The Science of Blind Dating
I have a confession to make. I go on internet dates. And why not? It’s a perfectly reasonable way to meet people in this new century and have a reasonable expectation that you’ll at least have enough in common to sustain a dinner conversation. I’ve started a few good relationships this way. A few have lasted as friendships. What makes the whole endeavor truly sporting is the ever-present threat of a Really Bad Date. On more than one occasion, I’ve found myself trapped at a restaurant, puzzling over what crazy computer monkey thought we’d be a good match, only to leave wondering, “What did she think about that car wreck of a date?”
Rubbernecking is the main appeal of the Washington Post’s newish Sunday feature, Date Lab, wherein our favorite community newspaper sets up two complete strangers based upon some dubious shard trait or desire, and then documents all the gory details.
Take, as a deliciously typical example, the young woman who wanted to be set up with a Jewish doctor. Quickly, she finds, “he monopolized the conversation and totally excluded me. And he asked why I wasn’t showing any cleavage.” (“It was totally within context at the time, but I can’t remember how,” he defends.) Each column ends with the Date Lab Rats rating the experience (“I’d rate the evening a 3 [out of 5]. We’re not the best match, but I’m not entirely convinced that if I went out with him again, it’d be awful.”), and a post-script updating our potential couple’s follow-up. In this case, our young woman e-mailed the Jewish Doctor, “listing 14 things he’d done that ‘you should never ever do on a first date.'”
So it goes, week in and week out. It’s a comforting format, one which helps us imagine how to fill in the blanks from our own (non-major-media-sponsored) blind dates. The Date Lab Rats are interviewed a few days later, and the column is structured chronologically in a “he said / she said” format, which really brings out the venom. Take these (revisionist) first meetings:
Ultimately, there’s the wonderfully awkward parting of the ways:
And, best of all, what all dates need: A rating on a scale of one to five!
It’s enough to tempt me to move to D.C. just to participate in Date Lab. At the very least, I’ll continue to read every cringe-inducing moment every Sunday morning.
A Press More Bumbling Than the Dead Prez
If Gerald Ford was trying to live down his image as a bumbler, he made a curious choice of dying right after Christmas when most of the half-way decent reporters must be on vacation. On a good day, the New York Times annoys the crap out of me, but a couple of doozies slipped in that have really driven me nuts.
In a television column that itself comments on how substitutes are reporting the news of Ford’s death, reporter Alessandra Stanley notes:
On “Today” the NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell mentioned that she last spoke to Mr. Ford in California last February, “when he came over to see me, and we had lunch.” (It is hard to imagine a former president in his 90s going out of his way to meet a television reporter, so it was hard not to suspect that Mr. Ford was going out of his way not to invite Ms. Mitchell over to his house.)
How clever? What a fucking idiot! Either she doesn’t know that Andrea Mitchell is married to the then-Fed Chair Alan Greenspan, or else she was intentionally obscuring how cozy journalists and official Washington can get. Either way, it’s outrageous.
More outrageous is Sam Roberts’ attempt to exonerate Ford for his role in New York City’s fiscal crisis. Yes, it’s technically true that, just as Marie Antoinette never said “Let them eat cake,” Ford never told New York to “Drop Dead,” but their actions and policies made clear the contempt that was summed up in the better copy that the journalists of their day (far better than this sorry lot) screamed in headlines. His defenders may insist that he “liked New York,” but insisting that the city raise the subway fare (part of the completely separate and solvent MTA budget), raise CUNY tuition, end rent control and hack away at public hospitals, museums and social services showed real – I’ll say it again – contempt for what New York stood for politically and for its heroic effort to be more than a playground for the rich and famous.
Roberts finds a number of people to praise Ford’s neoliberal hatchet job, mostly the politicians who subsequently turned New York into a playground for the rich and famous, but makes no attempt for balance. There is no questioning the wisdom of drastic cuts in public spending, nor the dubious “fact” that the crisis was the product of “inevitable hemorrhaging inflicted by bankrupt liberalism” (rather than a conspiracy of a handful of big banks that encouraged the city’s debt and then without warning demanded their money back).
The only voice of dissent slips in, almost by accident, from 30 years ago in DC37 chief Victor Gotbaum’s witty complaint that the Ford administration aimed to shrink government down to just police and fire protection, “and he’s not sure about fire.”
Gender, Identity and the Grey Lady
Like a brontosaurus trudging into a tar pit, the New York Times just blundered into a debate that up to now has been best left to feminist journals and Queer discussion groups, in the Fashion & Style section, no less. With the nuance of a brickbat and the keen understanding of someone who has watched “The L Word,” writer Paul Vitello takes a look at lesbian response to transmen and finds (surprise!) some unease.
Unhip and straight as I am, I still know that not every woman who identifies as a man pauses to identify as a lesbian in between and that any woman who successfully passes as a man never quite gains the male privilege that the rest of us are born into.
I’ll leave further criticism of the Times for being out of its league to more qualified blargers, but did want to highlight this illuminating quote from Natasha, a lesbian whose partner became a man, putting an end to their relationship:
“You’re in love with a person, but there is something about gender that is so central to identity it can be overwhelming if the person changes,” she said.
What I had never quite gotten about transgender identity is that if gender is supposed to be just a social construct, like “race,” something that we made up and that has nothing to do with biology, then why change the physical form? Why go through a series of expensive and less-than-satisfying surgeries and hormone treatments just so that you can be who you always felt you are? Why not just be?
As I thought more about what Natasha said, I realize that I can accept my trans friend who identifies as a man, because to accept him as a man means to drink beers together and talk about what’s the best strategy for grooming facial hair. But if it was a man asking me to accept him as a woman, I could do so, or tell myself I could. But I wouldn’t countenance dating her. I would view her as a sexless being, like nuns or my grandma.
Yes, yes, nuns and grandmas are women, and femininity and womanhood comes in all varieties. I could certainly be saying this more eloquently, but I am writing this in the first flush of realization that saying that gender is a social construct (much like saying the same about “race”) does not make it a contemporary fact. Saying it is merely the first step towards making it true. In the meantime, we live in our culture and society today, where gender is so central to our identities, and sometimes extreme physical changes through medical science are important for acceptance.
More Notoriety
You can’t even pump your gas in this town without people interviewing you for a newspaper article (See next to last paragraph).
A YELLOW LIGHT FOR POLICE’S RACE PLAN
Experts and LI drivers say Suffolk police should proceed with caution in project to record race of those stopped for traffic violations
BY JENNIFER MALONEY
Newsday Staff Writer
July 12, 2006
Law enforcement experts and Suffolk residents reacted with skepticism yesterday to the Suffolk police department’s plan to gather data as a check against racial profiling.
The opinions came a day after Suffolk police said they are recording the race of drivers stopped on the Long Island Expressway and Sunrise Highway for routine traffic violations in an effort to document if cops are profiling residents by race. The department, which began the initiative about two months ago and will continue for the next six to 12 months, hopes the data gathered will help prove that Suffolk officers don’t give tickets more often to members of a particular race.
But many drivers interviewed yesterday objected to the method of gathering the data — and particularly to the fact that officers note the drivers’ race without consulting them.
“They’re assuming the race,” said Erica Lopez, 23, of Huntington Station. “What if I’m Italian? What if I’m black? That’s not going to get anything except some statistics that prove nothing.”
Peter Moskos, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said the data gathered will be meaningless unless it is compared with statistics on how often different races commit traffic violations.
In New Jersey, a similar project showed that more blacks were pulled over for speeding than other races, he said. But an academic study later showed that blacks there were more likely to speed, he said.
“If it’s skewed, you need someone else to figure out if that’s justified or not, because it might be,” Moskos said.
Suffolk police spokesman Tim Motz said the department will consider “all potential statistical variables” when it analyzes the data. “It’s a very complex issue. They’re looking at everything.”
Motz did not say whether the department has access to statistics on how often different races commit traffic violations.
While many Suffolk drivers agreed yesterday that racial profiling occurs, some said gathering data on race will only exacerbate the problem.
“So they’re going to conduct racial profiling to test how much racial profiling they do?” said Shaun Richman, 27, a Queens resident who commutes to Hauppauge.
Others applauded the department’s effort. “I think it’s proactive,” said Marie Orlando, 43, of Brightwaters. “It’s not like they’re ignoring it.”