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If there is a cultural phenomenon about which I can really do without the expertise contained within the average weekly magazine feature on the subject, it is the one about women who live in New York and drink more than they ought. Still, I am a female contributor to a female-centric blog, and women have savored women-getting-wasted stories at least since Anne of Green Gables got Diana sloshed on that raspberry cordial, so I dutifully began to read it this afternoon for possible posting purposes and indeed found myself snickering in recognition over this passage:
FEMINIST ONE: You would be proud of me. I drank alone last night!
FEMINIST TWO: I am proud! I should have called you. I was too drunk.
FEMINIST ONE: I opened a bottle of wine—a good bottle that I had been saving—poured some into a juice glass, and watched The Age of Love. My dad called, and he was like, “You know that drinking doesn’t solve things long-term?” And I was like, um, that’s a lie.
FEMINIST TWO: Hahahaha!
FEMINIST ONE: I know. I was so serious too.
FEMINIST TWO: Yeah, it solves things long-term, as long as you commit to drinking.
FEMINIST ONE: I told him booze was no different from Klonopin and it’s cheaper!
That's so funny! I thought upon reading the first few lines. I have had IMs exaclty like…
Oh ha, indeed, the IM had originally appeared in a July 2007 post on Jezebel, a women's site I co-founded which the New York story dubs "very pro-alcohol." (I am "Feminist Two," and for the record I have never tried Klonopin.) But more importantly I really don't think of myself, or anyone else on the site, as "pro-alcohol." Pro-pleasure, sure, pro-"honesty" or "candid examination of the human condition as experienced by women at this particular cultural moment," maybe. And insofar as our treatment of women and alcohol ab/use during my tenure was concerned, I think the site was probably best described "very pro-jokes," as one might glean from, say, my posts chronicling my adventures with alcohol-cessation drugs.
But no: the author illustrates me and certain of my former colleagues as "misguided" budding alcoholics drinking to reach some warped form of boozer parity with the men in our life men by a rationale "akin to the type of reasoning that paints Girls Gone Wild participants as sexually liberated."
I think this is unfair. Women make mistakes. Women do embarrassing stuff. Women regret that stuff sometimes. Women cope with it by joking about it, growing out of it, getting pregnant, getting help, or in lieu of all that, drinking more. That is the problem with alcohol: it can be a vicious cycle -- the way you drink too much, stay out too late, get too little sleep, wear yourself out the next day working late, blow off steam getting drunk all over again. But that's how it is for guys too. Sure, our bodies are different, and while drinking certainly has an added appeal to anyone who is experiencing menstrual cramps, what woman with a drinking problem would lay the blame on all the societal pressure to match the ounce-per-ounce consumption of our male drinking buddies? (Because that woman probably has bigger problems than her drinking problem, just saying.) Because I personally drink a lot -- less than I used to, more than I'd like -- and I can't even approach what my male companions can regularly put down, and I'm not trying to pretend that is good news. In other words, yes, New York, we have a drinking problem, but just like so many other problems it seems to be affecting all of us.
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You probably wouldn't have known it by looking at him, but your Dunkin' Donuts clerk this morning wasn't thrumming his fingers to the latest Soulja Boy bastardization. According to John Parker's sprawling piece in the Economist's quarterly offspring, Intelligent Life, he was probably pumping a little Pavarotti—maybe a This American Life podcast, a choice bit of Faulkner, or some Sartre on the side.
Or it could have been Soulja Boy, but only if he'd already finished Atlantic.
We know this is true because Parker says, thank God, that we're all getting smarter. It's the age of mass intelligence, where high culture reaches low IQs, transforming the ignorants into erudites—or at least ignorants with erudite taste, as in the piece, intelligence seems to be quantified by cultural consumption:
"Millions more people are going to museums, literary festivals and operas; millions more watch demanding television programmes or download serious-minded podcasts," Parker writes, and a festival director notes that her "audiences increasingly want 'the buzz you get from working that little bit harder.' "
Parker quotes Ira Glass, This American Life creator, to reassure us that it's not as bad as Paris Hilton & Co. have led us to believe. "When people talk and write about culture,” says Glass, “it’s apocalyptic. We tell ourselves that everything is in bad shape. But the opposite is true. There’s an abundance of really interesting things going on all around us.”
Glass lost me when he cited the fact that there are "really interesting things going on" as evidence for the fact that we're all doing just fine, but nonetheless, I'd love to believe Parker. I'd love to side, like he does, with Philippe de Montebello, director of the Met, who apparently "is fond of saying 'the public is a lot smarter than anyone gives it credit for.' ”
Which is why I was willing to stick it out for Parker's reasoning:
"It’s unlikely people are more intelligent than they used to be. [Blogger's note: Yes. Yes, it is.] Perhaps the elites that enjoy high culture are now bigger for some reason? Perhaps popular tastes have changed in such a way as to benefit high culture? Or perhaps it has nothing to do with changes in the audience, and more to do with the artists and institutions, who have become more skilled at attracting people? Answer: all of the above."
Unfortunately, Parker doesn't figure his explanation along the lines of his "all of the above" but instead goes on to note, among other things, that "educational standards have risen appreciably over the past 40 years" and that (shock!) people with degrees are more likely to visit museums than people without degrees.
He does take a paragraph to point out that the smartest among us often make stupid—blissfully stupid—choices when it comes to culture, which explains many of my otherwise brilliant friends' addictions to Gossip Girl, which I totally cannot relate to at all, ever. *cough* Apparently, Parker's "elite market" is more likely to be nondiscriminating "cultural omnivores," rather than "univores," devouring both high and low culture with unquestioning enthusiasm. "One of the features of the market for mass intelligence," says Parker, "is its heterogeneity.
Which is exactly what de Tocqueville, who basically predicted this entire phenomenon, found so terrifying—that the consumer would begin to consume art produced at the lowest, most consumable level, and that art would deteriorate accordingly. He writes in Democracy in America:
"Many of those who are not yet rich begin to conceive [ a taste for the fine arts ], at least by imitation; and the number of consumers increases, but opulent and fastidious consumers become more scarce.... No longer able to soar to what is great, they cultivate what is pretty and elegant; and appearance is more attended to than reality."
And this is why I don't share Parker's self-described "Pollyanna-ish" outlook on the revitalization of mass intelligence. Yes, I believe that society is consuming more high culture, but why? Is it because we desire to learn, or because we want to appear that we've learned—that we're cultured, intelligent, and eclectic? Since, particularly due the hipster oeuvre, intelligence is the new chic.
Chic, and easy to attain. Learn to pronounce Foucault, drop a well-placed Freaks and Geeks reference, read a few Great Books, subscribe to HBO and the Economist, mix in a little ironic Lil Wayne appreciation, and suddenly, you've got class, intelligence, and culture. And everyone perusing your Facebook knows it. Appearance, not reality.
So, my question to you ladies: Are we, the masses, getting smarter, or are we just omnivorous culture frauds—plain-bellied Sneetches who sewed on our own stars?