Woman Enough to Wield a Riding Crop

(Spoilers Galore in what follows)

I just bought the Criterion Collection DVD of Gillian Armstrong's 1979 film My Brilliant Career.  It's one of my all-time favorite movies, and although I already own the 2005 Blue Underground DVD, I thought a Criterion edition with their supplementary material would be a good investment. The Criterion includes a couple of new interviews and Armstrong's student short film One Hundred a Day, which brought her to the attention of the producer Margaret Fink and soon led to the making of My Brilliant Career.

An interview with Fink on the Blue Underground DVD informed me that the first major financial backer of the project was very nervous about Sybylla the main character's refusal to marry a wealthy, eligible, and swoonworthy suitor.  He changed his mind when he saw the final cut, but how interesting that a commercially-minded male industry type would agree with two radical gay male writers on that point, though their opinion was formed after they'd seen the film.  Years later, Fink and Armstrong were still a bit nervous about it, protesting that it wasn't a feminist decision. I think it is, but then I don't think that counts against it.  (As Rita Mae Brown wrote in a note in her second novel, To the non-feminist reader: What's wrong with you?)  

Armstrong says that such an ending would be more acceptable today, but I'm not so sure of that.  What would, I think, be acceptable would be for Sybylla to marry Harry, live comfortably in his mansion with a room of her own, numerous babies (tended by the help), as the camera pans over a row of her books visible and she writes in her workroom.  For her to end up as she does in Armstrong's film, single, writing at night in her parents' rundown farmhouse in the outback, is less so.  I think it's the difference between a woman's movie and a feminist movie. The former is okay, but there is a difference.

I am ambivalent about the Criterion Collection, which I think is somewhat overrated, partly as a result of all the "Criterion Closet" YouTube videos I've watched.  In these, industry-connected people are turned loose with a bag in a big closet of Criterion videos.  They gush over this cornucopia of great cinema, though the movies they choose tend to be pedestrian and predictable, and while I think it would be fun to have my pick of their products too, there are many great movies that aren't in the Collection and I want them too.  While Criterion video transfers are excellent and the supplements are generally good, a Criterion edition means that older releases of the same movies often become unavailable, and Criterion editions cost more, often a lot more.  (I know -- I can and often do buy used copies of the other versions.)  Criterion editions are usually only in one language, unlike mainstream releases which may have several, and that can be valuable, as can subtitles in more than one language. But that's just me; I doubt many people notice or care about this.

Criterion editions also feature printed essays by prominent critics, though these tend to be of uneven quality.  My Brilliant Career has one by Carrie Rickey, a critic I used to read in the Village Voice if memory serves. Rickey's essay is all right, but I quibble with one of her takes: "And while there is a fabulous kiss in My Brilliant Career, the first time Harry leans in to buss Sybylla, she hits him upside the head with a riding crop."

This is technically true, but I think it misreads the scene.  Context: It takes place during a big party on Sybylla's maternal grandmother's estate.  Sybylla has sneaked out of the upper-class ball in the big house to party with the workers in the barn.  Class is an issue that I haven't seen addressed in discussions of My Brilliant Career.  Sybylla's mother comes from bluebloods, her father is the salt of the earth. Thanks to childhood visits to her mother's mother, she knows her way around a formal dinner, but she also loves working people.  (Miles Franklin, the author of the 1901 novel, eventually became a labor organizer in the United States.)  Her suitor Harry Beecham drags her by the arm away from the barn and brusquely proposes marriage.  She taunts him, which understandably makes him angry; he grabs her in a classic movie move and pulls her roughly to him.  It's at that point that she hits him upside the head with a riding crop. I think Rickey plays down Harry's aggression in the scene.  (I also don't agree that their eventual kiss is fabulous, but decide for yourself.)

But anyway, if you have never seen My Brilliant Career, you should. It holds up very well after forty years, and it looks great for a relatively low-budget movie, as lush as a Merchant-Ivory prestige production.  Despite my reservations about Criterion, this edition shows off its visuals, and the English subtitles enabled me to understand some mumbled dialogue I'd missed before.  For that matter, read the book.

Sauce for the Goose, Sauce for the Gander

The composer, diarist, and critic Ned Rorem was born in Richmond, Indiana, a few months before my father was born in 1923.  At 96 and counting, Rorem has outlived my father by fourteen years.  He was still composing as late as 2010.  I've never been able to get much from Rorem's music, though I keep trying; but his books have given me a lot of pleasure, from the notorious Paris and New York diaries, down to Facing the Night: A Diary (1999-2005) and Musical Writings (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2006).

Raised a Quaker, Rorem later became an atheist, but he is still a pacifist, and I was intrigued by these remarks in Facing the Night, dated 13 June 2000 (17):

With those feminists of yore [?] who claimed that men have it better than women, one must agree, but for this crucial disclaimer: Women are not subject to the draft.  The draft eats up young males, whether they will or not, forcing them to learn how to kill their brothers in ignorance of whatever they're fighting for.  Indeed, if their male superiors - inevitably above draft age - find women so dispensable, why not form our armies from exclusively female combatants?

No, "intrigued" is the wrong word; more like "mildly offended."  Rorem is annoyingly glib and simplistic here.  Biologically speaking, men are much more dispensable than women, since human females usually bear only one child at a time, and are tied up by gestation for nine months and by early child care for several years.  Men, by contrast, can inseminate many women in a short time.  A cultural materialist like the anthropologist Marvin Harris could argue that this fact explains the male near-monopoly on military activity.

But that's the least of it.  As I just indicated, men have fiercely maintained war as a male preserve.  A popular rationale is that women are what men are defending by killing each other, either directly by keeping their opponents physically away from them or, more piously by casting women as a holy good, like the Nation itself.  (I don't know if all countries are regarded as feminine, but the US definitely is.)  It's not very convincing.  First, women (and children) have never been exempt from the horrors of war: massacred, enslaved, or raped, they have been regarded as prizes.  (The word "rape" originally meant the carrying away of women, not their forcible use by their captors, though the distinction was notional: soldiers abducted enemy women in order to fuck them.)  This reality is all over the Hebrew Bible (and indeed world literature in general), which regulates the sexual use of female captives from areas where Israel had not been ordered simply to kill every living thing.  There's also the phenomenon of military prostitution: the US military requires the nations in which Our Boys are Protecting Democracy to provide them with comfort women, among other vital services.

Second, like male-homosocial spaces in general, the military has traditionally been regarded as a refuge from women who might nag men to wipe their butts, pick up their underwear, take out the garbage, or refrain from blowing their noses on the floor.  Ironically, perhaps, joining the army is just going from the frying pan to the fire in this respect, from the demands of nagging moms to abusive drill sergeants and endless chickenshit barracks policing.  I suppose that the deadly masochism of the male is a factor here; women express their version of this syndrome through heterosexual marriage.  So I don't take the claim of "defending our women" very seriously: military men and organizations view women as more dispensable even than men.

One reason I like the term and concept of "patriarchy" is that, as someone has defined it, it arranges people of both sexes by their relationship to older men.  Do the Fathers care about the young men they send to war?  Not very much, and they manfully subdue their care in the service of Higher Values like power and profit.  Do they care about the young women they claim to be defending and protecting against the buck Negro, the Mexican, the Hun, the Gook, the Hajji?  Oh, my dear, possibly even less than that.  Male supremacy might be the last survival of feudalism and its forerunners.  But Enlightenment values have not managed to improve things much in this area.

I also noticed that at the time Rorem wrote those words, the United States hadn't had a draft for decades.  (Though, true, young men were and are required to register in case the draft is reinstated.) And of course, increasing numbers of women have been going into combat to defend Our Oil Companies (which really are sacred), where they too can be maimed and killed, or maim and kill others.  Equality, yay!  Maybe I shouldn't expect even a gay man of Rorem's vintage to have a very nuanced grasp of sexual politics, but his view of war and the military also leaves a lot to be desired.

Men have been whining that they have it rough too at least since the advent of Second Wave feminism ("feminists of yore"?).   They tend to ignore the fact that feminists have been vocal about the harm done to men by patriarchy all along, and have tried to engage them in the effort to eradicate sexism.  I suppose the problem is that feminism is run by, y'know, girls, and they want their own show; even collaboration as equals seems unacceptable.  A men's movement against sexism is fine with me, but what we've had always ends up blaming women for men's disadvantages, perhaps because blaming other men is so much scarier.  Dorothy Dinnerstein wrote a lot about this problem in The Mermaid and the Minotaur (Harper, 1976).  I've quoted her before, but today I'll add this observation; rereading it reminds me just why I found Rorem's remarks so faulty.

I have seen on the faces of some men who are on the whole quite likable a certain smile that I confess I find deeply unattractive: a helpless smile of self-congratulation when some female disadvantage is referred to. And I have heard in their voices a tone that (in the context of what women put up with) is equally unattractive: a tone of self-righteous, self-pitying aggrievement when some male disadvantage becomes obvious. This sense of being put upon that many men feel in the fact of evidence that the adult balance of power is not at every point by a safe margin in their favor seems based on the implicit axiom that to make life minimally bearable, to keep their very chins above water, to offset some outrageous burden that they carry, they must at least feel that they are clearly luckier and mightier than women are [215ff].

"Self-righteous, self-pitying aggrievement" says it very exactly.  If I were like many people, I'd call Dinnerstein prophetic; but she was describing a problem of her own time, and much older.  I'm not putting Rorem down, however; I enjoyed Facing the Night very much overall, and it gave me more than just this bit to write about here.

And Don't Hold the Guacamole

There are writers who are known as writers' writers: they are appreciated more by their colleagues than by the general reading public, because of their technical expertise and willing to experiment with their art.  I was interested in "experimental" artists when I was a kid, though I was generally liked and appreciated their theories and their lives more than their work.  Now I see experimental art as an attempt to appropriate the prestige of the sciences for the arts.  At best, to support the metaphor, an artistic experiment should confirm an artistic theory, and in my opinion they rarely do.  When a writer I respect recommends such work, I often follow through, but I'm usually disappointed.  That probably reflects badly on me, not on the work, but there you are.  I'm not, I think, a naive or unsophisticated reader, but maybe I'm the wrong kind of writer.

Carol Emshwiller seems to be such a writers' writer.  Wikipedia, for example, refers to her fiction as "avant-garde", and she herself calls it "experimental", though she adds: "Now I'm passionate about what I think of as postmodern. (I've read all sorts of conflicting definitions of postmodern, so I'm not sure I'm right about what I think it is.)"  She's never won a Hugo (science fiction fans') award, but she has won a Nebula (the Science Fiction Writers of America -- hence, a writers' writer).  I believe I got interested in her work because Ursula K. Le Guin wrote some appreciations of it.  At some point I found her 2002 novel The Mount at the library, and found it impressive but rather icy and inhuman, which was probably intentional.  Then last year I read a Le Guin essay which mentioned Carmen Dog (1988), and I've been meaning to get to it ever since.  Finally, yesterday, I did so.

In Carmen Dog, women are turning into other animals and female animals are turning into women.  Emshwiller tells the story mostly from the viewpoint of one of the latter, Pooch, a family pet who's turning human while retaining many of the traits of her breed.  When one of her owner turns into a huge snapping turtle and bites its baby, Pooch runs away with the baby into New York City, where she almost becomes an opera singer, is captured along with other changing creatures by a male scientist who believes that they can be forced to revert if proper discipline is imposed on them, and then by a group of male scientists who want to recover motherhood for men, since women have in their view failed to do the job properly.  These are all familiar tropes in feminist science fiction, which Emshwiller exploits, turns on their heads, and otherwise plays with.  She's very much in control, and her writing is tight and ironic, with a satirical edge reminiscent of Jane Austen.

For example:

All those creatures that have been kept relatively germfree in the doctor's basement are scheduled for artificial insemination the day after tomorrow.  The Academy uses only the best genes in the nation, those belonging to governors, generals (three star or above), atomic scientists, as well as those of the directors of nuclear reactors, presidents of the largest corporations, oil magnates, and so forth.  The men picked are splendid, tall, and for the most part blonde.  All earning well over $100,000 a year, not counting perks. Of course it has taken time for these men to achieve status in their fields, so most of them are by now paunchy and bald.  (Since the imagination is suspect particularly at present, artist' and poets' genes are not used.  Besides, it is hard to tell where artists come from.  Some have dreadfully wizened little parents) [210-11].

Looking again at this passage out of context, I realize that it sounds like a cliche, thinking perhaps of various eugenic fantasies about breeding a master race, of scientists caricatured as soulless control freaks who mock the arts and humanities and so on.  Unfortunately, such fantasies and scientists are still with us, promoting themselves and very much in the public eye.  But it works in situ.  Let's try another passage, about Pooch's encounter with a sinister figure who manipulates her into a three-way with another changer:

Pooch does learn a lot, though, that she had not even suspected before.  Knowledge that may stand her in good stead later on, though she hopes she will be able to use it with someone for whom she had some real feelings.  She had not been aware until now, for instance, of the exquisite sensitivity of the breasts, and especially had not been aware that the nipples of the male are, or so it seems, as sensitive as those of the female; nor had she realized the potential of the backs of the knees, not to mention the toes and the bottoms of the feet.  She had also not realized the many ways that music, ribbons, belts, pepper, and guacamole could be used [143-44].

Better, eh?  "Guacamole" is a fine, Austenish touch.

In addition to The Mount, which I think I had better reread, I've also read Ledoyt (1995), Emshwiller's non-science-fiction novel about a young girl growing up in the American West.  She has several other books, which I'll get to before long.  Carmen Dog drew me in.

Does Not Nature Itself Teach You That a Woman Should Not Shave Her Pits?

This item appeared in my newsfeed this morning because my Diversity-Manager friend commented on it.  (Names, except mine, are obscured to protect the guilty.)  In a way, his ex cathedra pronouncement was predictable, and of course I myself agree that women shouldn't be required to shave their body hair, any more than they should be required to wear the hijab or cover their heads when they meet a supreme religious leader.

What messed with my mind was DMF's simplistic appeal to Natural-Law doctrine, which I don't think he'd invoke in most contexts, and certainly not with regard to transgender issues.  (He may well not have realized he was doing so: he's not the most careful thinker.)  Quite apart from the fact this doctrine is a mainstay of antifeminist, antigay and antitrans bigots -- though the Born-Gay argument also relies on it -- it can't be applied consistently to human beings.  Nor does anyone do so: I alluded to the apostle Paul's decree that "nature" teaches that women shouldn't cut their hair but men should do so.  The passage is a marvel of incoherence, which is what one usually finds when people invoke Nature for any reason, for any cause (via).  (It's fascinating to me that some arbitrary religious requirements inspire contempt, while others inspire awe, with no criteria for the difference that I can discern.)

People shouldn't be required to modify their bodies in certain ways, but cutting or shaving hair, trimming nails, covering or uncovering themselves, painting or otherwise adorning themselves, are so ubiquitous in human cultures that such practices can reasonably called "natural," though no particular modification should be mandatory.  And anyone who denounces one given modification almost certainly will favor another.  Which practices (if any) should be forbidden can only be decided by deliberation and judgment, not by appeals to Nature or any other fixed rule. 

Cherchez la Lesbienne

The other day at the public library book sale I picked up a charming book I've been wanting to read for a long time: Diamonds Are a Dyke's Best Friend (Firebrand Books, 1988) by Yvonne Zipter, an informal look at lesbians and softball.  I just finished it, and enjoyed it all the way through.  Zipter, a freelance journalist and poet, had found softball a helpful community builder and enjoyable recreation, so when a friend suggested she write about it, she came up with this book.  It's not a monograph, but she did read up on women in sports, circulate questionnaires, and interview people.

Zipter spends some space on friction between jocks and feminists, though one of the book's virtues is that Zipter recognizes that the groups are not mutually exclusive, and is more interested in doing justice to the variety of views and politics among lesbians rather than finding a unifying essence despite everything.  (After all, the dyke cartoonist Alison Bechdel -- several of whose drawings illustrate the book -- has celebrated lesbian softball as played by her strongly feminist characters.)   But I was brought up short by this quotation excerpt from one of the questionnaires:

Stephie: "What do you mean by feminist?  When I think of feminists, I think of hairy armpits, hairy legs, ERA all the way ... I believe in equal pay, yes.  [But] if I was straight and went out on a date with a guy, I'd still want the guy to open the door for me.  I don't think I'm a feminist.  I believe in equal rights -- don't get me wrong -- and I believe in equal pay, but ... I know some women are feminists but I'm not like that" [139].

Hairy armpits?  Hairy legs?!  Why, they sound like a bunch of lesbians!

Let me remind the reader: the person quoted here is herself a lesbian.  Yet she deploys the crudest and most laughable stereotypes of lesbians to distinguish and distance herself from feminists.  (Her evident assumption that "ERA all the way" is an extreme radfem slogan is equally wack: the Equal Rights Amendment was a liberal-feminist project.  And. of course, it was meant to enforce the "equal rights" that Stephie claims to support.)  I wonder who holds the door for whom when Stephie goes on a date with another woman?

My first thought as I tried to resolve the cognitive dissonance this quotation ignited was that Stephie was an unreconstructed femme, but she could just as easily be a butch with hairy armpits and hairy legs herself.  One happily effeminate gay man I met in my first year in a gay community said, when he learned I was involved in the campus Gay Liberation Front, said to me: "The GLF? Aren't they all -- you know -- [hand wiggle] effeminate?"  He promptly burst out laughing, acknowledging his own queeniness, and I have never been able to decide whether Reggie was serious or was just performing one of his little comedy routines (he had several).  Later, though, I met other less-than-butch gay men who denounced other GLB student organizations in the same terms: Oh, they're all just a bunch of screaming queens.

If Stephie were a straight woman, even a straight feminist, she might use the same stereotypes to establish firmly that she's not a lesbian.  (The trope about holding the door open is still, astonishingly, with us, and invoked by women as well as men.)  Zipter also discusses the anxiety of women athletes trying to fend off the stereotype that they are lesbians -- even when they are lesbians.  That's the irony of Stephie's remarks: she's not really talking about feminists, she's talking about lesbians, even if she shaves her own legs and armpits.  It's a fascinating example of someone tripping over her own stereotypes, and of the difficulties people have with thinking about principles and politics.

As Easy as Stepping on a Rake

I'm a firm believer in the usefulness of debate.  One of its uses is to help figure out what the issues are.  It's easy to become so obsessed with the formulation of a question that you develop tunnel vision and forget that the question can be asked in different ways, and that there are more than two sides in an important disagreement.  This is why the audience of a debate is at least as important as the debaters themselves.  As I've often said, the purpose of a debate is not for one of the debaters to persuade the other that his or her position is wrong, but to inform the spectators, so that they can better evaluate the controversy.

I had it in mind to apply this point to the current controversy over the Confederate battle flag, but then I read a post on same-sex marriage -- or rather, on marriage in general -- by Amanda Marcotte at Rawstory.  Marcotte tries to administer a dope-slap to reactionary opponents of same-sex marriage:

Basically, their real concern is that people are going to stop seeing marriage as a miserable duty to be endured and instead start thinking that love, happiness, and companionship should be what marriage is about. The marriage-for-love mentality is no doubt especially threatening to some of your more sexist men. There’s already a lot of fear that women prefer singleness to being with a man who isn’t loving and supportive. That’s what all that hand-wringing about single motherhood and singleness generally is about—anger that women might actually have standards and not just marry the first guy who will take them.

She then quotes Mike Huckabee speaking on CNN:

“Regardless, heterosexual marriage is largely in trouble today because people see it as a selfish means of pleasing self, rather than a committed relationship in which the focus is on meeting the needs of the partner,” he said. “That sense of selfishness and the redefinition of love as to something that is purely sentimental and emotional, has been destructive.”

Marcotte then denounces

this bleak view where marriage is about cosmic duty, not about being happy. In fact, there’s a suspicion of happiness underlying this, a belief that if you’re enjoying your relationship, you must be doing something wrong.

Jeez, where did Marcotte ever get the idea that marriage is about love and happiness?  She really should check out the century or more of feminist analysis and critique of marriage, and then all the research that found that the only people less unhappy than married women are unmarried men.  This research was cited by mostly male reactionaries to attack feminism (women totally owe it to men to sacrifice their happiness to propping up the male ego!), but that doesn't discredit the evidence.  This article sums up First Wave feminism's take on marriage, though it probably stereotypes Second-Wave feminism unfairly.  The best-known Second Wave critics of marriage are probably Shulamith Firestone and Ellen Willis.  The situation has changed slightly as married women gained more autonomy and have had their own outside-the-home jobs, and could control their own money -- which, perhaps oddly to this mindset, means that having a job makes you happier.

And then there's the "marriage equality" movement itself, which has made a big deal about all the zillions of "rights" that married people get.  Special rights, of course.  Right after the latest Supreme Court ruling I had an educational exchange on Facebook with a marriage-equality devotee who flatly angrily denied that the movement was about anything but Love!  Like, what part of "Love Wins" didn't I understand?

Marriage is not about equality: it's about inequality.  It privileges certain couples -- those who are registered with the State -- over other, unregistered couples, to say nothing of single people.  Marriage is, and always has been, about property, not about love, and certainly not happiness.  From what I see, most of my younger acquaintances, especially the gay ones, are really interested in having a wedding.  Preferably a big expensive spectacle of a wedding, like in the movies.  Preferably in a church, which is going to frustrate them when they learn that they can't force a church to be the soundstage for their spectacle.  How are they supposed to get a viral Youtube video and website out of their wedding if they can't have it in a church?

"We loved the T-Mobile advert spoof of Wills and Kate's wedding," [NIna, 28, the bride] said.

"Ever since I saw that I've always fancied giving it a go."

Back in the Seventies when I first began to realize that I preferred being single, I was bemused when to find that my coupled friends (mostly lesbians at the time) were saying that they needed to find me a nice boyfriend, so I'd be happy like they were.  When I replied that being in a couple hadn't made me happy, they would change their tune: Well, you're not supposed to be happy!  Being in a relationship is hard work!  You'll be miserable, but it's good for you! You're just selfish! ... and so on.  Bear in mind, they weren't talking about legal marriage (not available then to same-sex couples anywhere) or civil union or domestic partnership, but just about having a boyfriend.  Ironically, they succeeded in confirming my sense that being coupled was not for me.  For them, maybe, but not for me.  (A few years later, all those would-be matchmakers had broken up with their partners.  They found new ones, of course.)

Since then I've often observed that people to tend to stay in relationships long after after those relationships are making them miserable -- for fear of being thought a quitter, or immature, or selfish, or a failure -- or for fear of being alone.  Again, the propaganda that pervades the Culture of Therapy encourages those fears.  It isn't only old fundamentalist males who say this stuff.  And civil marriage makes getting out of a bad relationship even harder, as it's meant to.

Not only does marriage not equal love, love doesn't equal marriage.  I love many people; I'm not even theoretically interested in marrying most of them.  (My niece, my friends, my grandnephews, etc. -- but not my sex partners either.)  "Love" is a multivalent and confusing concept in many cultures, not just ours; often it's an outright euphemism for erotic desire or for copulation.  Equating love with marriage is propaganda, as is linking it to happiness.  One reason so many marriages fail is that people have unrealistic expectations about the institution -- again, it's not just old religious people who say this, it's a staple of the Culture of Therapy.   But what are realistic expectations?  Inflating the importance of marriage or even just of couplehood, making romantic love a prerequisite for happiness, is patriarchal propaganda.

But all this is the easy part, I think.  It's easy to mistake Amanda Marcotte for a radical: she's brassy, confrontational, and she talks dirty.  But confusing tone with content is usually a mistake. Her stated position here makes it explicit that she stands in the liberal tradition of the atomized individual.  "There is no such thing as society," Margaret Thatcher infamously said, "there are individual men and women and there are families."  Obviously Thatcher drew different conclusions from that premise than Marcotte and many other liberals do: that doctrine can be used to rationalize a wide variety of positions.  Mike Huckabee would probably be shocked to learn that Christianity as represented in the New Testament is an individualistic (though not liberal) cult, as religions of salvation usually are.  Jesus' teaching focused on the safety of the individual, who must be prepared to break with and defy all the institutions of his society -- family, marriage, religion, state -- in order to get into the Kingdom of Heaven.  As the Confederates found with their doctrine of states' rights, the early Christians had to contain this doctrine immediately if they were to survive as an institution themselves: the apostle Paul's letters show him balancing the freedom of the individual against the rest of the community (conceptualized as the Body of Christ), under his authority as Christ's deputy.  But the early Christian communities could only be built by taking individuals away from already-existing communities.  It's worth remembering that although most early Christians probably married, Jesus' and Paul's exaltation of sexual abstinence encouraged and empowered many people to reject marriage -- especially women.

You can't have individuals without community, or a community without individuals, and social history can usefully be read as an account of the tension between those poles.  Propaganda for same-sex marriage has cited the importance of social recognition and acceptance of Our Relationships.  Which, ironically, confirms the complaint of many opponents of SSM that ratifying same-sex civil marriage forces not just them but everyone to endorse those relationships against their religious principles.  You can make an argument that this isn't so, but the proponents of SSM tend to flipflop after having done so, and demand social acceptance and support from everybody for their marriages.  Civil marriage isn't about individual happiness, it's a social and political construct, and it can enable or obstruct individual happiness.

Individual choices are not (necessarily) determined by social or cultural forces, but they are pressured and limited by them.  The choices we make are limited by the options available, the rewards for compliance and the penalties for noncompliance.  So the question still has be asked, quoting Ellen Willis quoting Rosalind Petchesky: Why do we choose what we choose? What would we choose if we had a real choice?  I agree with Marcotte's insistence that women have a right to choose their partners and relationships, to draw lines within their relationships to preserve their autonomy, and that men have no right to demand that women make all the concessions and provide all the service.  But she should consider the question whether (especially civil) marriage civil marriage, despite the reforms that have been enacted in parts of the West, is a gateway or an obstacle to personal happiness.

But, you know, if Firestone and Willis are too radical for you, there's always Nancy Polikoff's excellent and moderate Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage.  Simply negating the demands of the religious patriarchs isn't the only way to refute them, and such negation has a tendency to snap back and hit you in the face.

The First Wave

From Louisa M. Alcott's novel Work: A Story of Experience (originally published in 1901; cited from Project Gutenberg electronic text). Some of the divisions within the women's movement clearly go back that far, and I was fascinated to see how Alcott depicted the conflict.

The ladies did their part with kindliness, patience, and often unconscious condescension, showing in their turn how little they knew of the real trials of the women whom they longed to serve, how very narrow a sphere of usefulness they were fitted for in spite of culture and intelligence, and how rich they were in generous theories, how poor in practical methods of relief.

One accomplished creature with learning radiating from every pore, delivered a charming little essay on the strong-minded women of antiquity; then, taking labor into the region of art, painted delightful pictures of the time when all would work harmoniously together in an Ideal Republic, where each did the task she liked, and was paid for it in liberty, equality, and fraternity.

Unfortunately she talked over the heads of her audience, and it was like telling fairy tales to hungry children to describe Aspasia discussing Greek politics with Pericles and Plato reposing upon ivory couches, or Hypatia modestly delivering philosophical lectures to young men behind a Tyrian purple curtain; and the Ideal Republic met with little favor from anxious seamstresses, type-setters, and shop-girls, who said ungratefully among themselves, "That's all very pretty, but I don't see how it's going to better wages among us now."

Another eloquent sister gave them a political oration which fired the revolutionary blood in their veins, and made them eager to rush to the State-house en masse, and demand the ballot before one-half of them were quite clear what it meant, and the other half were as unfit for it as any ignorant Patrick bribed with a dollar and a sup of whiskey.

A third well-wisher quenched their ardor like a wet blanket, by reading reports of sundry labor reforms in foreign parts; most interesting, but made entirely futile by differences of climate, needs, and customs. She closed with a cheerful budget of statistics, giving the exact number of needle-women who had starved, gone mad, or committed suicide during the past year; the enormous profits wrung by capitalists from the blood and muscles of their employes; and the alarming increase in the cost of living, which was about to plunge the nation into debt and famine, if not destruction generally.

When she sat down despair was visible on many countenances, and immediate starvation seemed to be waiting at the door to clutch them as they went out; for the impressible creatures believed every word and saw no salvation anywhere.

Christie had listened intently to all this; had admired, regretted, or condemned as each spoke; and felt a steadily increasing sympathy for all, and a strong desire to bring the helpers and the helped into truer relations with each other.

The dear ladies were so earnest, so hopeful, and so unpractically benevolent, that it grieved her to see so much breath wasted, so much good-will astray; while the expectant, despondent, or excited faces of the work-women touched her heart; for well she knew how much they needed help, how eager they were for light, how ready to be led if some one would only show a possible way.

Take That, Patriarchy!

When Ted Cruz jumps to stand with you, you may be in trouble:

I saw this item Wednesday morning just before I went to work, and it intrigued me.  On the one hand, right-wing Republicans have thrown tantrums before when they imagined that the Obamas were violating royal protocol; surely they would be upset that Mrs. Obama should do it now, and to one of America's most important allies in the Middle East.  On the other hand, she was defying "sharia law," which is good, but she's a Democrat and married to a black man, which is bad. especially since her husband is widely believed by Republicans to be a Muslim bent on imposing sharia law on Christian America.  What to do?

But consider the dilemma for the Democrats.  On the one hand, Mrs. Obama defied patriarchal Muslim norms and totally destroyed the Saudi oppression of women! -- at the same time that her husband was defending US intimacy with one of the nastier dictatorships in the world, and his administration (along with the corporate media and other minor elements) was fawning on the late King Abdullah as a "man of wisdom and vision," even a "man of peace" who "nudged Saudi Arabia forward."  On the other hand, she disrespected another culture, which objectively put her on the side of the Islamophobes.  As far as I can tell, except for Cruz, most people chose to solve the problem by falling back on knee-jerk cheerleading.  Since the Right mostly did not mount an offensive, liberals didn't have to get defensive.  So when I looked around after work that day, I didn't find the slapfight I'd half-hoped to find.

What I did find was that Mrs. Obama's behavior was not unprecedented.  In fact, it was routine and bipartisan.  Neither Laura Bush nor Condoleezza Rice (who later referred to the headscarf as a "sign of oppression") wore a headscarf when they traveled to Saudi Arabia and met King Adbullah, and according to this Washington Post article, other foreign women have done likewise.  As foreigners and non-Muslims, they aren't even expected to cover their heads.  So why did Mrs. Obama's attire get all this attention (via)?  There was a fuss on Twitter by some Saudis, that's why: about 1500 tweets, some of which were critical, while others defended her.  A tempest in a teapot.

So, good for Michelle Obama, though it doesn't seem she was making a bold political statement.  Like her predecessors, she went with the flow, followed precedent, didn't make waves.

This item interested me, though, because lately I've been seeing a number of feel-good multiculti memes which declare that wearing a headscarf is a personal choice or an individual choice.

 
Which is, of course, nonsense.  Using a Hello Kitty lunchbox as a briefcase is a personal decision.  Dyeing your hair green is a personal decision.  Wearing a hijab, or other form of female head covering, is a custom tied to the status of women in a particular culture or religious sect (as shown by the fact that men aren't required to wear one), it's a declaration of one's religious affiliation and makes a statement about the status of women in that affiliation.  (If people were required to use a Hello Kitty lunchbox as a briefcase for religious or cultural reasons, it would cease to be a personal choice.)  It's not a universal Muslim custom, nor is the covering of women's heads as a cultural requirement limited to Islam; and outside of certain Islamist environments a woman can usually go bare-headed without being penalized for it, though even in Europe or the US she could come into conflict with her family or her mosque if she makes the personal choice not to wear the scarf.  It could be a personal decision if a non-Muslim chose to wear one in a non-Muslim society because they thought it looked cool, but how often does that happen?

This iteration of the meme is particularly dishonest, not just because it ignores the cultural context in which many women must cover themselves, but because of that bit about its being "oppressive to strip you of your freedom of choice" by calling the head covering a sign of oppression.  Discussing a cultural sign, criticizing it for what it signifies, does not strip a person of their freedom of choice.  Assaulting a woman and tearing off her headscarf would strip her of her freedom of choice -- but so would assaulting a woman who chooses not to cover her head.  So would laws or regulations forbidding (or requiring) women to wear the hijab.  By this logic, criticizing, say, antigay or antichoice Christians would strip them of their freedom of choice.  Such Christians and their apologists might very well try to claim that it does.  (As do ultraorthodox Jewish males who assault little orthodox Jewish girls for not meeting their standards of female attire.)  People of the mindset represented by this meme mostly reply that their faith is not legitimate, it's a religion of hate, and therefore their faith doesn't deserve respect.  As I've noted before, such people are highly selective in their implementation of freedom.  I suspect that they are so tolerant of the hijab because it has no hegemonic cultural significance in the US yet: it seems exotic, and they can fantasize about the inner lives of the women who wear it.  To some extent the hijab is a personal choice here, though young girls whose parents require them to wear it, or grown women pressured by their communities to wear it, could plausibly argue otherwise.

While it would be obnoxious to hector women who cover their heads, or accuse them of collaboration with the patriarchy, etc., such criticism does not strip them of their freedom of choice, any more than this meme strips me of my freedom of choice by trying to tell me how to think about the hijab.  We live in a pluralistic society, however much many people find that uncomfortable, and in a pluralistic society people are free not just to behave and believe differently, they are free to talk and disagree and argue about their differences.  Unfortunately the level of debate is generally very low on all sides, but the remedy for that is to raise the level, not to throw out debate altogether.

According to the meme, "Susan wears a hijab out of choice".  This is laziness, or as Bertrand Russell said about postulating, it has all the advantages of theft over honest toil.  Susan is a fictional character, created to grind the meme-maker's axe.  Real women's reasons for wearing headscarves will likely be more complex than that.  People have often chosen to go along with systems that oppress them.  The women in the anti-choice movement, for example, are as eager to police other women's bodies as any patriarch.  Or take as simple an example of female gender-cop behavior as women calling other women sluts.  I'm reminded of Richard Trexler, who wrote in Sex and Conquest (Polity Press, 1995) of claims that children chose to become 'two-spirit': "Compare these protestations that a child exercised 'free will’ to those in any traditional Catholic society that young girls married of their own free will, when of course they did not" (225 n14).  In the American culture of therapy, moreover, choice is highly suspect: it's only okay to be gay, for example, if it was forced on you by your genes; as this meme shows, choice is okay when it's an exotic multicultural manifestation, forced on you only by your parents and your imam.

I think it's time to reread Susan Miller Okun's Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?, in which she and several other writer / scholars grapple with questions like this one.

A Lot of Explaining to Do

I recently read Rebecca Solnit's new book, Men Explain Things to Me (Haymarket Books, 2014), a collection of essays kicking off with her deservedly famous piece of the same title.  Readers may be surprised that I bought a copy right away, since I've hammered on Solnit more than once in the past (she really ought not to try to write about religion, she gets it wrong every time), but "Men Explain Things to Me" is a powerful, important essay, and the other essays in the book are fine too.  So this time I'm going to quote her with approval and appreciation.

In the essay "Grandmother Spider," Solnit writes:

I think a lot about obliteration.  Or rather that obliteration keeps showing up.  I have a friend whose family tree has been traced back a thousand years, but no women exist on it.  She just discovered that she herself did not exist, but her brothers did.  Her mother did not exist, and nor did her father's mother.  Or her mother's father.  There were no grandmothers.  Fathers have sons and grandsons and so the lineage goes, with the name passed on; the tree branches, and the longer it goes on the more people are missing: sisters, aunts, mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers, a vast population made to disappear on paper and in history.  Her family is from India, but this version of lineage is familiar to those of us in the West from the Bible where long lists of begats link fathers to sons.  The crazy fourteen-generation genealogy given in the New Testament's Gospel According to Matthew goes from Abraham to Joseph (without noting that God and not Joseph is supposed to be the father of Jesus) ... Thus coherence -- of patriarchy, of ancestry, of narrative -- is made by erasure and exclusion [70-72].

This is very good, and I hope it will encourage my readers to read the entire essay, and the book.  I still have to quibble, though.  The genealogy of Jesus that opens the gospel of Matthew is not a "fourteen-generation genealogy": it is forty-two generations, divided into three groups of fourteen.  Maybe that's what Solnit meant, but it's not what she wrote.

So let me digress for a moment and have a New Testament scholar, Dennis Nineham, explain things to you*.  Nineham points out "the problem that on the most plausible interpretation of the most likely form of the text as we have it, the third period contains only thirteen names; [but] Matthew clearly intended, or understood it, to contain fourteen" (172).  He goes on to explain that Matthew seems to have gotten the names in his genealogy "from the LXX [i.e., the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible used by the early churches], mainly from I Chronicles 2-3, supplemented by Ruth 4.18 and possibly Haggai 1.1 -- an intelligible enough procedure if you believed, as presumably Matthew did, that the Old Testament was inerrantly accurate on all matters, including matters genealogical" (174).  That covers the first thirty names.  However, "When we come to the last eleven names in the third list, the vital names which specifically link Jesus with the acknowledged kingly line in Israel, we are completely in the dark" (174),

To add to the confusion,

... we may ask: if Matthew drew on the Old Testament because he regarded it as authoritative, how comes it that he felt free to deviate widely from it in the way he does, for example omitting four names from the list it gives and assigning Rahab to a date fully three hundred years later than that to which both the Old Testament and later Jewish tradition unmistakably ascribed her?  It has often been suggested that the absence of the names of three of the kings may simply have been accidental, the result of an error on the part of a copyist; in which case we should presumably have to say that the balanced numerical structure which so impressed the evangelist was fortuitous and factually baseless.  although this suggestion of a scribal mistake is not without plausibility on palaeographical grounds, to suggest that such a symbolic numerical structure was simply the result of an accident surely stretches our credulity rather far, and we may notice that if we accept it, we shall have to suppose that Matthew cared so little about accuracy in factual matters that he did not know, and did not bother to check, whether the numbers he regarded as so significant were really derived from the Old Testament [175].

Speaking of Rahab, she's one reason I don't think Solnit bothered to look at this crazy genealogy before she wrote about it.  One of the other puzzles about Matthew's genealogy (and there are plenty of them, discussed in Nineham's article) is that it includes the names of five women: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba, and Mary the mother of Jesus.  This makes it anomalous for a biblical genealogy, the exception that proves the rule.  I suppose Solnit was limited for space (though "Grandmother Spider" is pretty long), and discussing the women in Matthew's genealogy would have diverged from the main course of her argument; but given her customary sloppiness when she writes about the Bible I think she simply didn't know about them.

This doesn't affect the point Solnit wanted to make, of course: genealogies, Matthew's included, are meant to bolster someone's authority, and they do so by erasure and exclusion, not to mention invention.  And it happened that a few days after I finished reading Men Explain Things to Me, I read another book that showed the same process of erasing women at work, but this time in evolutionary biology.

The book was Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death: Essays on Language, Gender and Science by Evelyn Fox Keller, published by Routledge in 1992.  By quoting it I run the risk that some of the problems she points to have been corrected in the past twenty years, but from what I see in more recent discussion about science, I doubt it.  And in any case, the 1980s and 1990s were hardly primitive, pre-scientific times; they were a time of scientific triumphalism as defenders of Darwinism contended with "Scientific" Creationists in the courts and in the media, asserting the correctness of their science against pseudoscientific superstition.  In "Language and Ideology in Evolutionary Theory," Keller wrote:

In much of the discourse of evolutionary theory, it is commonplace to speak of the "reproduction of an organism" -- as if reproduction is something an individual organism does, as if an organism makes copies of itself, by itself.  Strictly speaking, of course, such language is appropriate only to asexually reproducing populations because, as every biologist knows, sexually reproducing organisms neither produce copies of themselves, nor produce other organisms by themselves.  It is a striking fact, however, that the language of individual reproduction, including such correlative terms as "an individual's offspring" and "lineage," is used throughout population biology to apply indiscriminately to both sexually and asexually reproducing populations.  Although it would be absurd to suggest that users of such language are actually confused about the nature of reproduction in the organisms they study (for example, calculations of numbers of offspring per organism are always appropriately adjusted to take the mode of reproduction into account), we might nonetheless ask: What functions, both positive and negative, does such manifestly peculiar language serve?  And what consequences does it have for the shape of the theory in which it is embedded? [128-9].

Which individuals reproduce themselves?  For a long time, biologists assumed them to be male on the assumption that "the reproductive contribution of females [provided] the raw materials or nutriments for growth" (130), though that has changed.  Even Darwin, who tended to see natural selection as a process affecting individuals, "was at other times quite explicit in including differential procreation along with survival in his definition of natural selection" (131).  Eventually population genetics tried to solve the problem by focusing on the reproduction of gametes.

In spite of this fact, however, the theoretical (and verbal) convention that subsequently came to prevail in much of the teaching and practice was to equate natural selection with differential survival and ignore fertility altogether.  In other words, the Hardy-Weinberg calculus seems to have actually facilitated not one but two kinds of elision -- first, of all those complications incurred by sex and the contingency of mating that are lost in the representation of reproduction as gametic production, and second, more obliquely, of reproduction in toto [133].

One way of dealing with

the difficulties of sexual reproduction is that of acknowledging sexual difference, and attempting (at least in some contexts) to restrict reproduction to only one sex -- for obvious reasons, usually the females of the species ... This strategy (known in demographic theory as the reproductive dominance of females) would be perfectly adequate were there, in fact, one sex, or alternatively, if neither the attributes nor the availability of males were relevant to the reproductive process, and we furthermore agreed not to inquire too closely about the reproductive fitness of males [138].

Although "rewriting the equations of mathematical ecology for two sexes appears to relatively straightforward" (139), Keller shows that there is a tendency among scientists to resist doing so, and to continue to treat sexual reproduction as if it were asexual.  And twenty-first century evolutionary psychologists continue to treat reproduction, and evolution, as if they were about the reproduction of males, with females either cooperating passively or wickedly obstructing the males' struggle to perpetuate their genes.

*Dennis E. Nineham, "The genealogy in St Matthew's gospel and its significance for the study of the gospels."  Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 58 (1976): 421-444.  As reprinted in Nineham, Explorations in Theology, London: SCM Press, 1977: 166-187.

This Is the End

I ought to mention another book I've liked recently, Marlen Haushofer's The Wall.  Originally published in German in 1963, it was translated into English in 1990.  Haushofer herself died young, not quite fifty years old, of cancer in 1970, and her work attracted little attention until years later, when it was taken up and championed by feminists and environmentalists.  Until very recently, The Wall was her only work available in English, but that changed at around the time Julian Pölsler's 2012 film adaptation was released, and now several other of her books have been translated.  A review of the DVD made me aware of The Wall, and I decided to read the book before I watched the movie.

The premise of The Wall is that the narrator, a fortyish widow, goes on vacation in the mountains with her cousin and her cousin's husband.  She stays in their cabin one evening when the others drive into town.  When they still haven't returned the next morning, she discovers that there is an invisible but impassible barrier between her neighborhood and the rest of the world.  Through it she can see an elderly couple, seemingly frozen in place. There's a radio in the cabin, but all she can find is static.  Gradually she realizes that she's probably the only human being left alive, perhaps on the planet, and must figure out how to survive with very limited resources.  For company she has only her cousin's dog Lynx, and later a cat and a cow.

There's almost no action in The Wall, aside from a brief moment of violence towards the end, which the narrator foreshadows early on, and some readers (mostly, I suspect, younger males) have objected to this.  No exploding heads, no car crashes, no explanation of where the wall came from, no rescue, no romance.  But Haushofer meticulously depicted the narrator's achievement of her survival, along with her fears and doubts and abandonment of hope.  The book is tightly written, and I found it fascinating but also profoundly disturbing.

Some critics have compared The Wall to Robinson Crusoe, and there's some validity to that since the appeal of the story lies largely in the narrator's account of her survival strategies.  Haushofer wrote to a friend that the writing was hard work because "I must continuously inquire whether what I say about animals and plants is actually correct."  Her attention to detail gives the novel a very rich texture.

The Wall is often called "dystopian," which is correct insofar as the narrator's situation is far from idyllic, but a dystopia usually refers to a society, and the narrator is alone except for her animal companions, with whom she gets along quite well.  With some irony the book could also be seen as utopian, as the narrator reflects on her troubled relations with other people, her happiness with her animals, and the freedom solitude gives her not to worry about how she appears to others.  She is often lonely, however, though not for romance; at one point she reflects that she wouldn't mind the company of an older woman.

Is The Wall a feminist novel?  Yes, in the sense that it puts a woman's experience and perspective in the foreground of the story without apology.  Is it about humanity's relation to nature, as some readers have said?  Yes, but I'm not sure it's therefore an environmentalist novel any more than, say, Robinson Crusoe would be.  I've seen its spiritual aspects stressed too, and that's accurate enough, as the narrator reflects on the nature of self and her place in the universe.

For me, though, the most prominent theme of The Wall was its contemplation of mortality.  I often thought while I read it of The Turin Horse, Béla Tarr's 2011 film about an old farmer, his daughter, and their horse, who find that their already restricted lives are being narrowed even further as a mysterious (allegorical?) night descends on them.  As the film proceeds, they discover that they can't leave their land as the horse refuses to move, and eventually they're trapped in their house in complete darkness.  Like The Wall, The Turin Horse has little action of the kind that would appeal to fanboys; it's structured around the characters' numbing routines, which they continue as best they can to the bitter end, depicted in long takes that show everything they do, more or less in real time.  And it seemed to me that The Turin Horse was about death, which is also the end of the world, and vice versa.  The inexorability of the end's slow approach was quietly terrifying. 

The same is true of The Wall: the narrator knows that she must work hard to sustain herself and the animals, which she feels both as a burden but also as a reason to carry on.  She doesn't mind dying herself so much, but worries about the dog and cow, who are dependent on her care, and the deaths they'd suffer if she gave up or died before they did.  She gradually gives up hope of escape or rescue, let alone knowing why the world changed as it did.  The claustrophobic feel of the story symbolizes the approach of individual mortality for me, and like The Turin Horse, the effect is both frightening and fascinating.

I don't, however feel a need to reduce The Wall to a single theme.  What makes it a great book, in my opinion, is that it contains all these aspects, intricately woven together in a deceptively simple tale.  I expect to reread it at least once before very long.  I'm very glad I found out about it.

Just Asking

In Thursday's post I put in this aside:

I imagine some readers will criticize me for "asking" these young women to be flaming queer militants and write Politically Correct song lyrics that will alienate most people, etc. etc.  I'm not asking them to do anything of the kind.

I wrote this partly because I've been the object of such accusations about other gay people in the past.  And the more I think about it, the more I feel sure that the interviewer brought up pronouns and universality in his talk with that young woman because he knew she's gay, and she knew he knew it, and he was congratulating her for closeting herself.  How often, after all, does a heterosexual artist get chided for not being universal enough?

But I also wrote it because I had fresh in my mind a similar accusation about another issue.  It had just emerged that a pro-gay, pro-feminist Australian priest was recently excommunicated under Francis' authority.  So when someone linked to a story about Francis denouncing "global economy for worshipping 'god of money'" and various people got all excited about it, I pointed out that his grinchy predecessors had made similar denunciations.  Someone else, whose initial reaction was "Best. Pope. Ever", countered with "Yeah, but this pope is getting the conservatives in the Vatican in a knot with his de-emphasis on gays and abortion." I answered, "'Getting the conservatives in a knot' is no achievement. If he actually de-emphasizes gays and abortion, I'll manage a wan smile. I won't actually praise him unless he changes church policy on those and other issues. Right now he's just doing PR. It's amazing how many people are falling for it." The other commenter, who as it happens isn't even Christian let alone Catholic, replied: "You're asking him to out and out change Catholic doctrine which may be more than he is capable of doing. He may be a 'representative of God on earth' but he still has to play politics with the other Catholic humanoids ... Radical sudden change isn't possible. But [the church] can be nudged."

I'm not asking Francis to do anything.  In most respects I'm not even talking about Francis, but about the people -- including active Catholics, lapsed Catholics (including one friend who's now a Unitarian quasi-neopagan), Jews, and secularists -- who are overreacting to Francis' rhetoric.  I thought I was fairly explicit about that, when I said that I'll manage a wan smile when he changes doctrine on these issues.  Until then it is just talk, and talk is cheap.  My Unitarian friend linked to the story about the excommunicated priest, but backtracked by saying that she "know[s] better than to expect sudden, dramatic change from the Vatican. I was just pleasantly surprised that he's trying to emphasize the importance of doing good over dogma to the public." Which means, as I pointed out, that she's falling for his PR strategy too.  She also forgets that American Catholics, at any rate, are less reactionary than the Vatican (including Francis himself); they don't need to be reminded of the importance of doing good over dogma -- they already know it.  (Francis isn't emphasizing "doing good over dogma" either: he says he wants them in better balance -- but "dogma" still rules.)

Later that same day, Katha Pollitt posted a new column at the Nation, expressing her own skepticism about Francis.  Yes, she acknowledged, Francis "seems a lovely man", but liberals and secularists shouldn't overreact. Liberals, she said,

have seized on the pope’s words as signaling a change in the church’s teachings, the way they did when Pope Benedict XVI seemed to say condoms were permissible to prevent AIDS. (Actually, he didn’t quite say that.) There has been no doctrinal change, nor is there likely to be one anytime soon. Rather, the pope was calling for a change of tone and emphasis: forbid with love.

Ah yes, Pope Rat on condoms -- I'd almost forgotten that.  It's another case where people, and not only Catholics, are so eager to paint a nasty bigot in positive colors that they exaggerate his words.  Francis may not be quite as bad as Benedict -- that will have to be seen -- but the secularist desire to put a human face on religious bigotry has little or nothing to do with what either man has said or done.  That's some pretty heavy denial going on there.

Pollitt also noted:

Pope Francis is continuing the investigation, begun last year by Pope Benedict, of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, the progressive nuns’ organization charged with espousing “radical feminist themes” and being insufficiently zealous against abortion and gay rights. It’s hard to imagine winning many hearts and minds among American Catholic women—who use birth control and have abortions and even same-sex weddings like other American women—by putting these immensely learned, dedicated and, of course, devout women under the supervision of male authorities, as though they were children.

One of the first commenters on Pollitt's column complained, predictably enough:

This pope's actions have been far more radical and courageous than any of Katha Pollitt's nothing-is-good-enough, by the numbers feminist columns. I am grateful Pollitt's was not writing in 1963, undermining the Rev Martin Luther Kings March on Washington. Bourgeois so-called "radicals" like Katha Pollitt are too bloated w their pseudo-revolutionary narcissism to recognize truly radical steps made by individuals who are taking true risks (see:John Paul I, assassination) because they are men.

But what has Francis done? So far he has only talked. What risks has he taken, except to continue the doctrines of his predecessors?

And isn't this business reminiscent of another holy figure whose advent was greeted with similar inflation of his significance, one whose fans were ready to credit him before he even took office with achievements that he had, as it happened, not even promised, and in the event didn't deliver?  I'm referring, of course, to the Only President We've Got, whose critics were also told to wait, to give him a chance -- even as he, like Francis, was busy establishing his reactionary bona fides.  This all-too-human tendency clearly has nothing to do with the qualities and actions of the people it celebrates and defends; it expresses the wish for a Savior.  No human being is going to be that, but people will go on canonizing one New Hope after another.  Sometimes I think they prefer talk to action; at the least, they consistently confuse the one with the other.

The Birth of Chinese Feminism

I've been meaning to write about this for a couple of weeks.  It's a commonplace that feminism and the gay movement are innately and perfidiously Western, and that activists are just trying to force their Euro-American categories down the helpless throats of indigenous women and queers around the world.  It's an odd instance of common ground between Third World fascists and Western postmodernists, which right there is a sign that something's wrong with the commonplace.  So I was happy to encounter a book on the New Arrivals shelf at the university library called The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory, published this year by Columbia University Press.  Edited by Lydia H. Liu, Rebecca E. Karl, and Dorothy Ko, it collects English translations of feminist writings by Chinese writers at the end of Qing Dynasty, early in the twentieth century CE.  These include two manifestos by male writers urging China to move into the modern age and learn from the West's openness and dedicates to equality for all, and several pieces by a woman taking those male writers to task.  The woman, Zhen He-Yin,* labeled an "anarcho-feminist" by the editors, argued in Chinese terms for the liberation of women.

The social system in China has enslaved women and forced them into submission for many thousands of years.  In ancient times, men acquired proprietary rights over women to prevent them from being claimed by other men.  They created political and moral institutions, the first priority of which was to separate man from woman. For they considered the differentiation between man and woman to be one of the major principles in heaven and on earth.  Men thus confined women to the inner chamber and would not allow them to step beyond its boundaries.  The Book of Rites states, "When a married aunt, or sister, or daughter returns home (on a visit), no brother (of the family) should sit with her on the same mat or eat with her from the same dish."  It goes on to state [m]ale and female, without the intervention of the matchmaker, should not know each other's name.  Unless the marriage presents have been received, there should be no communication or affection between them" ]53-4]. **

But Zhen didn't regard the West as a role model for China either.

Liberation means setting [the body and the mind] free from bondage.  The problem with the marriage system in Europe and America is that individuals remain constrained by three bondages: power/privilege and self-interest profit, morality, and law.  They talk about freedom in marriage and so on.  But do individuals in Europe and America get married purely out of free love?  What often happens is that a man may lure a woman with his wealth, or a woman's family fortune may cause a woman to admire her and propose marriage ... [58]

As for equality between man and woman, it is likewise often a sham.  Although men and women are both now educated [in Europe and America], they live in a world supremely ruled by man.  Women seldom study politics or law and are completely barred from acquiring knowledge in the fields of the military and police.  It is true that women and men may socialize ; but when the world is controlled by governments that systematically exclude women from their governing bodies, so-called gender equality can exist only in name [59].

Things have changed somewhat in the West, but it took the better part of another century, and there are still efforts to roll back the progress that has been made.  So-called gender equality still exists only in name here.

Zhen wrote her essays while in exile in Japan, and this kind of criticism of her culture was dangerous. The editors mention one of her feminist contemporaries, "Qiu Jin (1875-1907), the cross-dressing revolutionary martyr, who left her husband and children behind to seek education in Japan, and who, upon her return to China, was executed by the Qing state for her advocacies of dynastic overthrow.  In her essays, songs, poetry, and short stories, Qiu tirelessly wrote of the nationalist political need for female emancipation" (35).  Zhen herself, "in her published works, ... prefers to sign her name He-Yin Zhen so as to include her mother's maiden name in the family name.  This was a decision grounded in her theoretical work published in National Justice" (2-3).

The Birth of Chinese Feminism isn't for every reader. Zhen bases much of her argument on exttended citations from the Chinese classics, which were important for her original readers but won't have much effect on a modern Western (or even non-Western) reader.  Those people who are interested in the history of feminism and gender struggle will probably find it interesting, as I did.

*The surname comes first here, as usual with East Asian names.
** I've silently removed the transliterated Chinese terms the editors included in the text.

My, Your, Our Bitchy Resting Face

My friend A complained today from work that she "has already been told to smile by two men today. STOP TELLING WOMEN TO SMILE." That set off a mild storm of discussion, including one man and his wife, both cutely using the same account, who accused A of stereotyping all men.

A added as a comment: "Would they ask a man doing the same job to smile? Probably not." I mentioned that it isn't only women who are told to smile.  I have often been told to smile, usually by women.  Those of us who have what is becoming known as a Bitchy Resting Face -- a face that looks grim when it's at rest, not because we are angry or upset, just because that's how our faces are arranged.  I'm most likely to be told to smile when I'm busy, concentrating on a task, so my expression is intense, not angry.  Ditto for A, who reports that she replied, "No, I"m busy" when one of the men asked her if she was having a bad day.  But the fact that this kind of face has been gendered female and called "bitchy" instead of serious says a lot about attitudes toward women, don't you think?

There are evidently a lot of people of both sexes who feel compelled or entitled to police other people's facial expressions.  They aren't necessarily evil, but they are rude.  I've been told more than once that my BRF intimidates some people, and that does concern me: I only want to intimidate some people, and I want to know when I'm doing it.  But maybe they need to learn to read facial expressions better?  If you mistake a serious person concentrating on a task as bitchy, arrogant, intimidating, maybe part of the fault lies with you.  And, of course, many women who are ordered to smile by men are just walking down the street on business of their own: they're not obligated to smile at anyone if they don't want to, and men who demand sunshine from a random woman they don't know are almost certainly sexist porkers.

Those who order other people to smile -- and it is an order, generally accompanied by a vacuous grin -- may have a point when they're addressing someone who's interacting with strangers (aka "the public") at the moment, as part of their job.  When I've done such work I make an extra effort to look pleasant, but I know I don't always succeed.  I also know from my own experience that it's no fun walking up to a service person who looks at you as though you're interrupting them at something more important, when their job is to interact with you.  Still, most of my thirty-seven years in university dining halls was spent in the back of the kitchen, washing dishes, not serving the public directly, and I preferred it that way.

One of A's friends and commenters protested, "Smiling makes the world a better place." I agreed, but added that being told to smile makes the world a worse place.  Suppose that I'm looking grim because I am in a bad mood: being told that it can't be that bad doesn't improve my mood, especially if it is that bad, if something is wrong.  (It's like telling me to "chill," one of the surest ways to get on my bad side.)

The writer of the Atlantic piece I linked earlier suggests that the tyranny of the smile may be peculiarly American:

Outside the United States (and certainly outside the South), the tyranny of the smile is considerably weaker. In France, even women with the most naturally perky of faces seem to purposely cultivate BRF to enhance their je ne sais quoi. I live in Hong Kong, one of the densest cities on earth, where turning your face into a blank mask is simply a tool of urban survival. If I walked along Nathan Road in Tsim Sha Tsui with a grin on my face, people would think I was psychotic. 

One of her commenters agreed, speculating that her own BRF

was the unconscious influence of my very beautiful Italian mother -- from a culture in which inane public grinning is considered undignified. I'll never forget watching the Miss America pageant with her as a child (the only time we ever did so) -- she observed for awhile, obviously becoming increasingly exasperated. "Why" she finally asked, perplexed, "are they smiling like that?!?  Like hyenas?"

I first remember being told to smile when I was barely out of my teens, by some of the typists and clerks at my first job in the mailroom of a commercial office.  I realized that people who looked serious, even grim, most of the time, really lit up when they did smile.  One elderly lady in the office was the best example I knew.  It's not for me to say whether that's true of me.  I came up with various answers to that order over the years -- most recently, I would just say "Bah, humbug!" -- but it was that knowledge that stayed with me.  I don't go around telling people who always smile that things can't be all that great, the world is a serious place.  (After all, many people look like they're smiling because that's their resting face.) But I remember that the people who make the world a better place, for me at least, are those whose expressions mean something, and aren't just a mask they wear regardless of what's going on in their heads.

May Day

Lately it seems that the days have become about four hours shorter.  That has something to do with why I haven't posted in a week, though I've also felt a debilitating apathy that made it hard to work up the initiative to write here.  (I've done a little better in comments on other people's blogs.)  Today also ran short, but I promise I'll try to do better in this new month.  Meanwhile, I'll pass along this wonderful image that someone I know posted to Facebook not long ago.  I'll be back.

P.S. And then I found this cool article at the Guardian snapping back at Diana Rigg for putting down feminists:

The other day a perfectly nice chap opened the door for me in a restaurant so I spat in his face and started ululating Greenham style. Another man offered me a seat on the bus so I kneed him in the groin. Because I am a feminist and this is how feminists behave, right?

Of course I did not do these things, nor have I ever met a woman who has, despite the fact that I am from the Paleolithic era. When Diana Rigg spouted this nonsense – the old "I like having doors opened for me" line – I wondered where the myth comes from. Mostly I see women bumping buggies down the steps at train stations while no one helps.

Yeah, that's what I'm talkin' about.

Overlooking the Obvious Again

One thing I've learned over the years from speaking to classes and from online discussion is that very often a question has an unspoken assumption I don't hear at first.  Discovering such an assumption may drastically change the way I answer the question.

Once, for example, a young woman told us that an older male relative, maybe a policeman, had referred to "gay rape" in her presence.  This upset her a great deal, and the other panelists tried to answer it without succeeding in assuaging her concern.  Finally we figured out that she had concluded that her relative meant that rape was a normal part of the gay male experience.  I explained to her that he must have been talking about the rape of a male by another male, which he called "gay rape" just as many people refer to marriage between two men or two women as "gay marriage."  When she understood that gay men don't usually rape each other, she was visibly relieved.  Years later, I'm still baffled at how anyone could have drawn such a conclusion, but that was a learning experience in itself.

I just finished reading I Am Your Sister, the posthumous collection of Audre Lorde's nonfiction writings I wrote about yesterday, and I came again on the notion that, as one Third World queer writer phrased it, concern about women or non-heterosexuals is a "luxury," a monkey wrench thrown into the struggle for liberation.  Or, as a young African-American man asked Audre Lorde in Germany in the 1980s, "Would you think that the Black women's liberation struggle causes harm to the overall struggle for Black freedom?"  (The notable thing about Lorde's answer, which can be heard in Dagmar Schultz' documentary Audre Lorde -- The Berlin Years 1984-1992, is the way she changes her spoken delivery.  Her voice goes up about an octave, sounding almost girlish.  I presume that she did so in an attempt to make her forthright answer less threatening to her male interlocutor.  I'm not sure it worked.)

Of course, this notion assumes that liberation is for men only.  Lorde tells a chilling anecdote in I Am Your Sister:

In 1985 I had a dialogue with James Baldwin at Hampshire College in Massachusetts, not far from Boston.  One of the most heated discussions was around the issue of the twelve murdered Black women, and sexual violence and assault against Black women in general within our Black communities.  There were present two other Black women, two other Black men, one white man, and a young Black male student.

Jimmy and one of the older Black men were in agreement that under the tremendous pressures of racism, Black men could not be held responsible for their violence against Black women, since it was a response to an unjust system, and Black women were only incidental victims.  One of the Black men went so far as to say:

"The Black male is not attacking the Black female; it would be a sheep if that's what was there ..."  To this I replied, and still reply:

"Yes, but I'm not a sheep, I'm your sister ... who is learning to use a gun.  If we wind up having to kill each other instead of our enemies, what a terrible waste for us all."

And at this point it was the young Black male student in the room who spoke up to the older men, in defense of his mother and sisters and their right to defend themselves in the street [179].

It suddenly occurred to me that people who raise this objection are thinking in terms of struggle against the First World oppressor, and assume that women's and gay concerns are going to be added to the list of demands that the liberation movement makes of the oppressor.  But the real issue is internal to the struggle for liberation: Third World men must stop oppressing Third World women and other Third World men.  It's not surprising that such men should object to this condition: they have generally absorbed First World sexism and and anti-gay bigotry along with First World political theories like Marxism and psychoanalysis, using these principles to reinforce indigenous inequities.  Still, it is easier for Third World men to stop oppressing other members of their own group than to demand that the First World stop doing so. (Do I need to add that this applies just as much to sexism and racism among gay white Americans?)  All they need to do is stop harming their own people; this will add nothing to the burden of their struggle against the West.  As Lorde told a mostly white female German audience in The Berlin Years, "Each one of you sitting here has some power.  I know that makes you uncomfortable enough to laugh, but you are responsible for using that power, whatever it is.  And that is not altruism, that is survival."