A woman-boosting NYT headline gets paraphased to cause more pain in Time Magazine (or perhaps to boost a different set of women).

The NYT headline was "Wall Street Mothers, Stay-Home Fathers As Husbands Do Domestic Duty, These Women Are Free to Achieve." (We discussed that article on this blog here and here.)

The Time article (via Paul Caron) that bounces off that NYT piece has the arresting headline: "When Stay-at-Home Husbands Are Embarrassing to Their Wives/We simply haven't evolved to the point where a househusband is considered desirable." Whoa! I don't remember anything in the NYT article about these hard-charging female bankers getting embarrassed over their home-front husbands.

The author at Time is Vivia Chen, and — before reading what she has to say — I hypothesize that she's going to skew left of the New York Times and promote policies about flex-time and childcare for all women in the workplace, based on the premise that the role-reversed single-earner family is only available to the rich. So don't see those women profiled in the NYT as a model for women's equality.

I guarantee that I wrote all of the above without reading beyond the headline and the link to the NYT piece. Chen says she's not surprised at the "tenfold increase (since 1980) in the number of women in finance with stay-at-home spouses." The surprise is the new willingness to "admit" that couples were living like this. Chen's area of journalism has been law (not finance), and she's familiar with the stories of women in top law firms. The high achievers often have a husband whose contribution to the marital partnership is made outside of the income-producing workplace. But according to Chen, these women didn't talk about it.

I sensed that reluctance when I did a story on female partners at big Wall Street firms with househusbands a few years ago. Though three couples were happy to speak to me on the record about their arrangement, many more bowed out about going public. “My husband and I talked it over, and we’re not comfortable with the scrutiny,” said one partner.

That doesn't mean they were embarrassed! It's not necessarily shame that motivates a person to decline to submit the story of her private life to the template a journalist has in mind for an article. The fact that Chen would say it is shows the wisdom of declining to dish the quotes and anecdotes she wanted for her story.

Chen tells us that we have "entrenched ambivalence about changing gender roles" and:

Men in these situations often feel alienated, particularly if they are surrounded by stay-at-home moms. But the power moms with the stay-at-home husbands are just as uneasy, often more embarrassed than proud that they’ve upset the traditional order.

These are simply assertions, backed up mostly, it seems, by the data that women who earn the income in single-income families don't feel like being Chen's data. How convenient! Finally, in the last 2 paragraphs, Chen gets close to where I predicted she'd go:

[T]he publication of the New York Times article suggests that this atypical arrangement might be more palatable if the wife makes an outrageous amount of money. In one instance, the husband put the brakes on his architecture career when his banker wife started to make twice his earnings. At that point, “the solution seemed obvious.”

What remains to be seen is what happens when the economics are not so “obvious” — when women work at more pedestrian, less lucrative jobs. Given the unease about reversing gender roles when there is a superearner in the equation, I’m not sure we’re ready to have June Cleaver go to work and Ward Cleaver stay home with the boys after all.

Chen stops short of saying the single-earner household can't work anymore unless that single-earner makes a huge income (and she doesn't detour into the usual talk about what's really needed to support the parents who do (and must!) go to work). It's fair to ding the NYT for focusing on rich outliers and to cherry pick the phrases in that article that hint that the high-achieving women are not proud of husbands whose only activity is housework and childcare. Chen's last sentence is so tame that it's hard to fight with her: There's "unease," and she's "not sure," and maybe were just not "ready."

As you know if you've been following my single-earner household tagged posts — which go back to April 2012 — I am a proponent of clear thinking about household economics in light of taxes and the value of unpaid work within the family unit. I resist the endless propaganda that the single-income family is no longer possible for ordinary people — that it's some delusion haunted by the ghosts of the 1950s, who are almost always embodied in the characters June and Ward Cleaver. I think we are failing to see how much we lose when we accept the idea that all good adults must devote their work energy to the production of taxable income.

"I understand people think there is a dilemma presented by a Web site where you can pay to have a mug shot removed."

"I understand that people don’t like to have their mug shots posted online. But it can’t be extortion as a matter of law because republishing something that has already been published is not extortion."

Said the lawyer for BustedMugshots and MugshotsOnline, 2 companies that are the target of a lawsuit brought on behalf of individuals displeased by the results of Google searches on their names.

NYC builds a newsstand designed to be run by blind workers, then decides to scrap it because it's not theft resistant.

Now they're going to build an new one.

“As part of a major and vital rehabilitation of the Kings County Criminal Court, we are adding a new newsstand and investing to make it accessible,” said a spokesman for the city Department of Design and Construction. The Office of the Criminal Justice Coordinator ordered the DDC to build the stand as part of a $38 million courthouse renovation. City courthouse newsstands are operated by blind workers through a program run by the state Commission for the Blind.

Blind people have traditionally run newsstands, but the safeguard against theft —  a problem at any newsstand — is the heightened sense of morality people feel about cheating the blind.

Said one court source, “Let’s face it. It’s in the lobby of a courtroom, so you might get a few criminals walking by who wouldn’t think twice about stealing from a blind guy.”

You might think NYC should just use the new place and not employ a blind worker, but consider that there is a pre-existing but run-down newsstand in the lobby, run by a 61-year-old blind man who's worked there for 10 years, the design of the new shelves really does facilitate shoplifting, and there are other aspects of the design that aren't suitable for a blind person. The area behind the counter is said to be too small to use a cane or seeing-eye dog.

It sounds almost as though the designer had a secret agenda of ousting the blind. That's a premise I'd explore if I were suing. Things less cheap than lawsuits: 1. building another new newsstand, and 2. eating the cost of shoplifting.

Quite aside from potential litigation, there's the political problem. Here you've got: 1. wasting the taxpayers' money, 2. looking stupid, 3. showing lack of concern for the blind, 4. the embarrassment of a ridiculous crime paradise in the lobby of a criminal courthouse, breeding more and more disrespect for the law among those with the least reason to feel respect.

Jim S. is right, I need more nominees for Most Embarrassing Sentence in Major Media, 2013.

He says:

I think if you're looking for the most embarrassing quote in major media, you can do no better than this description of Huma Abedin that Instapundit draws attention to:

She wore bright-red lipstick, which gave her lips a 3-D look, her brown eyes were pools of empathy evolved through a thousand generations of what was good and decent in the history of the human race.

Ultra-close readers of this blog with great memories know that I defended that sentence — and some sentences around it — as "so gloriously absurd, that they must be intentional satire and not a new level of good press."

So prod me toward some other nominees.

Rachel Jeantel's inability to read cursive leads to articles about why we're even teaching cursive anymore.

Here's one: "Is cursive writing dead?"

A single sentence, uttered in the trial of George Zimmerman for the shooting of teenager Trayvon Martin, has catapulted an issue into the national spotlight.

When asked if she could read a letter in court, witness Rachel Jeantel, her head bowed, murmured with embarrassment, "I don't read cursive," according to court testimony.

Jeantel was embarrassed, so let's all stop. Let's find everything that some people can't do and feel embarrassed about. And let's ask: Is this really necessary? Is this serving a purpose... other than to make some people feel embarrassed?

Jeantel is an icon not only in the fight to end education in cursive handwriting, but the fight to spare everyone embarrassment. This is the necessary extension of the struggle against bullying, a struggle to control deliberate meanness. But think of all the unintentional things that create emotional burdens for some people. There was a time when sidewalks lacked ramps for wheelchairs, not because anyone was out to make life difficult for wheelchairs, but simply because we failed to notice. Step up — wheel up — and become aware of all the needless barriers out there.

ADDED: When I learned cursive — in the late 1950s in northern Delaware — the word "cursive" was not used. We just called it "writing," "handwriting," or — I think — "manuscript" or "script." Consequently, the word "cursive" has always seemed strange to me.

I hear the ugly words "cur" and "curse," but, looking it up in the (unlinkable) OED, I see the etymology is connected to the Latin for "run" — cursīvus — and the idea is: "Written with a running hand, so that the characters are rapidly formed without raising the pen, and in consequence have their angles rounded, and separate strokes joined, and at length become slanted."

The word "cur" — meaning a low-quality dog — goes back to Middle Dutch, Swedish and Norwegian.

Middle English curre corresponds to... Norwegian (widely-spread) dialect kurre, korre ‘dog’, etc. The latter is generally associated with the onomatopoeic verb Old Norse kurra to murmur, grumble, Swedish kurra to grumble, rumble, snarl, Danish kurre to coo, German obsolete and dialect kurren to growl, grumble, murmur, coo....

So hear the grrrr in "cur."

The word "curse," the OED says, has unknown origin: "Late Old English curs, of unknown origin; no word of similar form and sense is known in Germanic, Romanic, or Celtic."  (Of connection with cross, which has been suggested, there is no trace.)"

Interesting to see that people have imagined that "curse" had to do with "cross," even as I imagined that "cursive" had to do with "cur" and "curse." What words have influenced your understanding of other words? Isn't that something that happened to you a lot when you were a child? Did you ever find it emotionally difficult to learn about something because you made an imaginative connection like this? Would "cursive" be easier to learn if we called it "script"?

"I remember that night fondly, even though my feminist sensibilities cringe a little now."

Says the author of a WaPo op-ed titled "Time to stop hooking up. (You know you want to.)"   

That night was a Halloween when she was a college student and she dressed up as a whore. Now that she's not a college student it's time for you to stop hooking up. She did that whore-costume thing when she was younger, so it's time for you to stop. Guess why? Because of feminism! Ha ha. That was the most transparent slip I've ever seen.

And I don't mean why not wear a transparent slip next time you want to dress like a whore. I mean, she did what was fun for her when she was so young that dressing slutty easily made her look super-sexy, and now that she's older and it's others who are young and have this automatic sexiness at their command, she's suddenly staunchly feminist. Ha.

This woman, Donna Freitas, is flogging a book — "The End of Sex: How Hookup Culture Is Leaving a Generation Unhappy, Sexually Unfulfilled, and Confused About Intimacy" — but the sample of her writing she's sharing in WaPo is awful.  

I remember that night fondly, even though my feminist sensibilities cringe a little now. Not only is "fondly" the most cliché adverb to slap onto "remember" to try to give it some oomph — "sensibilities" can't "cringe."

And does feminism cause a feminist to cringe when thinking about things like that time she dressed like a whore? To cringe means (quoting the unlinkable OED):

To contract the muscles of the body, usually involuntarily; to shrink into a bent or crooked position; to cower.

Picture a position of the body. Is that a feminist position — shrinking and crooked, cowering? Figuratively, it's:

To experience an involuntary inward shiver of embarrassment, awkwardness, disgust, etc.; to wince or shrink inwardly; (hence) to feel extremely embarrassed or uncomfortable. Freq. with at.

Is that feminism — shivering with embarrassment, awkwardness, disgust? Maybe Freitas is purveying the same old shame with a deceptive "feminism" label, and maybe she's just a bad writer. Either way, I wouldn't recommend this book (though with that title, it could be a great gag gift for the right person).

The completely inappropriate use of Michelle Obama — piped in from the White House — to announce the Best Picture Oscar.

Wow. I'm just seeing this now. How awkward. I was embarrassed to watch the clip. Jack Nicholson — the greatest actor of the modern era (or something) — comes out as if he's going to announce the award, observes that it's traditionally one presenter who does the announcement, then throws it to a White House feed where it's Michelle Obama, dressed up in her ball gown, in the company of White House toadies in tuxes. And then "Lincoln" doesn't even win, so we don't get the stunning climax of all of history that was what the producers may have thought they were setting up.

Abysmal.

IN THE COMMENTS: Drago said: "Those aren't 'toadies.' Those are the military aides assigned to the President. They have no choice but to be there when 'directed.' And those aren't 'tuxes,' those are military dress uniforms." I stand corrected. I'm sorry. I was going to watch the video again to check that detail but there was no scroll bar on the video and I could not put up with watching it in real time. Why were military personnel used as props for an entertainment industry awards show?

"They would be explaining what your benefits were, then all of a sudden this embarrassed look would flash across their face like, 'Oh, sorry. I guess this doesn’t apply to you.'"

For the new gay members of Congress, "their freshman orientation sessions were a reminder of just how unequally the law treats them, since the entity that cuts their paychecks and provides benefits — the United States government — is barred from recognizing their relationships."

I wish members of Congress would have more opportunities to experience the embarrassment of having to live with the people their laws oppress. And I don't mean just things having to do with whether their colleagues are getting paid enough.

"Althouse, 'embarrassed' by flashing her... 'its'?"

Observes EDH... with an apt clip.

"I was reckless writing about recklessness."

I say, noting that I got quoted over at Instapundit with a missing "it's" apostrophe: "he’s entirely reckless about what these laws would really mean to ordinary people, and its a recklessness that thrives in the mind of someone who...."

"Oh! It's blogging," says Meade. "It's the internet. Think how many times you've gotten it right."

"And it's more embarrassing to get the apostrophe wrong the other way," I soothe myself, referring to  putting the apostrophe in "its" when it's supposed to be out.

"It's embarrassing to be embarrassed," Meade asserts aphoristically.

"But I was criticizing recklessness at the very point when I was reckless," I brood nonetheless. "It's like the way whenever you mock a misspelling, you end up misspelling something."

I decide to write this post, which — speaking of blogging — is the antidote to embarrassment.

***

King Kong, little elves

On the rooftops they dance

Valentino-type tangos

While the makeup man’s hands

Shut the eyes of the dead

Not to embarrass anyone

Farewell Angelina

The sky is embarrassed

And I must be gone 

"By now, you have likely listened several times to the muffled 911 call placed by the Catholic priest who enjoyed..."

"... slipping into a bondage mask and handcuffs inside a church rectory in Springfield, Illinois.... this time he put the handcuffs on with the keyhole up instead of down...."

Although I find this bloggable, I don't want to listen to the recording. Hmmm. I guess don't enjoy hearing suffering, but I want this to be a lesson to you. Stop wasting the police's time with your handcuff incompetence.