Ask the Family Doctor: Race and Sex in Disposable Diapers

with Ferenc Molmar, MD

Dr. Molmar

Q. Dear Dr. Molmar, I have a little adoptive baby who you might say has a “touch of the tarbrush.” According to rumor his grandmother was part-Filipino, or Filipina, you might say. This creates a dilemma when it comes to shopping for disposable diapers at the supermarket. You see, they have Pampers and Huggies for white babies and negro babies and oriental babies of various sexes, but I do not see any for this new baby’s situation. Should I buy the white-baby diapers, or would the oriental-baby diapers be okay? Incidentally I have noticed that the Floogies brand do not seem to be designed for any particular race or sex and simply have a stick-figure baby on the box. Are these healthy to use, do you think?

A. Whoa, whoa. First of all, it’s probably not a good idea to adopt outside your own race and class, most especially if you are uncertain of the whelp’s antecedents. “According to rumor” is not a legend I would want on the family escutcheon! Furthermore, I frown on disposable diapers simply on principle, since we always found it more convenient to use cloth diapers and have the Happy Nappy deliveryman drop by every day or two.

However, what is done is done, and I’m not here to give lectures.

Huggies for Orientals

I was unfamiliar with the Floogies brand, but it sounds very sensible to have a one-size-fits-all disposable diaper, ready to be used by any sex or race. It probably won’t be as neat and tidy as a wrapping designed specifically for a quarter-Filipino, but we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. What is most important is that you never use disposable diapers designed for the opposite sex, as that is a leading cause of homosexuality.

Running the Gauntlet; or, The Joys of Contagion

Hair-salon touts, eye-cream hucksters, and other species of urban vermin.

One of the subtle delights of this past year’s Covid-19 lockdown is that it shooed away the commercial panhandlers who pester you in pedestrian thoroughfares. They used to be particularly thick in the stretch of sidewalk in front of the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle.

The worst, and most insistent, were the hair-salon racketeers. These touts, generally youngish and male, would approach you and ask you if you got your hair done professionally. You’d say yes, and then the tout would try to persuade you to try out a friend’s new salon, for which you could receive a one-time discount. But to get the discount you’d have to pony up $75—right here and now on the sidewalk.

If you seemed dubious about all this—handing over $75 to a sales rep for a strange hair salon in a distant part of Midtown—he immediately assured you that it was a top-drawer outfit.

“Look! Five stars on Yelp!”—as he flashed his smartphone at you.

After this happened the first time, I spent the rest of the day pondering what a terrible business model the whole thing was. Forget the $75 and “Five stars on Yelp!” nonsense. Most women simply do not visit new hair salons on a whim or because they’re promised cut-rate service. Generally they stick with a single stylist, whom they loyally follow from salon to salon. Or else, if the stylist suddenly packs up and takes a job in Hollywood, they find someone else in a salon they know well. They’ll do this even even it means paying $250 every month or two. Price is not really a selling point in the hair business. Certainly not a deal-closer when you’re being pressured by a complete stranger at Columbus Circle.

A smoother, older kind of sidewalk hustle may be found in the eye-cream racket. These operators are always Israeli, both male and female, and stand (or rather, stood) in doorways of cosmetic shops on Madison Avenue or the stretch of Broadway just north of Columbus Circle. When they see normal women strolling past—I mean the kind who use moisturizer and makeup—they wave sample packets of eye cream at them.

There’s always something unlikely and exotic about their cream. One popular come-on a few years ago was saying it contained flakes of real gold. And so you took the little foil sachet, and the gang in the doorway immediately implored you to step inside and try some of their other wares. Sometimes they’d even offer you a voucher for a free facial or makeover on some day next week, at some spa you never heard of.

The eye-cream hucksters of Columbus Circle have been shut down, along with their neighbors, the soap girls who would stand out on the sidewalk with their baskets of colored, scented handmade samples. I do wish to say, though: those young ladies outside the soap shop were always cheery, never nagged, and arguably provided an essential service. Sometimes you need to give someone a cheap gift, or they’re doing a Secret Santa thing at your office. What could be a lamer and more inoffensive gift for some random coworker you barely know, than a hunk of pretty, perfumed soap?

Columbus Circle today is not entirely safe for social-distancing shoppers, however. Those young people in badges and hoodies proclaiming dodgy charities, they are once again out in strength, waving their clipboards as you come into view. Legalize Sex Perversion! Children in Cages! Save the Narwhal! 

Forty years ago, the neighborhood was a half-step up from a slum. You had the decaying Huntington Hartford Museum just south of the Circle, and the dismal New York Coliseum to the west, where the Time Warner Center now stands. A faint bit of cheer was injected by a banner on an old gabled building to the north, advertising Jacki Sorensen’s Jazzercise.

The sidewalk ruffians were different, too. They didn’t promote hair salons or eye cream or Planned Parenthood. They often wore jackets and ties, and tried to chat you up about Henry Kissinger and the dank history of the British Monarchy. For a mere $300 they would let you have a full year’s subscription to the Executive Intelligence Review, the most informative periodical in the world, which was published right around the corner. That’s our founder on the cover, Lyndon LaRouche!

Forty Years On: The Yuppie Handbook

The Yuppie Handbook’s cover illustration is brimming with nostalgia. The tawdry insides are brimming with dreck.

Has it really been forty years since The Yuppie Handbook? No, its copyright page says it came out January 1, 1984. But the book was so drenched in early-80s sensibility that it was already looking dated on publication date.

Coming back to it today, one gets a pungent whiff of nostalgia and wonderment. Much of it is as bafflingly antique as that fondue kit you got for Christmas in 1979 (still new-in-box, is it?).

Look at the cover here and see what I mean. The woman wears a boxy-shouldered suit with “Running Shoes.” When was the last time you heard the phrase “running shoes”?

In the early 80s, a young woman who wore a boxy “Ralph Lauren Suit” (more likely a Paul Stuart knockoff) and arrived at work in “running shoes,” was sending out obvious class signals. There was a transit strike in New York City in early April 1980, and people who lived in Manhattan walked to work, often in clunky trainers. Those heavy Adidas and Sauconys became a badge of status, announcing to the world that you weren’t a bridge-and-tunnel loser! The style spread far and wide, lingering for years as a yuppie marker, long after everyone had forgotten how the fad started.

We can’t laugh at the Sony Walkman; iPods and iPhones were for the distant future. Likewise, the “Fresh Pasta” from Balducci’s or wherever may seem naïve today as a class marker. But it reminds us there was a time, four or five decades back, when it seemed trés sophistiqué to know about “pasta,” as the cognoscenti had begun to call spaghetti, etc. If you were carrying a sack of fresh “pasta,” it suggested you’d gone to a distant neighborhood to buy it.

And now I draw your special attention to the Squash Racquet, the basic Coach Bag, and the Burberry Trench Coat. Coach and Burberry were gilt-edged brands forty years ago, but few people think of them that way now. They democratized too much, sold their goods in every shopping mall, started manufacturing in Red China. And the Burberry trademark-plaid famously tanked after it became the badge of lower-class “chavs” of southeast England, c. 2005.

The Squash Racquet needs a bit more explaining. The game of squash (or more properly, “squash racquets”) had a big vogue, 1979-1982. In New York, Boston, and Washington DC, new squash facilities sprang up like mushrooms. But then the craze suddenly crashed. It turned out most people didn’t want to play squash! If they needed to knock a little ball around a shoebox-shaped indoor court, they much preferred the prole version—racquetball—played with an ugly little short-handed paddle. Hemorrhaging cash, squash clubs accommodated them, and changed their corporate brand.

The early-80s king of the squash hill, Town Squash, Inc., renamed itself Town Sports. It lives on today as a “leisure industry” conglomerate, mainly known for its value-priced commercial gyms, e.g., New York Sports Club, Boston Sports Club, Washington Sports Club, even a Philadelphia Sports Club—in basically any city where squash once flourished.

Second Edition, c. 2006

The Fake Sequel. There was a 2nd Edition of The Yuppie Handbook (sort of), circa 2006. I don’t think it was a real book; it seems to have been a promotional item given out by a knitwear company. Here we see no squash impedimenta, or even a racquetball paddle. Instead we get a golf club. Bad choice! At this point, the annoying status symbol was a $3500 triathlon bike.

Gone too is the now-declassé Burberry. It’s replaced with a plaid-lined “Trench Coat made by dead grandmother.” I suppose the point here is that a unique, handcrafted garment made in 1939 affords more status than a pricey brand. A reasonable point, but it confutes the idea that ostentatious consumerism was the prime marker of yuppiedom.

Further along, the Coach Handbag is now an oversized “bowling bag” model of the sort that was popular around 2002, although neither it nor the Coach brand carried any cachet. Finally, instead of a Walkman, the lady carries an iPod Nano. Now, the original Sony Walkman was expensive for its day, and often hard to find. But by 2006, everyone had an iPod. No one ever thought of it as an accessory for upscale young “professionals.”

Truly, Yuppiedom faded out sometime in the 1990s, the era when corporate offices began to have Casual Friday dress codes, which soon and inevitably yielded to “Business Casual” slob culture year-round. 

  *   *   *

And now for the insides. The 1984 Yuppie Handbook was a bait-and-switch deal. The text of the book has little to do with the cover’s promise. It is coarse, tawdry, slapped-together, like something hashed out in a few days from some old cent-a-word porn-novel boiler-room.

Even more than its model, The Official Preppy Handbook (1980), it has a noticeable Jewish slant. The chapter on “Organized Religion” consists mostly of jokey comparisons of how Orthodox and Reform Jews spend “the Sabbath.” There are no Catholics, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Lutherans within this eruv. Holy Communion for Yuppies means brioche and mimosas for brunch (yok yok yok).

The book never rises above this Borscht Belt level of wisecrack. In a chapter called “Y.U.” (Yuppie University) we get spoof course-offerings from The Learning Annex, including “The Cuisinart Seder.”

Learning Annex parody

All this would seem to subvert the book’s advertised purpose. Going by the cover and blurb, the ideal Yuppie objective is to be a stylish member of the Anglo-Celtic haute bourgeoisie, the class celebrated in the fiction of John O’Hara, John P. Marquand and Sloan Wilson. But that “Cuisinart Seder” clues us in to the authors’ frame of reference. The Learning Annex, with its ubiquitous course catalogs distributed streetside in newspaper-style racks, was a new fixture of 1980s urban living.

As with singles bars, no one regarded The Learning Annex as a yuppie preserve. But there’s a subtext here. Its courses functioned as a cover for “networking” and hookups, and thus attracted a disproportionate number of Jews. Catalog offerings were heavily weighted toward self-help gurus and pop psychology. They were thus like a downmarket version of EST, with classes that cost $35 rather than $1350.*

Seeking demographic balance, The Yuppie Handbook strives hard to be an equal-opportunity offender. We’re told about exotic subcategories, such as “Guppies” (Gay Yuppies) and “Buppies” (Black Yuppies). Guppies, the authors gush, “are really super Yuppies because they were the pioneers of Yuppie culture.” That is, (male) gays were into ostentatious consumerism and self-preening long before straight folk picked up the trend. Two incomes, no kids, right?

The “Buppies” section is a tooth-grinding read today. We’re told Buppies have “a tendency to name their daughters Keesha instead of Rebecca.” They have a “preference for custom-made suits” rather than “ethnic fashions like dashikis.” And they can talk sort of like White people, or as the authors put it, they have “carefully articulated and accentless speech,” which is why “so many Buppies get jobs as newscasters.” I’m sure we can all think of a couple better reasons.

“Prominent Buppies” supposedly include Bryant Gumbel and Arthur Ashe (though not of course the articulate, smooth-talking, luxuriantly afro’d Barack Hussein Obama, who’d just finished his two years at Columbia College).

Straining at gnats, the authors also conjure up “Juppies” (not what you think—they’re Japanese) and “Puppies,” that is, Pregnant Urban Professionals. The authors thought it might be amusing to mock thirty-something female VPs running around the office (usually to the bathroom) in business-appropriate maternity wear. But they never really explore the idea, they just point and laugh (yok yok yok).

The only people left out of the Yuppie Diversity Tent are normal, everyday Heritage Americans.

  *   *   *

The Yuppie Handbook was one of a number of little humor books that came out in the early 1980s, all pivoting around a theme of social class. Some were better than others, but it was an identifiable genre of a place and time. We had The Official Preppy Handbook (1980), the copycat and rather clueless Sloane Ranger Handbook (1982) in England, Paul Fussell’s Class (1983), part-way inspired by Jilly Cooper’s earlier Class (1979) in England; along with whimsical parodies of L.L. Bean (Items from Our Catalog) and The New Yorker (the parody title escapes me). The most witless of these by far is The Yuppie Handbook. Its authors and producers evidently sold-in the book proposal on the strength of the name alone, but didn’t bother to figure out what made those other books work, what made them stylish and amusing.

The Yuppie Handbook was never really more than a concept (“Let’s do a Preppy Handbook…but for yuppies!”) and a cover illustration. The 8,000 words of drivel on the inside were just filler. Not a spark of wit, not a dram of insight. Usually you can judge a book by its cover, but not this time.


*Erhard Seminars Training (EST) and its later edition, the Landmark Forum, were high-pressure self-assertiveness courses created by one “Werner Erhard,” alias John Paul Rosenberg. Ayn Rand’s onetime boytoy Nathaniel Branden held similar “Power of Self-Esteem” courses through The Learning Annex. A perennial Learning Annex offering was New Age blather from one “Marianne Williamson” (real name: Vishnevetsky) whose offerings had titles on the order of,  “A Short Course in Miracles.”

 

Smoking Prevents COVID-19, says David Hockney

Famous gay painter and pastel illustrator David Hockney has some medical news for us all.

Of course we already knew that cigarette smoking prevented Alzheimer’s Disease. But this is the first time an important artist has weighed in on the COVID-19 nonsense and how coffin nails may help!

From the New York Post:

NYC Galleries to Close

“I’m gearing up for a conversation with my landlord,” says dealer Cristin Tierney who operates an eponymous gallery on New York’s Lower East Side.

Read the whole thing here.

(Hat tip to theartnewspaper.com.)

The Polo Shirt, Rediscovered

For years I shunned polo shirts because the standard cotton-piqué type (Lacoste, 1970s) was always just a little bit too heavy, and the cut of the women’s style was somehow too restrictive. (Something to do with the armholes, you know.) Of course you could always buy a larger size, but that was like wearing a men’s: baggy, totally unbecoming.

And the good ones were always so expensive. I remember how in the original novel Jaws the chief remembers how badly he wanted a Lacoste shirt, like the ones the summer people at Nantucket wore. But his mother sneered, called the Lacoste polo a “two-dollar shirt with a ten-dollar alligator,” or something like that. I guess this was supposed to be back in the 40s or 50s, but it was pretty funny to read in the early 70s, when Lacostes already cost about $30.

The best-made polos I’ve seen these days are from Fred Perry. Their detailing is perfect and everyone looks good in them. Alas, they too are a bit heavy, and quite expensive (around $90 most places).

I think the theory is that they last forever, and soften up after many wears and washing, and after you’ve had them many years you don’t care what you paid. They are an investment, in other words, like a $200 Mason Pearson hairbrush that lasts a lifetime, provided you don’t lose it. Myself, I’ve never dared “invest” in a Mason Pearson brush.

But I’ve found a new source for polo shirts, and it may surprise you. It’s Vistaprint, the online company that makes you business cards and letterheads. Not only can they sell you a polo for about $25, they’ll even embroider your insignia onto it.

I toyed around with their site recently, inventing country clubs and yacht clubs with funny names. Finally I settled on a navy polo bearing a black-sun logo and the words BLACK SUN YACHT CLUB.

I’m told yachting shirts are almost never black, as they absorb the sun, but that just makes the whole thing funnier!

Really, take a look at this mockup: obviously it’s not as detailed as a Fred Perry, with Fred’s contrasty trim at collar and sleeves. But you do have the choice of many makes and fabrics, including some in dry-fit tech synthetics. And you can get the personalized shirt embroidered and shipped to you in a week or so, all for under $30.

What I really want though, now, is a sleeveless polo dress.

Vladimir Putin and the World of Art

The world was in quite a pickle in 1944, the year Vladimir Putin was born. The Germans were being chased out of the Baltic Countries (soon to become slave satrapies of the USSR) and the historic Hanseatic Port of Riga was now a huge concentration camp, where eleven million prisoners of all nationalities were forced to build Liberty Ships until they dropped dead from hunger.

Little Vladimir knew nothing of this. His father was a leading apparatchiknik in the Bottle City of Kandor, beyond the Urals. Vlad lived a sheltered life. So sheltered that when he was fourteen and sent to prep school, the other boys laughed at him when the instructor asked for High Points of the Great Patriotic War and Vladimir Putin suggested the Battle of Mukden.

Vladimir didn’t mind. He consoled himself with his Paint-by-Numbers set (a legacy from his wealthy aunt) and dreamt of the day when the finest trollops and art galleries down Nevsky Prospekt would vie for his favors.

How Vladimir loved coming home for the long holidays! The soft incandescent light burning in the hallways, showing the way to the Fabergé-tiled washroom with the gold-plated faucets; for this had once been the dacha of Grand Duke Nicholas.

“Would you like soft pretzel for little breakfast, Vladimir Ivanovichki?” his mother whistled down the hall, using the diminutive of the familiar patronymic. “Soft pretzel good, come all way from Philadelphiosk!”

Soft Pretzels in the Quaker City

How did soft pretzels conquer the Quaker City? It all began about 1850, when an order of nuns decided to bake and sell soft pretzels in order to raise money for a school softball team. In those days pretzels cost only one cent, or three pretzels for a nickel. Soon someone noticed that it all looked like a scam, as softball hadn’t been invented yet. “This is true,” said Mother Superior Annabelle Drexel, OSX, “there is no softball. In truth, we are raising money for our field hockey and cricket teams.” Such a scandal resulted from this admission that the order of nuns had to move themselves and their school out to the farmlands of Radnor, where they built a pretzel factory that lasts to this day.
Philly-pretzel