Yearly Archives: 2012

Jason Dittmer on Captain Nowhere

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Jason Dittmer recently published the book Captain America and the Nationalist Superhero: Metaphors, Narratives, and Geopolitics. I wrote a review (titled “Captain Nowhere”) at Reason Magazine. Jason had an interesting reply which was buried at the end of a long comments thread, and which I thought it might be worth highlighting here. Jason kindly agreed — and his response to my review is therefore reprinted below.

Hello all,

I would like to thank Noah Berlatsky for his review, which although critical raises some interesting points. I especially like some of the debate that it has spawned in the comments thread, especially on the relationship between states and markets. However, I do feel like a bit of an injustice has been done to the arguments of my book and I would like the chance to respond.

First, Berlatsky argues that I have ignored the two main reasons for studying popular culture, both of which revolve around the idea of relevance. Either something is worth studying because it is aesthetically important, or because it is ‘sociologically relevant’ (meaning vastly popular). The former is, of course, a matter of taste and therefore inserts an elitism into the analysis (we should only study GOOD popular culture) and the latter relies on the notion that audiences will be shaped by the popular culture in question (hence the importance of the audience size). Berlatsky implicitly adopts the latter perspective in his argument that I should be paying attention to the Captain America movie rather than to comics, which have a relatively small audience. I reject both of these arguments. Or rather, I think that to limit ourselves to them is to misunderstand the reasons it is worthwhile to study popular culture.

Rather than relying on relevance, I have studied comic books because of the way in which they come into the world — month after month, year after year. They provide an archive of insights into how artists and writers try to reconcile past events and (then) present concerns into a continuous narrative (there is, of course, a great concern with ‘continuity’ in superhero universes). In truth, I am interested in popular culture not as a thing which can be ‘relevant’ or not, but as a process — a continual set of interactions between creative teams, editorial staff, fans who write letters in to the creative team, and broader market forces. I am sorry if Berlatsky finds my examples ‘comically banal’ but I think that is because he doesn’t see why they are important. He sees them as ‘long-forgotten'(and therefore fundamentally irrelevant) but I see them as negotiations among people trying to assemble a world of collective meaning. Many of the commenters here, based on Berlatsky’s review, seem to think that what I am offering is a crude cultural analysis straight out of the Frankfurt School. I contend this is not the case, and that my argument is far different from the synopsis given here.

Fundamentally, my book is about two different kinds of geography (a word that never appears in Berlatsky’s review despite its fundamental importance to the book).

First, it is about the geography of the nation-state, and the way in which this is reproduced as a fundamental spatial category in our political life. Berlatsky scores rhetorical points in his review by asserting that I am somehow unaware of the politics that occurs outside or beyond the nation-state framework. I think this shows how fundamentally he misunderstands what I am doing in this book.

The book is, rather, about the way in which the nation-state is continually reproduced as a discourse of the political, and therefore also about the reduction of politics to that which is addressed by the state. My chapters each center on some aspect of this: the narration of a coherent body politic, of territory, of geopolitical orders, and so on. I am not holding up the state as an ideal, rather I am asking why so many people ascribe such meaning to it – a perspective I think Berlatsky would agree with given the conclusion to his review.

The second geography on tap in this book is found in the way the idea of the nationalist superhero genre is changed as it shifts from the U.S. context (in which it was created) to Canada and the UK. Again, this is about studying process rather than finding out how, for example, Canadian nationalist superheroes are different in the sense of cultural analysis. Berlatsky does not really touch on this aspect of my book.

I have gone on long enough and I do not want to wear out my welcome. I also do not want to come across as angry at Berlatsky — perhaps his misconceptions about my book are the result of my poor writing, or indeed maybe it is as laughable as he makes it out to be. But I wanted to a chance to make the case for the book, especially as Reason is such an interesting and important venue for the book to be reviewed. Thank you!

 

It’s Comics Versus Art, (at least according to comics)

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Comics Versus Art

by Bart Beaty

University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division, 2012

Its tempting to split up a review of Beaty’s book, Comics Versus Art, into a series of examinations of its individual chapters. Many of Beaty’s arguments are so relevant to the discussion of comics and wider culture that they deserve their own posts. More devilishly, its equally seductive to make a laundry list of his most controversial claims, just to see if they could nudge the Lichtenstein conversation out of its current emotional stalemate.

Either approach would be easier to write than an evaluation of the whole: Comics Versus Art is an ambitious but uneven chronicling of the diverse historical frictions between the two fields, including but not limited to pop-art appropriation, comic’s belittlement as nostalgic/primitive ephemera, and cartoonists’ ready cooperation with ‘art world’ prejudices.  Beaty is a firebrand and much-needed documentarian, and his book is an invaluable contribution to this discussion. Through an interweaving of many rewarding tangents, he often succeeds at elucidating, even correcting, accounts of art-comics friction through a fair examination of each case’s larger context, even if some of his dramatic conclusions are shakily reached or unearned. Comics Versus Art is far from a manifesto of why comics should or should not be art. Without being vehement or trite, the book is quite damning in its examination of the petty status games that occur at the border between these worlds.

Comics Versus Art is comprised of nine different “case-studies.” The first chapter is especially worth summarizing, as it examines several different definitions of comics, and how these definitions, particularly Scott McCloud’s, have exempted comics from art history. While most definitions of comics have been essentialist, (focusing on recurring characters, thought balloons, or moral narrativising as central components, depending on the theory,) McCloud’s formalist definition is open enough to abduct and rename other phenomenon as “comics,” while it rejects several examples widely accepted as comics, (Dennis the Menace, for example.) While McCloud’s proponents are happy to re-envision Trajan’s Column as a comic, (and couldn’t care less about Dennis the Menace, perhaps,) the rest of the art world remains indifferent; as a freak, isolated case of comics, the column’s new branding doesn’t have nearly the historical interest as it’s status as imperial propaganda. More importantly, ‘comics,’ ‘children’s books,’ and ‘artists’ books’ are only distinguished by their audiences. At this point, Beaty introduces an institutional definition of comics, borrowed from Arthur C. Danto, George Dickie and Howard Becker’s theories of an “artworld.” Loosely, comics are whatever the human members of the comics world (including but not limited to producers, critics and consumers,) deem to be called comics. This theory fails even more spectacularly in establishing borders with children’s and artist’s books, but that’s somewhat the point, and at least it’s honest about it: Becker writes that “‘art worlds typically have intimate and extensive relations with the worlds from which they try to distinguish themselves.’” Problematically, this theory has no way of pinpointing why or what about comics makes them a social nexus, (perhaps, by the centrality of recurring characters in comics, people really do gather around commercial franchises rather than their formal attributes.) Beaty does good work here in positing a parallel comicsworld, but the definition is tautological and directionless, and doesn’t quite address where this would overlap with an artworld anyhow. Moreover, Beaty doesn’t develop the comicsworld theory beyond this point, and only occasionally reintroduces it in further chapters. He also doesn’t cover any of the historical evolutions in the definition of ‘art,’ contextualize how Danto and co.’s definition interact with these, or how it can be expanded past a truism. This unbalance plagues most of the book, where Beaty uses a limited range of analytical approaches to draw his conclusions, and doesn’t apply these tools strictly enough to spawn ideas past his original biases.

Beaty misses the opportunity to develop the institutional theory with the next chapter, which details the gendered power dynamic underlying the Lichtenstein appropriation debate. This study could have benefited from a closer look at the sub-worlds at play: much of the art-world initially rejected pop-art for its association with low-brow cultural forms, and only gradually began to recognize Lichtenstein’s work as worthwhile. This in turn would have clarified Chapter 6, where Beaty erroneously concludes that Gary Panter’s featuring in Blab! and Juxtapoz magazines, and creation of a vinyl art toy, signals his acceptance by the art world at large. Panter’s luke-warm reviews by Artforum, one of which is included in the book, are slightly better than the New York Time’s treatment of another comics luminary decades earlier, Bernard Krigstein, who is instead framed by the book as an artworld failure.

Despite this, Beaty’s arguments have an commonsensical ring of truth, which he occasionally goes out of his way to justify. On Lichtenstein, Beaty frames the case study with discussion of Nietzschean ressentiment, defined as “a tendency to attribute one’s personal failures to external forces.” This is a little overkill, where simply using the word ‘resentment’ could have done the trick, as Nietzche’s philosophies are not mentioned elsewhere in the book. However, Beaty is on the right track:

When, for example, Clive Phillpot offhandedly dismisses the possibility that works of comics might be classified as artist’s books, the division between forms is presented as a self-evident commonplace barely requiring elaboration or argumentation. By contrast, the pent-up aggressive feelings towards the world of fine arts that characterizes many cartoonist’s ressentiment can become an all-consuming passion that threatens to poison their work with an easily diagnosed bitterness.

It is a breath of fresh air to have the emotional dynamic of the Lichtenstein debate not only included in its context, but considered the heart of the conflict itself.  In this case, he also studies how, evidenced by critics of the time, comics and kitsch were increasingly cast as feminine, while pop-art’s appropriations ‘masculinized’ camp that had been enjoyed in earnest. “Pop art, therefore, was a threat because it absconded with the one element that comic book fans assumed would never be in question: the red-blooded American masculinity that informed war and romance comics alike with their rigid adherence to patriarchal gender norms.” It is gender critique, not institutional theory, that becomes the lifeblood of Comics Versus Art, and provides a continuing thread through the other case studies, something that will fly in the face of readers not prepared to understand how certain behaviors and attitudes are routinely cast as ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ throughout history. Beaty writes,

The validation of the comics form, which is an essential aspect of fannish epistemology, can take many paths. One of these paths would be the outright rejection of the conservative basis of much of modernist art history, with its conflation of masculinity, artistry, and genius, and the adoption and promotion of new aesthetic standards that would recognize the importance and vitality of feminized mass cultural forms. Another, far less revolutionary, route would be a capitulation to the dictates of modernist art history and the nomination of a select few cultural workers to the position of Artist or Author. In the wake of pop art, it was this latter approach that was most commonly, and effectively, utilized by comics fandom, as they worked to export the idea of the comics artist beyond the limitations of the comics world.

Beaty extends this to comics content, where the industry tends to reward subject matter that reinforces gender tropes, either those of hyper-masculine heroism, or the imagination of the isolated, tragic genius, what critic Nina Baym calls “a romanticization of the straight, white male subject as the object of societal scorn.”  The most successful cartoonists play into the art-world’s existing stereotyping of cartoonists, and behaving like primitive, ( R. Crumb,) or pathetic, (Chris Ware,) versions of the Romanticized genius. Ware is treated as a synecdoche for the current status of contemporary comics, where his savvy use of draftsmanship, nostalgia, self deprecation, and an attitude that is “willfully ironic about the relationship between comics and art in a way that serves to mockingly reinforce, rather than challenge, existing power inequities,” make him the kind of artist that “if Chris Ware did not exist, the art world would have had to invent him.”

Comics emerges less as a victim of art than of its own, unintentional self-sabotaging, and its refusal to grow and celebrate itself on its own terms. Mainstream and alternative comics’ insecurities over their belittlement (better, feminization,) by both Romantic/conservative and contemporary art frameworks cause them to miserably ape ‘high art’ conventions, establishing canons and idolizing masculinized genius-creators.  Even when the artist doesn’t paint himself according to the genius archetype, (Charles Schultz’s optimism and transparent mercantilism, for instance,)  he can usually be reconstructed to fit it– while those outside the comics world tend to recognize Peanuts as a sweet, nostalgic, family franchise, fan-critics instead emphasize a tragic and masculinized reading. One great example lies in comparing Fantagraphic’s conneuseurist The Complete Peanuts, with their unsettling, somber jackets,  to the fabulously popular Peanuts paperbacks from decades before, such as Happiness is a Warm Puppy.

While not revolutionary, Comics Versus Art’s greatest service is to document these dynamics, attitudes and interactions between comics and art, so that they can be read against each other, and found in one place. It’s greatest crimes are its most obvious omissions–like the development and role of comics museums, conventions and festivals, and the erasure of the Terry Zwigoff’s Crumb, (now included in the Criterion Collection,) in the biography of the artist. Most unforgivably, Beaty omits the history of ‘deskilling’ in the art world, how deskilling inspired the institutional theory Beaty employs, and how it is an unmissable component of the artworld and the comicsworlds’ mutual dismissals of each other. Compared to that, his zany, unsupported claim that McCloud has distanced the comics and art worlds, rather than bring them closer together, is amusing, and his haphazard braiding of information, where certain lines are suddenly dropped, only to be weaved back in, only mildly frustrating. Comics Versus Art was a gargantuan project for one scholar to undertake, its faults are expected along those lines, and the book is self-consciously a testament to the fact that there are too few critics working on such a crucial, cultural  history.  In any case, Comics Versus Art is a great groundwork for future discussion, and a fiery read.

Music for Middle-Brow Snobs — Like a Motorway

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Electronica dance pop mix; download Like a Motorway here.

1. Lothario — Fabulous Diamonds
2. Amenamy — Purity Ring
3. Cry When You Get Older — Robyn
4. Far Away — Cut Copy
5. Vanished — Crystal Castles
6. Hercules Theme — Hercules and Love Affair
7. The Village — New Order
8. Silent Shout — The Knife
9. Hot Topic — Le Tigre
10. Like a Motorway — Saint Etienne
11. Dance With Me — The Juan Maclean
 

Utilitarian Review 11/23/12

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On HU

Shortened week due to the holidays this time out.

Featured Archive Post: Ariel Kahn on subversion of authority in Salem Brownstone and Skim.

I expressed skepticism about the supernatural manga Natsume’s Book of Friends.

I talked about race or the lack thereof in Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows.

Isaac Butler talks about memory and his father’s illness.

Richard Cook talks about preparing food with his girlfriend.

I talked about morality and other people.

And I compared comics sales to sales of other media.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic I talk about Twilight and abortion.

At Reason I review Jason Dittmer’s new book on nationalist superheroes.

At Splice Today I talk about filibuster reform and Democratic revenge fantasies.

 
Other Links

Christopher M. Jones on why worrying about fake geek girls is stupid.

The Republicans were for sensible copyright reform before they were against it.

Sean Michael Robinson interviews David Lasky.
 
This Week’s Reading

I finished Stanley Hauerwas’ “God, Medicine, and Miracles” read Nate Silver’s “The Signal and the Noise,” reread “The Hobbit” and read Alun Llewellyn’s “The Strange Invaders.”
 

Small Fish, Big Pond

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For Black Friday, I thought I’d reprint this piece about comics sales from back in 2009 — it first ran on Comixology.

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Comics are a relatively small part of the media landscape. But how small? Or how large? How does the sale of a popular comic book compare to the sales of, say, a popular book or DVD? I wasn’t sure…so I thought I’d use this column to try and see if I could figure it out.

Caveat and a half: Pretty much all of this stuff starts as guestimates made with inadequate data. By the time a non-expert like me starts talking about it…well, it’s not pretty. I think the following is useful to give some sense of the scale of the comics business compared to other entertainment industries, but any individual number should be taken with a grain of salt roughly the size of New Jersey.

Comics Sales

Marc-Oliver Frisch’s occasional column at the Beat seems like the easiest place to go for information about mainstream comics sales., at least through the direct market According to Frisch, in July of this year, the biggest seller was Marvel’s Reborn #1, which sold about 193,000 units. DC’s Blackest Night was second with sales of around 177,000 units. According to Frisch, these are fairly huge numbers, partially pumped up with variant edition covers and first issue excitement. A less hyped comic in the middle of its run – Action Comics #879 – had sales in July of 38, 324 units. Vertigo and Wildstorm titles are also in the area of 11,000 to 8000 units a month, apparently. Tiny Titans, a book for kids that’s near and dear to my heart, only sold 8, 576 units – but, again, this is through the direct market only, and I assume most of Tiny Titans sales are actually through bookstores (that’s where I get my copies., anyway.)

As far as smaller press numbers, Kim Thompson, co-owner of Fantagraphics wrote me that sales are “really all over the map. A Peanuts will sell 15,000-20,000, other classics and well-known cartoonists in the 4,000-7,000 range, then all the way down to 2,000 and less for more obscure, or unsuccessful, stuff… And of course some long-time continuing books have sold a lot more than that, Ghost World at 150,000+, Palestine at 60,000+, etc.”

Brian Hibbs does his best to figure out the Bookscan numbers at the end of each year, and says for comics sales through bookstores there’s about 8.3 million units sold per year, for somewhere around $100 million in sales for the top 350 books. Watchmen was the highest seller, with over 300,000 copies sold. (Though I saw a NYT article that put Watchmen graphic novel sales at 1 million…perhaps counting Direct Market and online sales as well?) Naruto v. 28 was next with over 100,000 sold. All volumes of Naruto together sold around 971,000 copies, for a total of $7.7 million.

For some other numbers to throw into the mix: Brigid Alverson, who blogs over at mangablog wrote me in an email that “first printings [for manga] seem to be in the 10,000 range for smaller publishers; Yen does 25,000 for titles like Haruhi.” The folks at the Anime News Network say total sales of graphic novels in 2008 were $395 million. Manga sales accounted for $175 million of that, which is the largest single chunk (the rest being divided among super-heroes, humor, adult, etc.) They also point out the huge success of Naruto, which is so overwhelming that it’s comparable to other media products that are not comics. Like for example:

DVD Sales

Sales figures for DVDs seem a whole lot easier to obtain…as in, I googled for about 5 seconds and got actual complete information organized in a handy chart. It’s almost as if our culture cares more about DVDs. Or as if the companies aren’t embarrassed to release the information. Or something.

Anyway…the biggest seller the week ending September 6 was State of Play, which sold 344,745 units. And again I say, that’s in a week. So that means that a successful DVD sells, very unscientifically, more than 6 times as much as a successful floppy comic in a given month.

Watchmen the movie, a bit further down the list, is an obvious point of comparison for comics. It sold 56, 814 units in the week; still higher than any comic has done in a long time, probably, but not necessarily by many orders of magnitude. Of course, this is 7 weeks into the DVD release, and overall it’s sold more than 2 million units in that time. (Again, as best I can figure Watchmen the graphic novel seems to have sold between 300,000 to 1 million units in all of 2008.)

Total DVD sales for 2008 were $14.5 billion. That’s about 36 times greater than graphic novel sales for the year, if my numbers are right.

Music

CD sales are in free fall due to the recession and that wonderful, magical whatsit we call the Internet. People still buy an awful lot of albums, though. According to the ever-erudite Ben Sisario at the NYT, the biggest seller in 2008 was Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter, which sold 2.87 million copies. Again, Watchmen, the biggest comic hit, seems to have sold less than half that, and possibly less than a quarter of that. Total music album sales (including CD, download, and LP) were 428 million. Meanwhile, over a billion songs were downloaded. The same article says that concert ticket sales clocked in at $4.2 billion in 2008.

Books

Sales of books in June were $942.6 million according to the Association of American Publishers. 2008 book sales for the year were 24 billion. I presume graphic novels are included as a part of that; if that’s correct, they’re about 1.6% of the total sales for the year…which is quite a bit smaller than I would have guessed.

Also to my surprise, big-event books appear to actually outsell big-event CDs and DVDs. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows sold more than 8 million copies on its first day on sale in the U.S., which makes Lil’ Wayne’s 2.8 million albums over a year look pretty puny. And, of course, 8 million copies is just about the total bookstore sales for all graphic novels in all of 2008, according to Brian Hibbs’ figures. Obviously, Harry Potter is exceptional…but Dan Brown’s most recent book was also selling in the hundreds of thousands on its first couple of days. Breaking Dawn, the last Twilight book, sold 1.3 million copies on the first day.

Nothing You Didn’t Know

There’s no really startling revelations here of course. Despite big comic book derived movies and the growth of graphic novels and manga, most people in the U.S. would rather watch a movie or listen to a CD or even read a book than pick up a comic. Perhaps with the recent shake-ups at Marvel and DC that will change, and comics will start selling on a scale with other entertainment options. But, if the figures here are even close to correct, there’s a long way to go before that happens.
 

Morality and Other People

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Is this man an autonomous moral actor?

 
A few days back I had an entertaining discussion with Mori Theil on Twitter about morality, individuals, and the public. Mori’s basic argument, as I understand it (and hopefully he’ll correct me if I’m wrong), is that ethics and morality are based in individual autonomy. Here’s a bit of his twitter discussion:

Moral decisions arise from principles. Other people should not be your morality; that is slapdash. w/others, you’re not dealing with morality at all, just feelings and goodwill – politics. If, say, I should have to justify my morality to you, that is a tool of societal control.

In what was perhaps his clearest statement of principle, he said, “…morality is the application of ideals to reality. You seem to say that we should twist our morality around to serve reality. That’s backwards.

Like I said, I enjoyed this conversation — and part of the reason I enjoyed it is that Mori so clearly and forthrightly states the basic Enlightenment presuppositions and beliefs about moral experience. For Mori, morality involves an almost Cartesian process. You do not listen to others; you do not learn from others. Instead, you turn inward, discovering there pure ideals beyond the reach of a corrupting and confusing society. Once you have found them, you apply those ideals to reality. Morality, then, is an essentially imperial endeavor. Ethics conquers the world. If the world conquers ethics — or even, it sounds like, if the world affects ethics — then you are doing it wrong.

Obviously, Mori’s vision of morality resonates to some extent. Our touchstones for moral worth, I think, are often people who go against social consensus or social norms; who do the right thing despite pressure to do the wrong. So, for example, Galileo’s commitment to truth despite the opposition of the Church is seen as a quintessential moral moment. Conscientious objectors refusing to fight during the Vietnam War despite the coercion of the state might be another example. Or, to cite one of my personal heroes, Khruschev’s decision to expose Stalin’s crimes despite massive opposition within the Soviet bureaucracy, and indeed arguably despite his own Communist ideological commitments, seems like one of the bravest and most moral acts of a world leader in the last 100 years — certainly braver than anything I can think of any American president doing in my lifetime.

The question is, though: are these examples of moral ideals imposed upon the world? Were these people autonomous moral actors? If they weren’t, does that make them less moral?

I would say that the answers in each case I give above are pretty complicated. Galileo, of course, actually renounced his findings; he caved to social pressure. Conscientious objectors, on the other hand, are not in many cases autonomous actors. They certainly are placing themselves against the broader society — but many of them do so because of their communal commitments to peace churches. They certainly have ideals, but those ideals are not autonomous or generated outside of a social context. And as for Khruschev — his indictment of Stalin was done in the name of ideals, certainly — but those ideals were specifically Communist, and therefore by definition communal and social. From the accounts I’ve read, he was most angry at Stalin for his failures of courage and leadership during World War II — for failures to Russia specifically, in other words, rather than for failures to live up to a particular abstract vision.

Mori might say that each of these instances is, in fact, a poor example — that none of them are adequate examples of true morality. None, he might argue, show a moral actor as sufficiently autonomous; none are sufficiently pure. To which I guess my response would be that I can’t think of any moral situations which are not complicated like this. Martin Luther King drew his ideals from his church and his community. So did Gandhi. Matilde de la Sierra‘s activism against torture is based in her own personal experience of torture — but it’s sustained by her relationship with her husband and her work with other activists, not by some isolated commitment.

Moral actions are never autonomous — which makes sense, I think, because morality is mostly about how you treat other creatures. If you’re stranded on a desert island all alone, without even any animals in sight, morality is going to be largely beside the point. Rather than an ideal we impose on the world, morality, then, is an experience that the presence of others imposes on us. Morality doesn’t occur despite society; it occurs only because of society. Which means that, if our moral selves are our truest selves, then in a real sense our truest selves are other people.

That may seem counter-intuitive but, for me, at least, it fits my moral experience much better than Mori’s account does. Morality for me isn’t formulating abstract principles and then following them. Instead, it’s, say, volunteering when my son’s school needs volunteers, or giving a friend a ride when he needs a ride, or even (as happened last week) taking down inappropriate scanlated images when a colleague tells me I should.

At one point Mori asked “do you think the Internet should perch like an angel of conscience on your shoulder?” My response is — sure, why not? The internet is just other people — and, like most folks, I’ve relied on other people to teach me to be a good person since my parents first started telling me to say “please”. Morality isn’t something I was born with. Rather, it’s a gift, granted by those I love, or respect, or live with. And the gift is, precisely, to teach me to love, to respect, and to live. If we are ethical, or human, it’s by each other’s grace — and if we’re unworthy of it, that’s all the more reason to be thankful when it is granted.
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Update: Mori replies here. I understand where he’s coming from much more clearly now, I think. Just quickly I’d say that when I talk about morality coming from communities, I don’t necessarily mean states or the law (I’m not ruling those out, but I wouldn’t see those as the only or best sources in every circumstance.)

I’d also just point out quickly that it wasn’t just society which saw slavery as acceptable for hundreds and hundreds of years (at least) — it was individuals who saw it that way too. Nor was the change against slavery a matter of lone individuals standing up against society; abolitionism was a movement and a community (composed of individuals, of course.)

Confessions of a Yuppie

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Before I met my girlfriend, my definition of “cooking” was warming prepared meals in the microwave. If I was feeling fancy, I might warm them up in the toaster oven. Most of the time I was too lazy to even bother with that, so I ordered lots of pizzas and or went out to restaurants. I had never cracked open a cook book, or bought fresh vegetables (unless pestered to by my mother), or spent more than 15 minutes preparing a meal. I used to be an embarrassing stereotype, the single guy who lived on junk food.

Very early in our relationship, my girlfriend insisted that we cook meals together. And by “cook,” I mean actually creating meals from raw ingredients. I found myself washing, and cutting, and boiling, and mixing, and doing all sorts of things that took forever. Or at least it felt like forever. Instead of warming up a meal for 5 minutes in the microwave, I was spending anywhere from half-an-hour to an hour performing manual labor. I didn’t go to college for this! I was making good money and was more than happy to take her out to a restaurant, but she wanted to cook together, so I sucked it up and we cooked together.

My shopping habits also changed. Prior to our relationship, I had purchased all my groceries at the nearest Giant. And I was mostly buying frozen dinners, canned dinners, boxed dinners, and cold cuts. Certainly not a healthy diet, but it was cheap and quick to prepare. After we started dating, my girlfriend convinced me to shop at Whole Foods. I had never set foot in a Whole Foods during the first three decades of my life. My mental picture of a Whole Foods shopper was an effete yuppie who agonized over buying the right kind of smelly cheese. And now I was one of THEM, buying fresh veggies, organic this and organic that, and definitely spending more money on groceries.

It turned out to be money well spent. I was spending more on groceries but saving money overall because I ordered less take-out and ate at restaurants less often. I lost weight and generally felt healthier. And my mother stopped sending me those annoying emails about the risks of heart disease.

But the best part about cooking with my girlfriend was cooking with my girlfriend. Prior to our relationship, I had always viewed cooking as an unpleasant chore, akin to vacuuming or cleaning the toilet. But cooking with my girlfriend wasn’t a chore. It was something that we did together. It was fun just to spend time with her, chopping vegetables together, listening to her music playlist, and talking about nothing in particular. And the most rewarding part was when we sat down and ate a delicious meal that we created together. It’s all very sappy and bourgeois, but to hell with it. I like cooking real meals, I like the taste of organic milk, and I like debating over the right kind of smelly cheese.