Just a Gwai Lo awkward flow, to some it's even unorthodox [?]

Julie Leung, responding to Jay McCarthy's review and notes of Persuasion by Jane Austen: “I don't know where I do belong. I'm not sure I have words to describe what it is that's missing in society. I can't articulate why I ache. Sometimes I long for another era, for a resurrection of times past, but I wonder whether I am simply imagining a fantasy with rose-colored retro-lenses, painting a picture of a place in my mind that never existed in the world. Books and movies aren't reality. But reading Jay's review and then Michael's has confirmed to me that others may share my longings and imagination. They've also given me words to describe what I want to see in our society: class and happiness.”

Jay McCarthy, responding to the above: “Specifically related to Jane Austen, the courtship, sweet letters, and balls were certainly romantic and grand but accompanied with them is the practice of wearing your salary on your shirt, strict barriers between ranks (even within the elite,) and the cold responsibilities of the lady of the house for her lord.”

Danielle Crittenden, anticipating both: “The desire to be pursued and courted, to have sex with someone you love as opposed to just barely know, to be certain of a man's affection and loyalty—these are deep female cravings that did not vanish with the sexual revolution. ¶ Perhaps that explains the otherwise mysterious success of late-twentieth-century movies based on nineteenth-century novels of manners, such as The Age of Innocence, Pride andPrejudice, Emma, and Sense and Sensibility. What is striking about the modern film adaptions is their almost pornographic obsession with the vanished protocol of daily life: the constricting costumes that distinguished ladies and gentlemen from common folk; the engraved calling cards on silver trays; the elaborately choreographed minuets and waltzes; the stiff exchanges of bows and curtsies; and, above all, the excruciatingly polite restraint that governed every interaction between men and women, even passionate declarations of love. They are airbrushed, sentimental views of the past, to be sure, but it's the urge to airbrush that is the most arresting thing about them. It's hard to imagine that you could have made such films twenty years ago without underscoring the cold indifference of the upper classes toward the lower or the suppression of women. It's as if popular taste now wishes to recall the past only for its good points, and particularly that lost civility between men and women.”

An inexhaustive list of the good and the overrated.

Best Blogger: if you have a weblog, and you kept it updated throughout 2003, you are the blogger of the year. Seriously. This is still early days for blogging, and even if you started in 2003, you were doing what most people never heard of. It takes a lot of time and effort and, yes, courage, to do it consistently. Even if all you did was link to those stupid online quizzes, at least you put something out there.

Best Weblog: Yours. See above.

Best Album: this is the not unexpected choice—Dizzee Rascal's Boy In Da Corner was the album that changed the game. I stand by my prediction that heads ain't ready when it drops in the United States. Runner-up was Basement Jaxx's Kish Kash (they're the Timbaland of house; perhaps strangely, I didn't like the Dizzee Rascal track all that much). As for the albums I can't claim to have purchased (yet: seriously, RIAA, I'm gonna buy them, I swear!), the highlights were Prefuse 73's One Word Extinguisher (it took me a while to enjoy it, but it grew on me), The Postal Service's Give Up and Pete Rock's Lost & Found Hip Hop Underground Soul Classics (the beats are consistently good throughout, but still don't come close to "Take Your Time" from his 1998 album Soul Survivor). Christmas present album of the year is Icelandic hiphop group Forgotten Lore's Týndi Hlekkurinn, which also wins for creepiest use of a George W. Bush quote. (Thanks go out to my cousin Katrín.) Overrated was Outkast's Speakerboxxx/ The Love Below. That said, they're still the most innovative group in hiphop these days, Dizzee Rascal excepted.

Best Book: I didn't read a whole lot of books published in 2003—I'm two thirds the way through the excellent Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power by Niall Ferguson (the illustrations and emphasis on primary sources are worth the price of admission)—but the best book that I read during the year was far and away Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian. Like how Dizzee Rascal changed how I listened to hiphop, Gao changed the way I read novels. There are quotes from it here, here and here. Of course, the quality of a translated book is, for those who don't read the language in which a novel was originally published, directly related to the quality of the translation. That choice may surprise those who think that I should have chosen What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman by Danielle Crittenden [references] but, quite frankly, I got tired of repeating myself. So Soul Mountain it is. Overrated was Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow.

Best Movie: American Splendor. I identified strongly with the Harvey Pekar of the first half of the movie, if not so much the second half. (Sometimes the best movies are the ones that tell something about us, whether to ourselves or to others.) I loved the what I call Harvey Pekar Moments, such as when Pekar is sitting in a diner waiting for his wife to return, and a thought bubble appears overhead saying “I'm desperately lonely and horny as hell.” [more here] Bend It Like Beckham was formulaic, but that doesn't mean it sucked. Indeed, it was rather funny. The movie-not-released-in-2003 that I enjoyed the most was Adaptation. It helps to have seen Being John Malkovich beforehand, but it's not required.

Article of the Year: far and away it was "Caring for Your Introvert" by Jonathan Rauch [my self-identification]. It's required reading for anybody seeking to understand the way and how I relate with people. Coming in a distant second was "Modern Flirting: Girls Find Old Ways Did Have Their Charms" by Laura Sessions Stepp, which, as I said, is like reading a certain book but condensed into 5 pages. Another quote appears here.

Good lord, "Modern Flirting: Girls Find Old Ways Did Have Their Charms" by Laura Sessions Stepp [via Accordion Guy] is too good for words. The premise: modern flirting and sexual mores are ruining it for girls in the long run. Yeah, what Crittenden said, except in 5 pages.

In the spirit of gender equality, many a young woman has discarded the slow, subtle arts of flirtation and charm that females have used successfully on males for millennia, and replaced them with quick, direct strikes: punching her number into his cell phone memory, rubbing his shoulders, grinding with him on the dance floor, hooking up in the spare bedroom at a party.

The result has not been an especially happy one, some young women say, for though they may snag the guy in question, it's only until he gets a better offer. As the one being pursued, a woman used to be able to set the course and pace of a relationship. As the pursuer, she relinquishes control, not to mention the fun of being chased.

The article gets even better after that. Highly recommended.

I don't put a lot of faith in Craigslist postings, since many (all?) of them are anonymous. This one, however, has echoes of Danielle Crittenden: “At 24, 25, 26, a lot of boy's have a hard time finding a girl, because many of THEIR peers are dating older, more established men. I've just been noticing that payback is a bitch. I'm getting a bit older, and now there's the aforementioned role reversal. I'm not really into 40-year-old men.” I wrote about this in my review of Danielle Crittenden's book, What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman: “[according to Crittenden, women currently in their early twenties] will worry that they sent men the wrong message: that sex was meaningless to them when they were young. While there will be an endless supply of young women as men get older, there won't be an endless supply of older men when the female gets older who will find them attractive.”

Barbara Kay: “At her bat mitzvah, my daughter wore a simple empire waist dress with a white lace Peter Pan collar. We chose her outfit together on a shopping expedition for which she was kitted out in slimfit corduroys and a crisp rugby shirt. That was a compromise: Her real preference would have been baggy jeans and a fluorescent T-shirt. But whether dressed neatly or grungily, neither she nor I wanted her being looked at in a sexual way.”

And later: “women, in order to be truly equal in value to men, must assimilate a man's sexual behaviours and instincts. Are men obsessed with sex? Great. We're there. Are men aggressive in pursuit of sex, promiscuous, and emotionally detached from their conquests? Enter Samantha from Sex in the City with a vibrator in her purse.”

This article is basically a shorter version of What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us by Danielle Crittenden.

So there are women who subscribe to Danielle Crittenden's views!

HeatherM at Kuro5hin asks "Is It Time to Redefine a Women's Role - One More Time?" and answers that "the pendulum has swung too far."

The Buddy System: Sex in High School and College: What's Love Got to Do With It? by Laura Sessions Stepp [via MetaFilter]

Also, even as they seek the same sexual rush that guys historically have enjoyed, young women confess to dreaming about the romance of the old-fashioned pursuit: being wooed by leisurely strolls, candlelight dinners, small gifts and other gestures of courtship that were more common when their mothers were their age.

This is a theme that occurs in What Our Mothers Never Told Us by Danielle Crittenden (pp. 39-40):

What is striking about the modern film adaptations [of The Age of Innocence, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Sense and Sensibility] is their almost pornographic obsession with the vanished protocol of daily life [...] They are airbrushed, sentimental views of the past, to be sure, but it's the urge to airbrush that is the most arresting thing about them. [...] It's as if popular taste now wishes to recall the past only for its good points, and particularly that lost civility between men and women.

Update: I love MetaFilter. Especially this from Stan Chin: “I for one, welcome these sluts.” (It's so crude an outburst that I can't help but laugh.) Or the Tom Wolfe quote.

Update Jan. 20, 10:48 PM: good comments from orange swan, beth, and and Civil_Disobedient make (successive) comments that speak to me. I identify with what mdn says (except I'm not sure what he means at the end of his comments about physical strength).

rushmc is wrong when he says that “Stating that something "is wrong" is not saying what you think. Saying "I think X is wrong" is saying what you think.” Saying something is wrong is indeed saying what you think. It's just not a very good argument (neither is the second part) because you're not saying why you think it's wrong. IshmaelGraves deftly counters rushmc.

Update Jan. 21, 4:45 PM: beth says (and I can identify with this): “When the cultural expectation is for sex without attachment, anyone who wants an attachment with their sex is at a disadvantage.”

Update Jan. 23, 2:25 AM: I have to admit that echolalia67 states the opposition's position intelligently: “Aping a repugnant attitude that was traditionally held by some men is not feminism. Understanding what you really want and figuring out a way to get it in an ethical, honest way is, as far as I'm concerned, feminism.” She sees sex outside of a committed relationship as not necessarily unethical, but all-the-same not for her.

Finished reading What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman by Danielle Crittenden.

Most important book I've read in years. Totally changed my view of women. I've written a fuller review, a link to which is forthcoming.

A longish paragraph from The Bad Book (as a friend calls it now) [see here and here], on p. 111:

Alas by withholding ourselves, or pieces of ourselves, instead of giving to our marriages wholeheartedly, we can't expect our husbands to do so, either. After all, it's not as if postponing marriage and going into it with our eyes more wide-open has made marriage any more stable than it was when men and women went into it practically blind. A young man I know told me that he'd "at last" moved in with his girlfriend of a few years. "We're more serious now," he said proudly. And I thought, No you're not. For marriage, as the married know, is about more than signing a lease, splitting bills, sharing chores, and professing a vague sort of long-term commitment; it's about more than being home in the evenings or spending weekends together or deciding what color to paint the walls; it's about more, even, than happiness and contentment and compatibility. It is about life and death, blood and sacrifice, about this generation and the next, and one's connection to eternity.

I'm just violating copyright because I'm too lazy to bookmark the notable quotes I come across and want quick access to them for future reference. Plus I borrowed the book from the library.

Another quote from What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us, this time on p. 72—shut up, I'm a slow reader—and again, without endorsement or criticism (yet):

My single male friends in their thirties complain about going on dates with women who spend the entire evening talking about themselves and analyzing themselves aloud. These women are no longer capable, it seems, of holding a conversation. They've become female versions of the eccentric bachelor [...] who are so set in their quirky habits, perverse likes and dislikes, and long-standing relationships with equally eccentric friends, that they cannot seriously involve themselves with anyone else. Instead [...] their problems now define their personalities; and without these problems, they wouldn't know who they are.

See here for the first quote from the book.