Tracie had one, William Serrin, who taught her reporting and, in her words, "how to cut the crap and not cry about it."

Megan: "There was an adjunct in the German department at my university who was the first older guy I ever wanted to bone, but I only think about him under rather specific circumstances. There was a prof in grad school I wanted to sue for sex discrimination and now wish I had, and one on my study abroad who hated me who I was randomly put in touch with a couple years ago." Megan's biggest intellectual influence was her high school German teacher.

Don: "Steven Bronner - total asshole. Marxism. was considered the 'voice of new Socialism' — i considered him the 'voice of old lechery' Marjorie Howes - Joyce seminar and Irish literature courses. it was all about the material maybe. Some other dude, who taught my satire class - i think he hit on me. perv." Don reads Ulysses every year, for whatever reason.

Anna had two favorite professors: one taught a creative nonfiction class; one taught a Dostoyevsky seminar. (True story: The nun who taught my fucking high school AP English class pronounced it "Dostoyvesky" and I think that's why I spent that year sampling eating disorders in lieu of literary greats.)

Balk went to college for a semester and a half, which explains why he is a genius.

And the DrunkenStepfather is also an autodidact! Not only did he not attend college, he doesn't even really read, although he made an exception for the Barbara Walters memoir and The Art Of The Deal. (Which I have also read.)

The one professor I still think about is Francis Fukuyama, with whom I took a graduate class at George Mason after I dropped out, namely to see if I could get away with taking a graduate class without actually graduating. The readings overlapped probably 50% with readings I'd been assigned in a (much more expensive) seminar I'd taken at Penn, but somehow he made it so I could actually understand them. No easy task, as Professor X could tell ya.

And finally, because I'm obviously deliberately ignoring the obvious point that "Maybe If Your Career Involved The Application Of Critical Theory Or Ancient Philosophy Or Whatever You Would Think More About Your Old Professors And Less About This Fucking Website," I asked my friend Jess. "Totally," she said. "Jim Nechas. He would have been a great blogger."

In The Basement Of The Ivory Tower

Personally, I was weird, and shy, and ADD, and got good grades. I was the type of kid whose sixth birthday wish was that there would be no gravity. I was a fucking leper until...I got my braces out? Something like that. I've blacked it out, obviously.

It's a weird thing, being that kid who would do anything, anything, to trade places with anyone just one measly rank higher on the social totem pole, or the inconspicuousness pole. Time passes so slowly when you're a kid it's hard to fathom life after childhood; you're so much closer to innocence, to that kinder, more just womb of unconditional parental love that it's almost easier to conceive of the Afterlife than any Life After at that age, and so you cope and hold out and grow up and assume you were bullied so you would understand, so you would have empathy for others, so you would grow into the lovable misanthrope you turned out to be, so you would discover Dinosaur Jr., whatever.

Somewhere you forget kids are still getting bullied, that you boiled over with a rage you didn't know you still had when you saw that girl who mocked you every day in religion class — fucking religion class!? — at the reunion, and she's got a baby now, maybe they'll be bullies too; you should have gone and told her off but for the fact that she was posing for MySpace photos, admirably maintained backside turned toward the camera, with all those people she still hangs out with...and anyway you learned long ago to turn the other cheek as a life philosophy, not a weakness. That from alienation could come...if not exactly triumph, a pretty easy "A" on the big Kafka paper sophomore year. Etc. etc. etc. Etc. etc. etc. it's not about you, really. Have you learned nothing from the bullying? You still haven't answered any questions for your people.

Why do kids bully? And what of those precious kids who, for whatever reason, don't participate in the bullying? Who befriend the meek and the bullied from a place of social dominance? What are those kids smoking? Because the world needs more of that.

A Boy The Bullies Love To Beat Up, Repeatedly [NY Times]

Jessica: completed five regulars.
Maria: failed to complete a regular, did seven "girl" style.
Jennifer: did none. Try the girl kinds, I offered. "i failed at those too. i also cannot do a headstand
if that matters. oh and add to list: i can neither ride a bike nor swim."
Megan: managed 10 girly-style before her back cracked. But she is hungover.

Me: I did five. My nose got really, really close to the floor, and I blame a dust ball for wrecking my concentration. Then I tried to do girl push-ups. Much effort was expended finding a towel and placing it on the ground so as not to punish my knees. I managed 22. Then Snoop Dogg appeared on The View and I needed to get up. I totally could have done thirty. Not that I ever will again.

In a similar vein, a certain blogger who briefly dated a certain other blogger who looks exactly the same as her (blond, firm, tattooed) offered that maybe dating dudes who look like you is a way of manifesting one's love for oneself — and on the flipside, preventing those inevitable pangs of self-hate. "There is nothing more disturbing than fucking a guy who has a nicer ass than you do," she pointed out. Which brings us to a second truth: It's not so much what you actually look like, but what you think you look like. Personally, we always go a few shades chubbier than ourselves, probably on account of the body dysmorphic disorder, but with even fuller lips than ours (because we were teased about them in grade school).

Incidentally, not all of our poll candidates agreed with us. One said she actually tended to date men who look like her mother (whoah!) and another beautiful, lily-white friend of ours that an ex once nicknamed "Porcelain Doll" says she goes after almost exclusively swarthy, Pakistani 'Axis of Evil 'types. And she's the spawn of Holocaust survivors! Rebel! Both Jezebel interns date boys who sort of look like them, down to a short torso on one of them: "My boyfriend was just telling me all his friends from when he was three thought that he wore his pants high because he liked it that way, when in fact, he is not wearing his pants high, but does have a small torso. They just never noticed and thought he had a stick up his ass. Like, his torso is the size of mine. Hot! Not."

Girls Send Macho Men Packing For The Girly Guys [MSNBC]
Why Couples Are As Fat As Each Other [Telegraph]
Related: Fat Is The New Hot
In Praise Of The Homelier Man

Jezebel = a derogatory name a wrinkly old lady in Macon, GA calls the mom (played by Barbara Eden) from "Harper Valley PTA," or anyone who wears too-big earrings. Probably from the Bible. Overused in classic rock, and likely on evangelical pulpits. Bordering on so religious and corny to make it ironically cool. But maybe still too commonly used to be truly ironically cool.

When we first heard the word we thought it sounded like the name of a store on the boardwalk in Wildwood, which is sort of like the downmarket Coney Island of the Jersey shore, and the store would be sort of like a downmarket Claire's, only with the requisite Coed Naked shirts.

Or as Gawker's Choire Sicha put it (more succinctly), "Jezebel" conjures "dressing like a naughty nurse on Halloween."

Not being ones to ever hate on anything without quantitative evidence culled from a demographically diverse focus group, we emailed our friends:

"I know that Trump Plaza has a new club they've named Jezebel's," wrote Rose, helpfully reinforcing the Jersey shore association but adding that she herself saw it as a better name for a Frederick's of Hollywood-esque lingerie store. Others saw "Stevie Nicks" and "Eartha Kitt", "Wicca" and "feminist zine." Tracie saw Jezebel as having "cleavage, but in a 'heaving bosom' way instead of like, 'big tits' or 'nice rack', which dovetailed with Jessica's description of "an older, lascivious, loosed-boobed lesbian who wears essential oils, rolls her r's in foreign words, re-uses her coffee grinds and has not removed a hair on her body since the early sixties."Our friend Maggie saw "a women's roller-derby team from somewhere like Baltimore. They would call themselves 'The Jailhouse Jezebels" and sport flame tattoos, full sleeves, pompadours, unfortunate animal prints, Bettie Page haircuts, all the rockabilly accessories, etc. etc. Some of the more zaftig members would also be part of a burlesque troupe" and our totally not-related-to-Maggie friend imagined "a suicide girl who's a little bit overweight and has a Bettie Page haircut and writes erotica."

We were beginning to sort of like "Jezebel," but only because we like to be contrarian. Then the men in our lives weighed in: "Jezebel sounds like a young, modestly hot and somewhat subversive girl who thinks she's hotter and more evil than she actually is and believes those traits confer more power than they actually do," Mark opined, while Don, who is more of an ass-man than Mark, wrote:

"Jezebel = slightly above "brat" and "princess" in class when placed on the backside of sweats."

We had visions: The woman in front of us in the Mister Softee line wearing the "It ain't easy being EASY" shirt. Nipple piercings. Britney. In those fishnets! Britney: in cap sleeves, and cowboy hats. Britney: at the tanning salon again, because she can afford to have one in her house but then she'd, well, never get out out of the house. In an era of famous for being famous, Jezebel sounded to us like slutty for the sake of sluttiness, bitchy for the sake of bitchiness, girls "with full-sleeve tattoos who will not only punch you for talking shit while drunk at some party but have their friends rob you while you're knocked out," as our friend Loren astutely observed.

A Jezebel, to us, was someone who acted badly with impunity. As if there were no consequences.

Friends, there are consequences. Man, are there consequences.

Don't get us wrong. We are irresponsible. We are gossipy. We are bitchy and we are sometimes sluts. We even have the odd piercing and book of Wicca, though not really about the Wicca, and none of us own
sweatpants with words written on the backside, even ironically. But there are responsibilities that accompany the freedoms that have allowed us to live life with all the options boys have, and we're taking back the name "Jezebel" because we don't take them lightly. Throughout the course of modern history the vast majority women who have been called "Jezebel," have, like us, not exactly been thrilled about it. The ones who call themselves Jezebels, meanwhile, have obscured the fact that there is room, in a Girls Gone Wild world, for sluts that don't drink from shotglasses, or iconoclastic ladies who aren't drawn to the whole rockabilly nipple-piercing thing, or frank, sexually-liberated "naughty" women who actually have a modicum of substance — not to mention like, a moral or two — beneath the whole "we are bad girls and proud of it blah blah" bullshit.

Basically, we're saying we've earned the right to call ourselves "Jezebel," and only feel a slight twinge of total cheesiness about it. And the twinge has faded considerably since we started watching "Tyra" every day.

[Graphic by Cheryl Campbell]