The Designated Bitch

My, oh, my, fat people are vicious. Especially fat boring mid-westerners.*

They’re shimmying about in their chairs, trying to get their arms above the belly fat in order to reach the keyboards to post angry comments on the Internet about Cintra Wilson’s Critical Shopper essay on JC Penney opening up in Herald Square. The resulting outcry against the New York Times would do Horace Greeley proud. If I’m to understand correctly, critics of the piece break down into three camps.

1) Those who find it in poor taste to mock the obese (‘fat people need clothes, too!’).

2) Readers who are upset about the way in which Bill Keller, an editor at the Times, later backhanded Wilson’s story.

3) People who don’t find Cintra Wilson funny in general.

Number 1 is a fair complaint as  fat people are never going to be considered fashionable in New York, so why not let them have unfashionable stores from which to shop? Wilson has already apologized for having hurt anyone’s feelings. I’ll return to number 2, and as for the 3rd complaint, well, – nothing‘s funny if you don’t have a sense of humor.

The New York Times and its editors are in an unenviable position here. JC Penney shouldered its way into town like a fat person who has to buy two seats on the plane, and it’s a story. It’s a story that by rights belongs to the Fashion section. But how is Fashion for the New York Times supposed to run a positive review of JC Penney?

Can you imagine?

It’s like being pissed off that AO Scott didn’t effectively or effusively enough sing the praises of Paul Blart: Mall Cop.

Sam Sifton is poised to become the Times’s new food critic. Is he now meant to start reviewing new menu options from Wendy’s and Hardee’s because that’s where “real people” eat?

At the end of the day, critics are society’s designated bitches. For example, Michiko Kakutani exists for the sole purpose of offending the Thomas Pynchon reading literati. As long as she exists, she will regularly remind her readers that there is no such thing as ‘American Literature’ – even if she has to take a stab at every living American author, one by one – until we learn that the Great American Novel is a vain and fruitless fantasy. In general, Kakutani is weirdly obsessed with debunking the idea of a ‘real’ Thomas Pynchon novel.

Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, “Against the Day,” reads like the sort of imitation of a Thomas Pynchon novel that a dogged but ungainly fan of this author’s might have written on quaaludes.

and

Though Inherent Vice is a much more cohesive performance than the author’s last novel, the bloated and pretentious “Against the Day,” it feels more like a Classic Comics version of a Pynchon novel than like the thing itself.

Kakutani is our nation’s one true Kantian – she is on a deep philosophical journey to find the noumenon, or Pynchon in himself. There exist on the Internet, fetish websites dedicated to dissecting, dissing, condemning, loving, hating and ejaculating on every one of Kakutani’s reviews, which doesn’t belie the fact that she’s right about Thomas Pynchon. If his novels actually do exist, they probably shouldn’t.

The relationship between Kakutani and Pynchon is symbiotic. She produces byline to troll and bitch him out; which correspondingly generates cocktail conversation and internet chatter; which, in turn, creates a buzz around his latest book, increasing revenue, giving Pynchon the financial security he needs to write more novels with which to troll Kakutani.

When it comes to JC Penney, the math is a little fuzzier. No one wants to be seen defying the Fashion section of the Times because no one actually wants to be fashionable (truly fashionable people spend 99% of their time being stubbornly unfashionable until the taste of the day swings back their way). The Times knows this. They know that by offending JC Penney, they willfully risk ad revenue and JC Penney’s corporate ire. It’s different with Kakutani because, as anyone knows, there is a great deal of social standing to be gained in disagreeing with her. When it comes to fashion, you want to be liked by the designated bitch. When it comes to literature, you want to be the first one to tell the designated bitch to blow it out her ass.

The purpose of critics, while they are oftentimes pious hypocrites, is to offer up value judgment. They’re the antithesis of academics, whose job it is to excuse the worst tripe (such as anything by Doris Lessing) by placing it in ‘historical context’ without taking into consideration that context doesn’t exist - it emerges – and that their own critical works are the filthy excrescences from bad writing.

It’s pretty clear from reading the comments on the Jezebel article devoted to the Cintra v. Fatties scandal that the sociological bent of most Women’s Studies programs in America has produced a reading class that fears and despises anyone possessed of an evaluative judgment. While I like most of the articles on Jezebel for their honest, bitchy, forthrightness, the comments section is like attending a feminist consciousness lowering seminar. Commenters sit Native American style on the floor, turn on their laptops and log-in to the supportive culture of Jezebel commentary where there is something akin to the Facebook ‘like’ button by which readers can ‘promote‘ one another’s comments.

What the feminists on Jezebel don’t understand is that fashion is not democratic. Good taste is not equivalent to what’s popular. As a critic, Cintra Wilson does not have to accord herself with the general will. To put it in terms they can understand: just as there is no ‘right to life,’ there is no ‘right to be fashionable.’

* This entry is the product of a conversation between theheartisanorganthatpumpblood and songsaboutbuildingsandfood. songs has already blogged about Jezebel. His piece can be found here.

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