Well put:
Yes and I think that etiquette is the same as any other set of skills where the guidelines are there not to be mindlessly adhered to, but because you have to know the rules to fully understand the impact of breaking them.
This from a comment thread about Emily Post on Jezebel.
A feature in the New York Times City section last Sunday set my teeth on edge. And I need to digress here for a second and explain how reading it led me to fret for the rest of the train ride to Chappaqua. (That detail’s irrelevant. I just like the way it sounds.)
The article was ostensibly about young single women in New York striving to be the next Carrie Bradshaw. But fundamentally it was about gross misunderstandings that prompt some people to butt their heads into walls until sore, bruised, and bloody. The wall, seems to me, is not going to budge. And yet people keep trying, hoping for different results! It’s sad. So it might be helpful to examine these blunders, unpack them some. They have to do with managing other people’s reactions to you, or — more accurately — failing to.
This will take a while.
The article quoted Julia Allison, 27, who writes a dating column for Time Out New York and appears on cable TV as an editor for Star magazine. Here’s what she said, in reference to her career:
“It is sad that people think you have to choose between being intelligent, serious and thoughtful, or you get to be shallow and frivolous and enjoy beauty and fashion.”
She’s essentially saying you’ve got thesis over here, antithesis there, and, lookit me, the synthesis. In this rhetorical strategy, the world is carved into two imaginary opposing camps, and then, either explicitly or implicitly, the speaker’s stance is presented as the sanest alternative. The third way. In other words, she refused to choose between two less than fulfilling options, and now she spans the best of both worlds. And if everyone could only appreciate the moxie, champagne corks would be popping, etc., etc.
Which sounds fair enough. Only it’s bogus, as most arguments set up this way are. I say the strategy relies on “imaginary opposing camps” because they often don’t exist in real life, or, they do exist but aren’t opposed in the way the speaker has just tried to suggest. (You know, like when you think about it…the real alternative to a bowl of vanilla ice cream is not chocolate ice cream, as cliche continues to insist, but…vegan oat flakes, or something like that.)
The cracks in this strategy show right away. In this instance, I’d want to know who in the mainstream, post-Sex and the City U.S. media says that serious women cannot also be found in the aisles of Sephora. Really. Who’s saying this? Did someone just resuscitate Eleanor Roosevelt? In fact, there’s tremendous support for the idea that sparkling, pretty things and a soulful intelligence can go hand in hand. It is a very, very advertiser-friendly idea. Just ask Anna Wintour.
But the dangerous misunderstanding here is assuming that if someone rejects what you’re trying to do — as the article implied was sometimes the case with Ms. Allison — it’s because of either A or B, two camps or ideas that you can readily pinpoint. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say, uh, no. The reason why someone doesn’t like what you’re doing is almost always X. That is, it’s a third factor, an unknown, one you most likely have not previously considered, and the full, final revelation of which usually surprises you.
But the line in this article that really made me scowl — and feel blue, honestly — is this one. After bemoaning some of the scars incurred from her once ubiquitous online presence, Ms. Allison said:
“I think you should be able to make a living doing something that really appeals to you without being judged.”
Yeah, maybe. Maybe that’s possible. Like, if subsistence farming really appeals to you. And this was 1872, and we lived in Czarist Russia.
Thing is, if you want to make a living, you will be judged one way or the other. Sometimes it’s called a six-month review, sometimes it’s called “laid-off” or, more happily, “promoted.” If you’ve opted to live in the public eye, chances are you’ll be judged in public. Protesting that this doesn’t present the ideal situation for you is pointless because you can no more fight it than you can defeat gravity.
O.K. The harmful misunderstanding here: That you can put something — anything — out there and escape criticism for it. It’s not possible. We use to get this as a culture, and somehow we’ve totally forgotten. And I’m not sure why.
In any event, first-generation etiquette books strongly hinted that the whole point of being a relatively private person, and of keeping your mouth shut on certain topics, was not to avoid offending someone, though that was certainly a consideration. No, the point was a clear-eyed awareness that you yourself were the one who’d suffer most once too much information got out. Emily Post argued for preserving an air of mystery. Too much exposure was…cheapening. After a point, you’d start making less of an impression (and ultimately, be less successful).
This is why mega-stars who are smart GO AWAY from time to time. People get tired of looking at their face. They need to gin up some scarcity value.
Moral of the story: Don’t start hitting your head against a wall — this is supposed to be some metaphor for public opinion, but…no time to make it work. Unless you’re committed to bringing about true radical change, in which case, wear a helmet, and bring a sledgehammer or something.
Meanwhile, writing this post has made me feel older than I am, and cranky too, so I’m going to take a few deep breaths and put on some red lipstick.