Buddhist Marketer

Quoted in The New York Observer

From Max Abelson’s “Boola Boola Boola…and Moola! Aging Yalies Raise Hell on Upper West Side” in The New York Observer:

Lithe 31-year-old Anittah Patrick, 1999 class secretary, in a Yale-blue dress and four-inch heels, was outside the townhouse. “You’re not a full meal, you’re a snack,” she told the Transom—Class of 2006.

“There was at least one woman in my age group looking for older single men,” she said, gesturing toward the townhouse, where techno party lights built into the entryway ceiling were blasting blue. Ms. Patrick is throwing a Feb Club party in Aruba on Valentine’s Day.

Click here to check out pictures from Feb Club for Old People, 2008 edition.

Beauty, the male gaze, feminism, & my ovaries

I’d like to make my blog more accessible so I’m going to work on getting a transcript of this, too.

Added 10/2/2008:

As women who are raised to, um, to really value our intelligence but more importantly value ourselves as a function of our intelligence rather than as a function of our beauty, I’m wondering if, and I appreciate the possibility of the dialectic here, I’m wondering if that competes with our inner cavewomen, and I’m thinking about Lacan, which is something that Rachel also taught me, and the male gaze, and I’m recognizing as I get older how, um, seductive, not seductive in a bad way, but, how really, um, there’s something very powerful about a man that, um, looks at a woman, and, you know, women look at babies and men look at women, and you know, how much is my not letting myself be valued by my appearance how much of that is an act of aggression almost against the male gaze and how much of that is therefore in competition with my ultimate desire to be a mother and have a family and is there an inherent tension between wanting to be um, or feeling as if my self-worth is partly a function of external accolades — and my hair is so big that I’m hearing the crackling of my hair against the bag of the chair, awesome — um, so that’s just something I’m thinking about, I don’t know what the answer is, I don’t know necessarily that any of that is true, surely there’s gotta be an elegant way to figure out what that balance is, but I’m also — you know, I don’t want to be that woman that makes a man feel that (3:37) that I don’t admire him, because I’m so trained to project a certain je ne sais quoi you know I don’t want to be that person who’s terrible on a first date or that you know sort of scares men away with, with whatever because I mean the reality is there’s so many men that I’ve admired or that I do admire and I kind of know that I act like an idiot or I just don’t know how to act, umm, if there’s a sort of frisson of potential romantic pleasure that’s in the ether, and um, I don’t know if that’s also tied into my discomfort or lack of ease in allowing myself to court the male gaze and simply be beautiful and walk around with huge hair in Soho so that people, men from Montenegro can come up to me and tell me about the airplanes they design and ask for my number, so I don’t know, I don’t know what the answers are, I mean I would like to think (5:07) that it’s possible for my future daughters, named Odessa and Jakarta, um, to be both, to be comfortable being beautiful but also comfortable performing quote unquote and have the grace to transition seamlessly — I don’t know. Hope you guys had a great weekend.