good. Into “lacunae,” lard willing. /wanking motion

I don’t know, maybe if people stopped doing the “someone is wrong on the internet” thing, this thread would be marginally less awful. Not that I’m suggesting anyone do this, obviously!

that was supposed to read “js” not “is”

No one ever asked to borrow my notes more than once, presumably due to their combination of idiosyncrasy and illegibility, but I’m completely with BW on the principle of the thing. The NPC analogy is brilliant – for the computer age; in my (pencil, paper and D20) day, NPCs were lovingly hand-crafted and messed with at one’s peril.

“JPL 08.23.15 at 6:01 am
Lynne @184

“The opposite of patriarchy isn’t matriarchy, it’s an egalitarian society.”

Thank you for that. There is much wisdom resonating in that little sentence. I wish the world could recognize that wisdom.”

Not to be snarky or anything (not at all, I’m very glad others are saying it) but I have been saying this for some time on CT threads (and elsewhere).

Sort of feel I need to emphasise this because in the eyes of some feminists here (lookin at you JanieM), I’m a terrible person who should piss off and not comment on CT threads again – so nice to see some people agreeing with some of the stuff I’ve been saying.

Wait a second, everyone. Have we considered what life would be like if we could all really be NPCs?

Each of us writes a computer-RPG-style dialogue tree for ourselves, records a video of ourselves reading our lines in the dialogue, and then when someone walks up to us with Google Glass, Microsoft HoloLens, or similar vaporware, they can just push a button on their controller and have a real-time “conversation” with us without actually bothering us? Your dialogue tree could even have stat-checks, with everyone’s statistics rated and stored by trusted third parties. Can I have your notes? Only if you’re in my social network, your grade in the class is lower than mine, and you have sufficient reputation and charisma points! (Actually, on second thought you can’t have my notes because reading them will only make you stupider–my notes are terrible.)

Hang on, is this why Facebook purchased Oculus Rift? That decision makes much more sense to me now.

@ 216 thanks Lynn :)

Just to have a go at looping back to what the post was about (is it possible? Is Belle off somewhere gnashing her teeth and rending her hair?), the NPC concept does remind me of something a man I used to know very well once said to me. Not using this to be mean, there’s a lot of complexities etc etc, but when I went back to the study of history and women’s history had become a thing, he said that he’d always thought of history as something that men made and women followed along behind, sort of thing.

I mean he was being honest, that’s what patriarchy taught us in school until feminism taught (some of) us better, he hadn’t studied much history, Australian history at school in those days had a massive focus on explorers (White of course), and he was just reflecting on that received knowledge.

OR WAS HE?

Anyway it’s certainly a view of women as NPCs in history.

He was male, and not taking Belle seriously, just feeling entitled, and uninhibited about showing it. In those days (probably less so now) being in a fraternity at an Ivy sort of sealed the deal, but it is, strictly speaking, an unnecessary condition, just a detail that makes the whole thing more vivid for US readers. If you’re English, and not upper class, but have been around people of your own age who are, you have almost certainly experienced something like it, even if you are male. (University, for me, was where I first experienced it, but, interestingly, I did again when I went back to London for a couple of years in my late-30’s, after 15 years in the US).

My own never to be completed much less published and in fact as yet nonexistent novel already has a scene in it touching on the subculture Belle alludes to. In Classics I assume it was worse, along the lines of the students in The Secret History, which I’m sure Belle has read.

I’d like to see statistical data on the demographics of who gets asked to provide more information or further analysis, and who gets responded to in different ways.

I say this knowing that the response will be snarky tag-ons to every comment by a woman, telling her not to engage the sexist requests for more info, EXCEPT when that’s actually what happened.

Plume, Whole monographs could be written explaining why the “frat guy” was not brought to life (as a “character” [sic]) for you, and monographs more explaining what it means.

There is an interesting double bind illustrated by the anecdote, where if the writer emphasizes the “elite” character of the setting, the story becomes a comment on the sins of the wealthy, and if the writer emphasizes the universal-male aspect of the incident, it becomes a comment on the essentially “elite” character of maleness itself. I’m sure there’s a theoretical term for this.

Bianca @229,

Yes, it’s called digging for outrage, and making sure you strike gold no matter what. Even when no such gold exists, and all you really find are shiny rocks.

Similarly if you’d like people to believe you don’t know what “outrage ” means.

Bianca @233,

As the young kids used to say, OMG!!

Are you trying to read something sexist into the use of the word “outrage” now? Un-be-leevable. Seriously. You’ve jumped the shark.

This defensive panic is unbecoming Plume.

You blew your cover and Saurs caught ya bigtime. Give it a rest, sweet talkin man. The nice girls will forget and forgive in time.

Bob@237,

Not true at all. Saurs did nothing more than invent nonsense and project it onto texts that can’t support it. It’s just a silly “gotcha” game, with admittedly no escape. Justified defense just becomes more grist for the game.

Which means there’s no way out except for leaving. Which, of course, was the goal all along.

See yaz.

Belle,

Although I never doubted your account of sexual harassment, and also think the frat boy who asked for your notes was being mildly dickish and you well within your rights to refuse, I’m sorry I just can’t let this go, not after you snarked on me (72, 3.), and especially after you sought to dazzle us with BS.

First, nobody was sniping at your book leaning. I’ll bet that pretty much everybody who reads this blog has a fair amount of that, probably a lot of experience of academia as well – otherwise it just wouldn’t be at all interesting to the reader. Still, even in this circle, when you drop mention of your high GPA, no matter how much you aw-shucks it, people get to twit you mildly about it.

If one were to be uncharitable, one might at this point bring up the dubiousness of the Ivy League “A,” and mention how many people with experience of teaching at such universities, and also at less august and pricey ones, are inclined to lament the outrageous grade-inflation at the former. It could well be that that the significance of the “A” is inversely proportional to the tuition charged by the awarding institution – but that would be a hard study to get funded. And surely none of this was true back in your undergraduate days.

Still, when, having bragged about your cum laudes and all, you make a teensy error, people get to twit you about that with reference to your earlier horn-tooting. You should take such twitting like a good sport, and resolve to edit yourself better and resist the temptation to drop that sort of GPA-specific information.

But, coming to the point: you are flat wrong about “homes” being a common or current back-formation from homeboy and just because you can throw out some linguistic squid-ink doesn’t change the case. Your etymology is false – plausible, but false. It’s analogous to the belief that, for instance, “satire” is rooted in “satyr.” That too is plausible, sort of interesting or resonant, but factually false. In the case of “homes,” cursory perusal of dictionaries suggests that there may have been documented usages of “homie” before this sense of “Holmes;” for example: “from the 1920s in New Zealand in the sense of ‘recently arrived British immigrant.’” Still, partly because I was in graduate school and recall English department discussion of the locution when it appeared on our pop culture screens (early 80s), I doubt very seriously “homie” had any general currency before “Holmes.” Moreover, “homes,” in your sense, has no currency in the vernacular now. When, dabbling in dialect, one uses the homophone, the listener or reader rightly assumes you mean “Holmes.” And not Sherlock either – as so many web experts have it.

The original epithet “Holmes” is black men’s funny ironizing of racist stereotype by association with a scuzzy, white, pop-culture Priapus. This piquancy is precisely why the locution became current – which is not to say that all who invoke the epithet today have John Holmes in mind. Language morphs, “couldn’t care less” becomes its Orwellian correlative; there’s not much point in gnashing teeth much about it. Still, when you insist upon “homes,” lopping off that troublesome l, you’re putting pantaloons on the piano “limbs.”

Finally, since your post claims to introduce a new and apt analogy, let me just hark back to my own analogy. The false etymology, like any solecism, is no crime, but in some circles it will, rightly or wrongly, be like spinach in the teeth. There’s nothing inherently wrong with spinach in the teeth either. There may even be cultures where it betokens high status, but it’s very rarely the move one wants to go for in ours.

It’s almost as if they realize they have to nitpick things to death

Ha, hmm. Yes. Yes, it is, isn’t it.

Kalkaino – you got any references for that? I did a little googling and I am not convinced.

I looked at a few ‘home’ based slang terms with equivalent meanings, and the OED has citations (in relevant senses and in the right kind of places) for

‘homie’: 1929
‘home’: 1942
‘homeboy’: 1965
‘homes’: 1970
‘home X’: (e.g. piece, slice) 1974,1980 respectively

Webster has:
‘homeboy’: 1927
‘homey’: 1945
Neither lists holmes. It seems somewhat unlikely that John Holmes would be the source of all the home based slang as his career didn’t really take off till the mid 70s (from wikipedia, to declare). I searched google books for hey holmes (to get round the false positive problem) and hey homes, and could only find examples from the latter before 1980 (admittedly, not many). It also seems that homes is more chicano slang (though not by any means exclusively) – which would also act against your theory, I think.

As you say, etymology is often difficult due to the ease of being seduced by pleasing explanations. I’m afraid I don’t have (and am not sure what would be) the canonical references for slang etymology, but from the evidence I’m not sure you should be giving out about other people’s spelling, especially when it doesn’t bear any particular relevance to the discussion.

Kalkaino, I apologise for the diatribe in the previous comment. Although i still think you’re on etymologically dodgy ground here.

Saurs — where on earth did that come from? For what its worth, I read the first book, and throughout the first 350 pages wondered why I was still reading, since all the characters made me want to throw up, and the author seemed to admire them but…. the last 1/3rd of the book was just fantastically good. People tell me she is laughing at them, not admiring them. I don’t know what to think. I haven’t been able to get myself to read the other books, though.

Why, it’s almost as if there’s a correlation between “made best ‘learning’ progress reading notes produced by others” and “unable to read social implications in the discourse you’re engaging not just with but in”.

Hmmm, The Goldfinch is a divisive read. People love it or hate it. My husband read it almost in one gulp (he was travelling and stuck in airports) which so astonished me that I gave it, unread, to a friend, and read it myself as soon as I could. But then I had to force myself to toil through it to the end, hoping to find what he found so enjoyable.

Different strokes….

I loved The Goldfinch, though I think she could have made a great many cuts to the book. Whereas I have issues leaving out too much info (in my own novels), as mentioned, and fall short in scene-painting at times, I think Donna Tartt, in that novel, spends too much time setting some of her scenes. But it’s a wonderful read, nonetheless, and stayed with me. One of my favorite novels of the last few years.

I read for character, I think. Of course plot is important, but I need to care about the character, or at least find him/her deeply interesting. I didn’t get any of that in The Goldfinch. And there was no suspense. She told us the mother died long before she showed us the death, by which time I was impatient. We were meant to be surprised by the contents of the package, but I wasn’t. There were other surprises that failed to surprise, too. Just frustrating and boring from beginning to end. It was my husband’s turn to be astonished. :)

I thought the cruel line from the NYRB review applied perfectly to The Flamethrowers: a film treatment, not a novel.

And I am terrible at guessing what’s going to happen, so the package in The Goldfinch took me by surprise.

I do read for style & character as well, but plotting is something I’m unable to do in my own (unpublished & will remain so) writing, so it impresses me more, I guess.

I made it through about 200 comments in this thread. Kinda hoping the next time Belle posts, we can get an early warning so the first 10-15 comments in the thread can be made by people with a track record of engaging productively with her posts.

Oh, and good on Zöe. Laser-like ability to identify power differential and abstract a broader point from it FTW! Must get it from her mother.

Lynne,

What recent books have knocked you out? Any that you absolutely loved?

I also recently read The Paying Guests, by Sarah Waters, which I liked a lot, too. Bought that after reading a rave review by Michael Dirda of Book World, and remembered her from BBC productions of earlier books. Though I think she created a story too good for its ending. It was a bit of a let down — the last part of the book — but not enough to spoil the whole thing. She writes beautifully.

Another really excellent and recent novel is The Door, by Magda Szabo. Highly recommend it.

Seconding Plume on The Door. Fascinating character study.

Anderson,

It was really fine writing, and it stays with me. Makes me want to find more of her works in translation.

I think The Secret History is a good novel. Some of the character-drawing and a lot of the dialogue is skillfully done. The anxieties of the narrator, who is from a somewhat ‘lower’ class background than the rest of the ‘circle’, are handled memorably.
Yes, aspects of it are funny, but Anderson’s remarks about the book seem to me sort of damning with faint praise, esp. coming from someone who says he’s read it ten times. (Possibly, in fact, that’s the problem: maybe only the greatest novels can stand ten readings.)

Now that we are talking about books, I wanted to correct Rich Puchalsky @81

“I think of William Morris. His “The Well at the World’s End” is supposed to be the first fantasy novel that takes place in an imaginary world, rather than a mock-medieval setting or some kind of fantastic setting on our Earth. So it grounds the whole 20th century fantasy genre in some sense. ”

The first fantasy book set in another world AFAIK was by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle in the 17th C — “The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing-World”

“As its full title suggests, Blazing World is a fanciful depiction of a satirical, utopian kingdom in another world (with different stars in the sky) that can be reached via the North Pole. It is “the only known work of utopian fiction by a woman in the 17th century, as well as one of the earliest examples of what we now call ‘science fiction’ — although it is also a romance, an adventure story, and even autobiography.”[2]

A young woman enters this other world, becomes the empress of a society composed of various species of talking animals, and organizes an invasion back into her world complete with submarines towed by the “fish men” and the dropping of “fire stones” by the “bird men” to confound the enemies of her homeland, the Kingdom of Esfi.

The work was republished in 1668 with Cavendish’s Observations upon Experimental Philosophy and thus functioned as an imaginative component to what was otherwise a reasoned endeavour in 17th century science.

Cavendish’s book inspired a notable sonnet by her husband, William Cavendish, 1st Duke of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, which celebrates her imaginative powers. The sonnet was included in her book.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blazing_World

What I noted (with some disappointment) was Tartt’s inability or disinterest in creating full-fledged female characters: I counted brainless shrews, nags, a manic pixie dream girl, and a fuzzy, shapeless, motiveless, and motherly dea ex machina for the epilogue.

What I mean by this — I hate to flog a horse that’s rapidly becoming glue, but Easton Ellis did this just fine — is that it’s more than possible, of course, to concoct a male narrator who hates or misunderstands or pays no close attention to (except through his boner) women, whose misogyny clearly taints or at least compromises his reliability as a narrator of events. If I remember correctly, TSH’s narrator Richard pines for (brilliant-for-a-woman but fortunately otherwise intellectually-unthreatening) Camilla (praised initially for her femininity and girlish-ness, later scorned for being a manipulative ice queen) but reluctantly settles for a similarly intellectually-unthreatening, wholesome, and dull education major who barely has a name and who has no character at all.

Anderson @276
You not only don’t know Tartt’s sexual orientation; if she is gay, you don’t know whether or with whom she’s open about it, because you’re not a friend or acquaintance of hers. What you appear to mean by “closeted” is “not out to the reading public,” but ‘closeted’ is not a particularly good word for conveying that meaning, imo.

Anderson, I don’t quite follow the relationship among Tartt’s critical reception, her own “sketchy” relationship history, and the sexuality of her male protagonists (queer, I’m assuming you’re suggesting). Her handling of Francis and of the twins’ incest may have made the almost obligatory homoeroticism less interesting to me.

You’re right: Bunny was the one dating a woman studying education.

bianca, I’m not educated or well-read enough to criticize a “women writer” feministically or otherwise. I did find the book cartoonish, though, and therefore do not expect someone like its author to Solve Misogyny for me. Neither do I think it’s particularly provocative to note that — surprise! — women can be unimaginative misogynists, too, and be lauded for it!

@280

No, in the Plato’s Symposium, Shakespeare’s Sonnets sense. He would be in love with any or all of them, or Julian, if he could, but he’s straight–and so is Henry–and there’s only one woman among them.

I don’t know what Anderson meant, but he seems to be alluding to a fairly well known attack, and if he wants to distance himself from that very common criticism of TSH, he’ll need to provide more details.

Appealing from moderation-of-comments Purgatory here … thanks!?

Well then Suzanne, it looks like all is right with the world. Feminism won! /s