Elegant.
Okay, I was charmed:
The essence thereof.
I’m not by any stretch of the imagination a difference feminist or a gender essentialist; there are differences, yes, of course there are, but they’re scattered in bell curves that overlap to an extraordinary degree, and even if one’s labeled Man and the other Woman, well, you never meet Man or Woman, do you? Just people. Who happen to be. And so.
I’m not a gender essentialist: for it to be at all meaningful (as essence, mind, essentially), you’d have to convince me that any conceivable woman has more in common with every other possible woman that she could with any conceivable man, and vice-versa. There are differences, of course there are, but we have so many different ways to be different together; why waste all your time looking for the Men who Always Do This or the Women who Never Do That and risk missing the people that are all around you?
Blanket statements like that, when the polarities are Male and Female, end up inevitably circling around one particular This ’n’ That which Men Always and Women Never (well, Hardly Ever): SEX. And while they can seem relatively harmless on the surface, leading to silly head-scratchers such as—
Men are simple creatures. Protoplasms. It is a strange irony that a woman can pretty much get whatever she wants from a guy with no arguments and no disagreements—nothing but “Absolutely, dear” and “Whatever you want, honey”—by doing just one thing (but doing it two or three or sometimes four times a week).
(And while I don’t doubt there’s some folks nodding along with the beat out there, there’s a whole lot of other folks going now hold on just a minute, what?) —But such seemingly harmless homilies can twist all of a sudden into duties and expectations the rest of us never knew were in the social contract—
What if your husband woke up one day and announced that he was not in the mood to go to work? If this happened a few times a year, any wife would have sympathy for her hardworking husband. But what if this happened as often as many wives announce that they are not in the mood to have sex? Most women would gradually stop respecting and therefore eventually stop loving such a man.
What woman would love a man who was so governed by feelings and moods that he allowed them to determine whether he would do something as important as go to work? Why do we assume that it is terribly irresponsible for a man to refuse to go to work because he is not in the mood, but a woman can—indeed, ought to—refuse sex because she is not in the mood? Why?
—and what was a seemingly harmless stupidity has become a collectively punishing generality, getting uglier with every Men Do and Women Don’t twist until we end up clutching at Spider Robinson’s Screwfly:
We’re all descended from two million years of rapists, every race and tribe of us, and we wouldn’t be human if we didn’t sometimes fantasize about just knocking you down and taking it. The truly astonishing thing is how seldom we do. I can only speculate that most of us must love you a lot.
Now Tiptree wrote “Screwfly” for a reason, and people who said shit like that were definitely part of the unbearable wrong that fueled that particular pocket of outrage in her head. But the coldly horrible what-if of the story is precisely what if Men Always Did; what if there really is an US and a THEM and an unbridgeable gender war between. —It wouldn’t look like a John Gray sitcom, is what.
(Yes. I know: Black mollies. —I never said the idea doesn’t exist. I said it isn’t true.)
I’m not a gender essentialist, but—
(Ha ha.)
No, seriously. Or at least as serious as I want to be, whistling once more past this graveyard. —When I’m out and about with the Littlest Wookie (so named because of her fluting and hooting and not at all because of her furry back), I’ve noticed it’s always women who are smiling at me, nodding, saying hello and oh my and how cute. It’s always women who are suddenly stepping close to rub her head without asking. It’s always women, and never men.
(And before you tell me it’s because as a father strolling through downtown with a baby Björned I’m clearly good breedstock and willing to invest energy in my offspring which does something all unconscious-like to her uterus or maybe it’s her hormones which explains why, you should note the crucial grammatical difference between “women always” and “always women,” and start maybe questioning what you should have been questioning all along: my perceptions, and yours, and theirs. —I’m lying, for instance: the cashier who gave us a 20% discount on a hefty load of groceries because the Littlest Wookie was fussy was, after all, a man.)
Okay, babies, but how about salesmen? —In my job I see a lot of email ripped from a lot of corporate email accounts and let me tell you: salesmen? Hands down the worst for the nasty jokes and the porn and the shockjock photos. Saleswomen? Not at all.
So there’s that.
Sing, Muse, of the wrath of Althæaphage—
Go, relish the rest of the post that surrounds this glorious catalog of truth-eaters:
...the howling roil of right-wing authoritarians, of spite retailers, blowhards, closeted gay ministers, cranks, Bible lickers, of nerds-gone-bad, of flag humpers, pseudo-intellectuals, chair-based saucer investigators, of stern-bodiced rape fantasists, of millennarians, Know-Nothings, Free Silver enthusiasts, jingoes, Oreos, Foursquare McPhersonites, splinter Baptists, pseudo-Methodists, Pentecostal highway parishioners, of cynical purveyors of purpose-driven things and of AMWAY, of Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, Graham’s miracle flour, Kellogg’s abstinence-promoting Corn Flake Cereal, or other products unevaluated by the FDA that are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease; of Goldwater idolators, ‘Scoop Jackson liberals,’ McCarthyites, Yankees fans, Likudniks, the mean of spirit, dupes, chumps, Dartmouth grads, shysters, four-flushers, dog-kickers, self-dealers, Professors of X at James Madison University, wingnut welfare skillet-lickers and beak-wetters; of wingnut welfare high-rollers, pimps, queens, bathroom-stall fellators, and generational dependents; of certain former or current WWF/WWE personalities and/or karate movie stars and/or minor Baldwin brothers, convicted Watergate felons, washed-up Red Sox pitchers, and/or 1970s Detroit-area rock musicians, as well as unnh and gaah, not to mention hunnh...
Form / Content,
or, The nail replaced.
Douglas Wolk incisively surveys the brand new and much-improved whitehouse.gov; Ben Orenstein tells you about the little, critical change you won’t see at first glance. (While we’re on about websites and such, would someone please give the New Republic whatever it takes to make theirs usable? The litany of “I’d link to this article I wrote for TNR but their website is as we all know borked” from the wonkosphere is beyond embarrassing at this point. —I ought to be able to click on a link from one of Douglas’s columns and bring up a directory of all of them; I ought to be able to search for his name and not have the first page of hits be nothing but front page teasers for the article I just read and a link to Marty Peretz’ columns. How else am I going to point y’all to the Critical Browser stuff?)
A cold day in hell.
I still haven’t heard the speech, or seen it. I did hear a bunch of attorneys and paralegals cheering from down the hall, and then I heard some historians talk about the speech on NPR (“I think it’s clear Obama decided to deliver one type of speech, and not another type of speech”). —I’m sorry, I’m just not much for this sort of thing, I guess, unless I am. And for whatever reason I’m not, today. But reading Spencer Ackerman gave me a taste of the thrill people are talking about, so hey. Thanks. (You are reading Ackerman, right?)
Brand new day.
(Also, there’s a new blog.)
Partisan hackery.
Shouldn’t the supposed crimes of the Bush administration be paid for by Barack Obama?
Yeah, I know. Maybe I’ll feel better about it all later today. But right now my back hurts and I’m grouchy and I have to load some data into a database downtown while he’s taking the oath of office and anyway his first words wouldn’t ever be arrest that sonofabitch. I guess I’m just a partisan hack. —I just wish I had a party, you know?
We’re gonna make it after all.
From Making Light, some photos by Scott Wyngarden:
I’ve never blogged under a Democratic administration. I wonder what it’s like.
Pith from the comments:
So I commiserated with Julia over the whole having to read Twilight thing; she said, “oh, you really should. Feel for me, I mean. If Susan Pevensie wrote an Ann Rice novel…” —And would you look at the air now, full of glitter?
But on the back side it didn’t say nothing
That side was made for you and me.
A whole lot of folks were thrilled beyond words when Pete Seeger stood up and sang the whole damn thing. They linked to uploaded videos of the historic public event to share with friends and family and country. HBO, who bought the rights to broadcast the inauguration concert, are busy yanking down every free copy they can find. —While you can apparently watch The Whole Damn Thing on hbo.com, there’s no linkable version of This Moment or That that I can find; what century are we in, again? (But apparently, neglecting to broadcast the invocation given by Bishop Gene Robinson—the sop tossed to Obama’s GLBTQ supporters, furious over the choice of Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at the actual inaugural? That wasn’t HBO. That’s all on Obama’s Presidential Inaugural Committee.)
Okay, so it isn’t as baldly bad as I’d thought. —Anyway, here’s a version from what looks to have been German television:
Appropriative.
This didn’t happen to me. It happened to a friend of mine who used to work at Powell’s. I’ve never worked at Powell’s. She was standing next to a display of Riverdance photobooks or stacking a display of Celtic Christmas photobooks or photobooks titled maybe The Dublin of Joyce, I don’t know, but anyway you get the point: stacks of grass that green and grey stone walls and smiling old folks in tweed and maybe a pint or two of the good dark stuff. Anyway there’s a customer, a black man, and he smiles and says Ireland, huh?
And she says, yeah, it’s always a bestseller, all this Irish stuff. —She usually worked in the red room; the books on Ireland would have been in the purple room. But this might have taken place in the orange room. I don’t know for sure.
Anyway he shrugs and says well Ireland, it’s kind of like an Africa for white people.
And my friend allows as how okay, yeah, she can see that.
And he leans across the stacks of books and says, thing is, most of us actually came from Africa.
I’m not going to link to it, the critical contretemps that’s USsed and THEMmed its merry way across LiveJournal (mostly), in part because I have read maybe a teaspoonful of it, in part because it is far more heat than light (my fingers scorched already by what little I read myself), in part because “linking” to it would require nigh-daily updates longer than this post will ever be, even accounting for all the posts and threads that have since been flocked up tight, in part because people I respect and even count as friends however internetty are saying inflammatory things on either side of the divide, but mostly because I haven’t even read the book whose discussion started? sparked? is the focal point? of the current fine mess, so I wasn’t going to say anything at all.
Still, these ripples will keep lapping even at the shores of my little backwater.
But if I say something like how it’s an incredibly dick move to say you haven’t read the book, it’s such an egregious example of X that you couldn’t finish the book, because I mean come on, how can you say something so surely without reading it for yourself, well, someone might say why should I have to read the book to have an opinion because X and anyway I never used the word egregious, why aren’t you engaging my argument?
And if I say something like how it’s an incredibly dick move to say if someone hasn’t read the book what business do they have stating such a divisive opinion about it, because I mean come on, one of the unstated goals of an undergraduate education is to be able to say things about books one’s never read, well, someone might say yes but their argument is wrong I mean X why I’d never, and anyway that’s ridiculous, and why aren’t you engaging my argument?
Which would leave me protesting that I’m not trying to engage any arguments, I’m just trying to point out that if your goal is to have a conversation then you’ve lost by opening with a dick move and if you’re just preaching to the choir well that’s fine but realize what you’re doing and don’t pretend otherwise, but that leaves me as the guy in the middle with the squashed armadillos saying on the one hand but on the other and anyway a mild and not-at-all-inconveniencing pox on both your houses, and no one likes to hang out with him.
And if I say the reason I’m not engaging any arguments is because I haven’t read the book in question, that might leave you with the impression you’ve sussed out which side I’m really on. But then I’d have to point out that the move in question as described sounds dicey as all get-out and I’d never attempt it myself and the earlier attempt that some have cited, which I have read, I’ve got to tell you didn’t work in my opinion, well, that might leave you with the impression you’ve sussed out which side I’m really on, and if so could you tell me? I mean would you look at the crazy on my face? Is that the time? Whoa.
None of which anyway is what I wanted to say.
What I wanted to point out:
This entire argument, about cultural appropriation and all the isms that implies, is raging around contemporary works set rather firmly in the genre of fantasy.
I can’t think of another contemporary genre whose tropes are so nakedly the fruits of cultural appropriation. Whose toolkit is so openly dependent on the tactics of cultural appropriation. —We go to write about the fantastic, and so we sauce our pastoral dish with a biting dash of Other, because what is more strange or fantastic than the Stuff from Beyond the Fields We Know? —And more: we appropriate our appropriations, cannibalizing the books our books are made of until Fantasyland begins to take on its own dim shape, with folklore and folkways we all agree on that nonetheless have never existed anywhere in the REAL world. Miles and miles of books and not a TRUE or AUTHENTIC moment in any of them, and how proud we are of that!
Because look at the beauty. Look at the power. Look what can be done with these tools. But look at the tools; look where they come from; look at what we’re doing with them, and what we’re doing it to. —That’s where the critical discussion needs to be.
(But it is! cry US and THEM. That’s exactly where we are! Weren’t you paying any attention? And anyway I think I made one too many dick moves myself to be able to take on the mantle of Reasoned Discussion, and also anyway, I haven’t read the goddamn book—)
Recession.
n. That period of time in which it is seen as economically feasible to run infomercials advertising a device that sharpens disposable razor blades. (cf. Depression, n., that period of time in which you can’t sell enough devices that sharpen disposable razor blades for $14.99 after mail-in rebate to cover your marketing costs.)
Jack-in-the-pulpit; onyx; yellow sapphire; Pantone® 14-0848 (mimosas!); Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn.
It says something that it’s only now as this blog-thing celebrates its seventh year that I’ve figured out how convenient it can be to post-date entries—so that I write them whenever it’s convenient (or whenever I actually think of them), but they appear whenever I actually want them to appear.
The requisite link to the first post.
The colors of the seventh anniversary are, apparently, yellow and off-white, which makes for an appealing synchronicity with Pantone’s choice of color of the year: a “warm, engaging yellow” they named Mimosa. “In a time of economic uncertainty and political change,” they say, “optimism is paramount and no other color expresses hope and reassurance more than yellow.” And they are the global authority on color and provider of professional color standards for the design industries! Says so on the label. So fret not about the folk wisdom that says yellow walls make kids twitchy and loud.
Seven’s traditional gifts are copper and wool; the modern gift is a desk set, which it seems can be combined with one of my preferences such as golf or collecting. Hmm. Golf aside, I think I’m going to like this year better than previously reported. —It’s suggested I watch The Desk Set: what night’s good for you, O Spouse?
Other odds and ends.
Since they keep piling up, and for whatever reason I’m in a pithy mood: Dylan Meconis has a new website; Sara Ryan, who has new glasses, points us to Vice’s interview with Ursula LeGuin; the Spouse has had a tasty epiphany; and this, while not strictly speaking safe for mixed company, might nonetheless prompt a small slim smile.
“They’re all going to suck, people! They’re all going to suck!”
Douglas Wolk demonstrates his marvelous politesse:
Still, there’s a cautionary tale within the pages of the graphic novel. In the ’40s, the Betty Grable-ish superheroine Sally Jupiter (played by Carla Gugino in Snyder’s film) agrees to star in a biopic, to be called Silk Spectre: the Sally Jupiter Story. Of course, after the director and the studio have their way with it, its working title becomes Sally Jupiter: Law In Its Lingerie, then She-Devils in Silk, and it eventually appears as a bondage-heavy exploitation flick called Silk Swingers of Suburbia. What goes into the Hollywood machine is never what comes out. Snyder’s Watchmen may be a terrific movie—but if it is, what’s great about it won’t be what’s great about Moore and Gibbons’ book.
