I Am a Fluke of The Universe, and So Can You

Sometimes I suspect I'm even weirder than I've always thought (and often been told).

I'm always baffled when people talk about their lives, or Life, having a purpose.  That we were put here for a reason.  And so on.  Evidently to many people that idea feels reassuring.  To me, if I took it seriously, it would be a prison.  As a gay man, for example, I know that I am expected by both my culture and by science to marry and reproduce heterosexually, to carry on the family name.  That's my function, that's my purpose, that's the reason I'm here. In Christianity, and at least in some other religions, my purpose is to serve and glorify God.  I see no reason why I should do any of these things, and luckily I live in a time and place where I don't have to.

Maybe for most people the idea of having a purpose assigned to them feels good because it's a license to do what they want to do anyway.  I suspect that's what it is.  But with the craving for such a purpose there often goes the feeling of emptiness when you don't know what it is, what you should be doing.  The language of intention, of plan, expresses the idea that someone, human or superhuman, either knows or is competent to decide what you should do with your life, and I see no reason to suppose either that there is such a being, or that I am obliged to obey it if it did exist. For one thing, such a person would have purposes, aims, of its own, for which it would use me: I would be a means to an end rather than and end in myself.  Where would it get its aims?  Why should I care if they are carried out?  What is its purpose in the great scheme of things?  Whether the purpose-giver is a god, a parent, or a monarch, these questions are not supposed to be asked.  But they should be asked.

Yet it's obvious to me that many, maybe most people, feel a great need to be told what to do.  This craving would be connected to what Walter Kaufmann called "decidophobia," the fear of making fateful choices, in his book Without Guilt and Justice (Wyden, 1973).

This need, or desire, or craving, is not an artifact of religion, however: it's a cause of religion, and of other ways people try to give authority to the purposes we invent.  Samuel Delany posted today on Facebook:*

I have read--or rather re-read--a wonderful book: The History of My Shoes, and the Evolution of Darwin's Theory, by Kenny Fries. At first it seems to be two books, one of the relation of Charles Darwin, and his supporter, critic, and sometimes editor, Alfred Russell Wallace, who realized that "Nature . . . does not so much select special various species [natural selection] as exterminate the most unfavorable ones [Herbert Spencer's phrase, 'survival of the fittest"] p. 96."

This weaves through a brilliant discussion of adaptability, in terms of that area often called disabilities.

In a passing discussion of the narrator's homosexual desire, we find comments such as: "'In matters of sex,' sexologist Alfred Kinsey observed, 'everything that you can possibly imagine has gone on and much that you cannot imagine.'"

Although the instinct for protection and survival of the species most often explains the desire for procreational sex, there have been a myriad explanations for homosexual desire. To Western science, homosexuality, both in animals and humans, is an anomaly, an unexpected behavior requiring some some sort of explanation, cause, or rationale. But to many indigenous cultures around the world, homosexuality is a routine and expected occurrence in both humans and animals. Biologist Bruce Bagemihl has shown that a good deal, if not most heterosexual sex in both animals and humans is without procreative intent. Thus, homosexual sex is not so different from most heterosexual sex. Except for the cultural context that labels it so. (p 113)

The book first came out in 2007, but with its discussion of things like ADD, social Darwinism and eugenics, it seems even more relevant than it once was. Before my retirement, from time to time I taught sections of it. Rereading the whole of it from end to end today, I wish now that I had devoted entire terms to it.

I haven't read Fries's book (and I can't tell where the quotations from it begin and end here), but it sounds interesting and important; it sounds as if his take on these questions might be similar to mine, though it easily might not.  I hope to find out.  If I didn't already have a large backlog of interesting and important books to read, I'd get to it now.  But soon.

Someone else commented under Chip's post:

We are non-reproductive but essential to the larger well-being of the community, just as neuter insects are to a beehive or an ant colony. Darwin's 'sympathy' as a secret to human success = Harry Hay's "subject-subject consciousness".

It's sad and a bit strange to me that people find it so difficult, even terrifying, to stand on their own, as it were.  (Kaufmann again: etymologically "decidophobia" is also a fear of falling.)  "We have a right to be here becuz Evolution." Or becuz Science. Or becuz Nature.  Or becuz Indigenous People.  Whose purpose, and where did they get it from?  It doesn't really matter why there are gay people, why there's gender, or anything else. We are the First Cause for culture, the buck stops here, and there's no need to invoke Evolution, or our genes, or other cultures to justify ourselves.  We don't have to justify ourselves; we're here.  Get used to it.

I don't want to live in an "indigenous" culture; I don't assume that the niche it would assign me would be any less repressive than the ones my own culture tries to impose.  But again: my culture now has freedoms and possibilities that no indigenous culture can offer.  I don't care whether Evolution or Nature planned me, for here I am.  (As I've said before, if I exist, I'm a product of evolution and nature.  It's not really possible to be otherwise.)

In the psychologist Carol Oyama's brilliant book The Ontogeny of Information (Duke, 2000) she shows how biologists have persistently tried to make genes, or DNA, or evolution, into a First Cause, updating the traditional Argument for Design for a scientific age; or into a homunculus that controls and guides organisms.  The efforts keep failing, but they can't seem to stop; they mostly don't even realize they're doing it, which suggests that they're driven by a deep, pre-rational need for a superior being (genes? DNA?) to order and direct them. If there were a designer, or a homunculus with a joystick in my pineal gland, there is no reason to assume that it knows what it's doing any better than I do.

Even when people get rid of gods, we can't seem to stop relying on them, inventing new ones and pretending that they invented us. We are a fluke of the universe, we have no right to be here -- but that's okay, because neither does anyone else: our existence has nothing to do with rights.

*Chip is dyslexic, and he doesn't proofread his Facebook posts, so I've silently corrected obvious slips of spelling etc. here.

#NotJustRichCollegeKids

Samuel Delany linked the other day* to a tumblr called Shit Rich College Kids Say.  He remarked:

This one requires a little thought, but work your way through it ... And by the way, it's not all rich college kids. But it's enough of them to be noticeable. And it's also noticeable that over the last decade a lot of not so rich kids have been saying it too, not to mention faculty. Things will be better if you understand what's at stake here, and life will make a little more sense.

Delany's a college professor, so he has more direct interaction with students than I do these days.  When I looked at the tumblr, the first, most current entries were these:

Having a good sense of humor is so much more progressive than taking offense to everything. If you go looking to take offense to things, you’re going to be offended

and:

I don’t know why you got so offended by that joke [targeting lesbians]. I mean I don’t think it’s offensive and I could probably even be considered a little bit bisexual at times.

The Stupid is certainly strong in these, but that's nothing new, either on college campuses or in society at large.  As I read more of the entries, though, the more baffled I got.  What, aside from playing "Ain't It Awful?", is the point?  I wrote a comment asking "Are we talking about the entries about being offended? I'm working class, and I think we need to rethink our approach to that issue." Delany replied:

Ultimately, I don't think this is about being offended and not being offended. It's understanding where people are coming from and not understanding where they are coming from--and why or why not certain arguments do or don't make sense--at least as I read it. But Duncan, I'll certainly look again. If you could point out some of the ones you find problematic, that might be a good place to start.

I realized that when Delany looked at the tumblr, the entries I quoted above might not have been posted yet, so I found the links and replied to him.  Another person, who'd directed Delany to the tumblr originally, paraphrased its mission statement: "omg These Assholes Are Our Nation's Future".  This seemed even stranger to me.  As Delany, at least, must know, these assholes are also our nation's present and past.  In the past, college education was more or less limited to rich kids (with a scattering of poor scholarship kids), and we may be moving in that direction again.  But like all schooling, college was, and is, a process of socialization.  It doesn't just teach students facts or skills, it teaches them courses (discourses, to be more exact) and limits of thought and conduct -- though it can also teach them to transgress those limits.  As Tom Lehrer might have said (but didn't), education is like a sewer -- what you get out of it depends on what you put into it.

Another one: "Wait, isn’t transgender when they have boy parts AND girl parts?"  This will be risible ignorance to those who are more informed than the average person is about sex and gender, but even they/we should be careful.  I can't think of many areas beside gender where the level of even informed discourse is so low.

Now, this one is especially weird, I thought: "I’m a trisexual - I fuck girls, guys and tr***ies."  The idea that relating erotically to trans people as well as cis people puts one in a separate category is not unheard of, though among our Speakers Bureau volunteers the preferred label is "pansexual."  I get that the person quoted thinks he's being funny, and I get that he's using blunt, crude language, but there's the weird part: someone thought that "fuck" is inoffensive, but "trannies" was so beyond the pale that it had to be censored with asterisks.  Except for "trannies," though, I see this kind of crudeness all the time among hip, class-conscious queer academics I know on Facebook who have a very sensitive nose for privilege in others, though less so among themselves.

I'm not sure that Delany and I are "reading" SRCKS the same way.  The mission statement claims that it's not intended to demonize other people. "Most of the original content is said by our [the moderators’] friends–who we are friends with ... Lots of my friends when they start learning new shit tell me to put up their old quotes so they can remind themselves never to be that way again," according to some of the FAQ responses.  But the entire lack of context in or for the posts makes it difficult to know what the mods' intentions are.  The title of the tumblr itself doesn't help -- are the rich college kids talking shit supposed to be the mods and their friends, or someone else?  A "we" or something to that effect would help a great deal.  And wouldn't it make more sense to provide some sense of how those people who were "that way" before came to be the way they are now, whatever it is?  As it's set up, the easiest and most natural way to read SRCKS is a finger-pointing exercise at a more or less depersonalized if not demonized Other.  The Microaggressions tumblr I've mentioned before makes similar disclaimers about its intent, no more persuasively.

A strange one here: "[R]ich college kids do not have as many excuses to be so ignorant. They just lack incentive to learn that their bullshit opinions are bullshit."  Oh, you think so?  Privilege is a shield as well as an enabler, and growing up in comfort and safety produces and encourages ignorance of what lies outside that shelter.  You'd think from this that "their bullshit opinions" were the rich kids' own, rather than something they'd learned from their parents and their class.  (The origin myth of the Buddha literalizes this: Prince Gautama's parents deliberately kept him isolated from awareness of human suffering until he was almost thirty.  Not until he glimpsed debilitating age, illness and death outside the family palace did he realize that not everyone had it as good as he.  Many parents have more foresight than Gautama's: instead of trying only to isolate them, they inculcate their children with rationales for their privilege and the disadvantages of others -- the Others are inferior, lazy, etc.  This allows people to believe that they deserve their good fortune even when confronted directly with the misery of others.  It doesn't always work, but often enough.  Non-rich kids have more reason to try to understand why the world works as it does, but there's no guarantee that they'll find better answers.  And the University historically is just as likely to be a repository of those justifications for privilege as to undermine them.

Some online conversations I've had on these matters don't make me more optimistic.  Even graduate students and post-docs in edgy specialties like Queer Theory or Post-Colonial Studies don't exhibit a firm grasp of the concepts they're working with.  Instead of learning from Foucault, for instance, American academics have turned his work into Scripture to mine for proof texts.  Critical thinking is seldom in evidence, and jargon (which is valid in itself) is used as a substitute for thought.  Learning to shoehorn one's thinking into the Procrustean bed of the academic paper too often produces distortion rather than clarification.  (Recently I listened to a grad student reading per paper on Queer Theory and Popular Culture, and I was struck by the way its rhetorical strategies steered away from substantive discussion.  The result was a kind of abstract poetry, where the language had its own logic and requirements that took it away from lived experience.)

I just looked again at Shit Rich College Kids Say, and I'm even less clear on what its mission is.  As I write this, the newest post is an appeal for help for a "homeless trans girl" and her mother.  There's another similar appeal posted on the landing page.  Is this what rich college kids say?  And it's no dismissal of the plight of many trans people to say that I don't trust appeals like these when they turn up on Facebook (because they're usually out of date at best, bogus at worst), so why would I trust a reposted item on this tumblr?  Do the moderators vouch for their validity?  These were followed by a call for submissions to a projected (online?) anthology on the ostensible theme of Road Trips from Hell, though it was hard to make that title fit up with the description.  And then, finally, another Ain't It Awful post about a "psychology professor" who said something dumb about Caitlyn Jenner and trans people in general.  Followed by a weird and not terribly coherent post by a moderator who said that person was upset by intra-community complaints being posted to SRCKS, when it 's supposed to be for inter-community complaints.

discussions about intra-community issues belong intra-community. not here where 41,000 other people can indiscriminately invade the conversations, manipulate the arguments, and deny the humanity of the subjects in question.

Talk about meta!  The post is in its way an example of what the writer is complaining about.  But as far as I can tell, manipulating the arguments and denying the humanity of the subjects in question is the purpose of this tumblr.  This writer just wants to be sure that the right people are having their humanity denied.  It would be reasonable simply to say something like: "The topic of this tumblr is inter-community conflicts, in order to enable certain minorities to play Ain't It Awful about certain majorities and run around crying Someone was offensive on the Internet!  We're not playing Ain't It Awful about conflicts within those minority communities, though they certainly happen and are cause for concern."  The writer puts per concern in terms of not airing our dirty laundry where those mean ol' Outsiders can see and exploit it, which is an old controversy in numerous communities including LGBTQ ones.  I don't object to defining and limiting the content of a publication, nor do I object to people having a place to vent their complaints and enjoy their ragegasms.  (As a blogger, I could hardly cast the first stone.)  But it seems to me that SRCKS is part of the problem.  The posts don't have any context, they don't lead to any kind of thoughtful discussion and aren't really meant to.  I look at sites like it and think "omg, these whining, unreflective babies are the LGBTQ community's future!"

*Actually, several months ago.  I'm plundering the drafts folder again, though much of this post was written today.

Attacking a Straw Kinsey

The book I was reading yesterday continues to frustrate and annoy me.  The author repeats his erroneous characterization of Kinsey's research -- "Kinsey's traditional behavioral scale for measuring sexual orientation" -- though I concede that this time he may be referring to later researchers' tendency to use the Kinsey continuum to measure sexual orientation, a use which Kinsey didn't intend in the first place and for which it doesn't really work.  But I don't think he understands this, because he clearly hasn't read Kinsey recently enough to have any idea what he wrote, or else has thoroughly misunderstood what Kinsey wrote.

The author spends some time explaining the limits of "a strictly behavioral approach to sexual orientation," and he's more or less right about them.  But then, Kinsey didn't purport to be studying "sexual orientation."  I stress that because so many writers on human sexuality falsely claim that he did.  Kinsey was studying sexual behavior, as the titles of his two big books make explicit.  Even that limited task was probably impossible, because most of his data came from interviews which sought to reconstruct people's sexual histories.  People who've had only one or a handful of sexual partners can probably remember all of them, though if they're over the age of about thirty, they probably can't remember accurately everything they ever did.  And that's assuming that the informant hasn't done anything he or she feels shouldn't have been done, and has either managed to forget it or chooses not to remember it for the interviewer.  It was Masters and Johnson who did some in-depth research into human sexual behavior in a laboratory setting, which more or less eliminated memory malfunctions for the behavior they observed, but couldn't reconstruct the subjects' histories.  Richard Lewontin's critique of another large-scale survey of human sexual behavior (only partially available online, alas, but you can see an exchange between Lewontin and the survey's principal author here) showed that people either can't or won't (or both) remember their sexual histories accurately, let alone report them accurately.

There are other factors, of course.  In an essay called "Aversion / Perversion / Diversion" Samuel Delany tells about a young man he met in a New York porn theater where men would go to have sex with other men.

As we began to touch each other, he leaned toward me to whisper, in a light, working-class accent, "You know, I've never done anything like this before.  All the other sex I've ever had has been with women.  But somebody told me about this place, so I thought ..."*

But Delany met the same young man at least twice more in the same theater over the next few months, and even though the youth greeted him with recognition, each time they began to touch each other, he would repeat the same formula.  Delany comments, "What troubles me in the memory of these encounters is, of course, how much of myself I can see in this fellow.  His litany, like some glorious stutter, recalls Freud's dictum: repetition is desire" (121).  What, I wonder, would the young man have told a researcher who was taking his sexual history?

It was a common criticism of Kinsey in his day that he didn't pay attention to the emotional side of sex.  Usually this complaint came either from religious figures, who weren't all that wild about the behavioral side of sex anyhow, or from psychoanalysts and psychiatrists whose claim to a more scientific account of sex was open to serious question.  The psychologist Abraham Maslow published a paper which purported to show that Kinsey's sample was skewed because it was made up of people who were willing to talk about their sex lives, which apparently proved them to be perverts.  I'll have to track down Maslow's paper, because I'd like to know how he or anyone else could claim to know anything about the sexual practices of the people who wouldn't talk about their sex lives.  From what I've seen, people who deploy this argument are usually quite sure they know what people really do, but they can never explain how they know.  The answer I usually get is along the lines of Nice people don't do things like that, because people who do things like that aren't Nice.  I wouldn't take for granted that people who don't want to talk about their sexual histories have necessarily had fewer partners or a narrower range of practices; it could be the opposite, that they have more to hide.  But again, who knows?

Kinsey focused on behavior, not because he was under any illusion that behavior was the whole story, but because it was what could (however inadequately) be measured and counted.  And that was important, because the real fury over his work came from its indication that far greater numbers of people did what they weren't supposed to be doing than the critics wanted to believe.  This was true not only of homosexuality but of premarital and extramarital intercourse, especially among women: Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, published in 1953, was widely seen as an insult to the virtue of the American Woman, and there's general agreement that Kinsey lost the crucial support of the Rockefeller Foundation because of that controversy.

But the author I'm quoting is unaware of all this.  I mentioned in the previous post a remark by Kinsey about younger men whose overt experience is exclusively homosexual (because, for whatever reason, it was more available to them) although they know they are primarily interested in women.  A reading of what Kinsey wrote would have shown him that Kinsey was aware of these problems.  But there's no way short of a direct memory tap (which, luckily, is beyond reach of our technology for the foreseeable future) to know what people have actually done, or what their true "deep-seated" desires really are.  Researchers who've attempted to study what Kinsey didn't have come up against the same barriers: people don't remember accurately, they can't reconstruct their emotional history in any detail, and there's no way for the interviewer to tell whether they're telling the truth.  As Richard Lewontin wrote about this problem,

Even though the world is material and all its phenomena, including human consciousness, are products of material forces, we should not confuse the way the world is with our ability to know about it. Like it or not, there are a lot of questions that cannot be answered, and even more that cannot be answered exactly. There is nothing shameful in that admission.

Unfortunately, too many researchers are unaware of this, or prefer to ignore it because they believe there is something shameful in that admission.  They dismiss Kinsey -- or rather, their fantasy version of Kinsey -- and blunder ahead without learning from his achievements or from his failures.  That's not necessarily a bad thing, considering how much of science is trial and error.  What is bad is when their (willed?) ignorance leads to the publication of misinformation about their work and its predecessors.  For myself, I'm willing to simply throw out Kinsey's research, but only with the understanding that no one after him has produced any more reliable knowledge about human sexual behavior.

*As reprinted in Delany, Longer Views: Extended Essays (Wesleyan University Press, 1996), pp. 120-1.

The Fantasy Police

While I was puttering around this morning after a late night, my eye lighted on Samuel Delany's On Writing (Wesleyan, 2005) and I decided to reread his remarks on Toni Morrison's novel The Bluest Eye.  That novel's premise is that a young black girl, living in the South on the cusp of the Second World War, becomes obsessed with the idea of having blue eyes and goes mad.  Quite mad.  I'm going to reread The Bluest Eye soon, I hope (I say that every time I think of Delany's critique, but this time I mean it), but my attention was caught today by this passage:

Morrison's novel aligns itself with the Fantasy Police.  Reading it, I find myself asking: What's wrong with wanting to be different from what you are?  The assumption that wanting to be other than you are means that you hate yourself is pathological and patently absurd.  A much clearer and more articulate argument might be posed that to desire effectively to be different, actually to expend energy to bring that difference about (to become surgically a woman if you are born a man; to become surgically a man if you are born a woman; to reconstruct your foreskin if you were circumcised before you could consent to it; to straighten your hair if you don't like it kinky; to wear blue contact lenses if you have brown eyes and dark skin; to wear dreadlocks if you were born with straight blond hair; to pierce, or tattoo, or or decorate your body in any way at all; to exercise or diet to contour your body toward whatever ideal you set yourself) requires much more self-confidence and a clear sense of who you are than those who never question or wish to adjust their bodily reality at all [166-7].

That is a long sentence, so don't lose sight of its beginning: that a much clearer and articulate argument to that effect might be posed.  I'm not sure I'd agree entirely with it myself, since I'm not sure what "a clear sense of who you are" is; I'd have to see a fuller articulation of it before I could decide.  But I still like his basic complaint.  Delany is black himself, and he's fully aware that "whatever ideal you set yourself" isn't necessarily a pure spark that comes out of a pure individual core: it's affected (though not completely determined) by the environment one grows up in.

I'd also argue that at least some decorations and other changes we may may make to our bodies aren't seen as recuperating or expressing our original selves before our parents conceived us.  People often try out different looks, even selves, without necessarily thinking of them as our essential being.  Whether a given modification feels like an expression of Self depends on the individual: the same look that represents a move toward the ideal for one person might just be this week's fashion statement for another.  But I think of this as an extension of Delany's point, not a refutation: why shouldn't people try on different selves, experiment with body ornament, and so on?  I don't think those experiments are rendered invalid if they don't last a lifetime.

Delany continues a couple of paragraphs later:

The accusation of self-hatred, whether racial or sexual (and notice, it is only blacks, only gays, only Jews, only women who are ever accused of hating themselves -- never straight white Protestant males ...), once we are attuned to it, always carries clear and persistent overtones of sour grapes from the accusers.  ... This has a common name in discussions of liberationist political analysis: blaming the victim [167].

Again, I go only part way with Delany here.  For one thing, it seems to me that straight white Protestant males are accused of self-hatred, usually under the name "liberal guilt" or (formerly) "radical chic."  If a man sides with feminism, a heterosexual with gays, a white person with anti-racism, a Jew with Palestinian struggle, he or she will be accused of self-hatred, and of inauthenticity at the very least.  (You can see this in many attacks on straight white Jewish Noam Chomsky: because he isn't poor, his criticisms on the privilege of the wealthy are hypocritical -- but if he were poor, he would be accused of mere envy of what he hasn't got.)  A blond, blue-eyed person who cultivates dreadlocks will be accused of cultural appropriation, if not overt racism.  Which is wack, if not racist itself.

Still, Delany's basic point is I think a good one.  (There's more to his critique of Morrison that's relevant here, but I'm not going to comment more until I've reread her book.)  I've written before about the same pattern among gay men seeking authenticity either in effeminacy or in machismo.  I think the two positions cancel each other out, but are to be opposed whenever they rear their heads. 

My Fellow Humans

I love Andrew Ti (including, but not limited to, that way).  His tumblr Yo, Is This Racist? is smart, funny, and mean.  I've been surprised and delighted by the off-the-wall but still on-target answers he gives to tricky questions.  But today he pissed me off with this one.

There could be several reasons why someone would do shit like that, but I can't think of any bad ones at the moment.  Maybe someone might believe that the waiter will be all THANK YOU FOR BEING ONE OF US.  But that seems to me a relatively benign reason, if naive.  I can't see what is ever bad about trying to use any words one knows in a foreign language, and trying to discourage it is a bad thing to do.  Maybe even racist.

I speak decent though not fluent Spanish, much weaker French (both from high school, but I've used Spanish much more since then), a little bit of Russian (I took three semesters at IU during the 80s, but have hardly used it since then), a tiny bit of Korean (only one semester), and stray words and phrases in Japanese, German, and even Cantonese and Mandarin.  One of the things that drove me crazy about my fellow students in Russian was their reluctance, even refusal, to say a word in Russian when I encountered them outside of class.  If I greeted them in Russian, most of them would grimace and say "Hi."  This was less of a problem when I was studying Korean, since most of the other students in my section were Korean-American kids who were taking the course for their foreign-language requirement, expecting it to be an easy A.  It wasn't always, because they'd usually stopped speaking it when they entered school, and though they understood it when it was spoken (since their parents still spoke it at home), they'd gotten out of practice speaking it.  My Korean friends, by contrast, encouraged and helped me to speak and write, and I was more motivated than most of my classmates because I wasn't taking the class for a requirement, I wanted to learn Korean.

It is intimidating, though, the first time you try speaking a school-taught language to a native speaker.  John Holt wrote about that somewhere: you don't really believe in your gut that this is real until you say something to someone and find that it works: they understand, and you even understand them.  My first-year high school French class used a dialogue-based approach with recordings, and Madame Cohn told us the joke about the student who visited France after their first year.  "How did it go?" the teacher asked when the student returned.  "Not too well," came the reply, "I couldn't find anyone who knew the dialogues."

There was a Cuban kid in my second-year Spanish class, so I was able to talk to him sometimes for practice.  He told the teacher I did pretty well, which was reassuring.  (He grew up to be a stereotypical fascist Cuban exile, alas.)  But when I encountered some Mexican kids, migrant farm workers, near Plymouth the following summer, they said they couldn't understand me.  I don't think I believe them, my Spanish was better than average for a high-school gabacho.  Maybe they just didn't want to be bothered, which is their right.  But I was also right to try to talk to them.

When I'm in South Korea, I use the little Korean I have, and it improves as much as one could expect over the course of the four weeks I usually spend there.  No one says "Thank you for being one of us," of course.  What they say is "Oh, you speak Korean?  You have a good accent."  Which isn't just being nice, I know I have a good ear and good pronunciation.  The only problem is that people believe at first that I can speak more than I actually can, because I can get out basic phrases accurately.  But no one has ever said Who do you think you are, trying to pretend you're Korean?

As for English in Korea, though, like any visible foreigner I attract people who want to try their English on me.  Some are old people who worked for the US military when they were young.  Some are like the college student who politely asked me on the subway if I minded talking to him for a few minutes so he could practice.  Others are like the middle-school girls who say "Hi!" and then dissolve in giggles.  Are they racist?  Possibly; many Koreans are racist, in Korean terms, but if so it doesn't hurt me.  Do they hope I'll say "Thank you for being one of us?"  I doubt it.  The kids are like kids anywhere: poke the strange thing and see what it does.  The adults have more complex motives, some of which is probably just the satisfaction of having an opportunity to use their English.  (That's one reason I enjoy speaking Spanish: now that I can think in Spanish instead of having to translate laboriously in my head before speaking, it feels good to be able to do it.)

Why do I want to learn Korean, or any other language?  I don't remember why I got interested in Spanish, but it goes back way before high school.  My mother had studied Spanish in school and remembered quite a bit of it, so I practiced with her at home sometimes; I know she encouraged it.  I took French because our school was abandoning Spanish and Latin, and I thought Why not?  I took second-year Spanish and first-year French at the same time, which I wouldn't do today, but it worked fine for me then.  I picked up Japanese phrases from a non-Japanese boyfriend who was a Japanese major.  I took Russian because I'd become friends with, and developed a mild but not debilitating crush on, an American student who was majoring in Russian history.  It wasn't that I hoped that learning Russian would get me into his pants (and it didn't), but listening to him talk about Russian got me interested in Russian.  (I get interested in things easily.)  I took a summer class in German because my Significant Other at the time needed it for his language requirement, and he had a weird block against learning foreign languages that left him in tears when he tried, so I took the class with him to help him learn.  Besides, I'd wanted to study German for a long time.  I took up Korean because I'd become friends with some Korean students at IU, started learning about Korean culture, and got interested in it.  (See above.)

Why would someone want to use the only Chinese phrases they knew in a Chinese restaurant?  There are probably numerous reasons, as I said before, but I'd do it because I know that so many Americans think it's a friendly gesture to pull up the ends of their eyes and chant Ching Chong Ching Chong! when they meet an Asian, or that it's Communist (or Politically Correct) for an American to speak any language but American.  Actually learning and using even a few phrases of another person's language is a gesture of good will at the very least.  It's a kind of contact, as Samuel R. Delany developed the concept in Times Square Red, Times Square Blue a decade ago: "contact" means interaction between strangers, usually in an urban context, that has no aim except the pleasure of recognizing and enjoying common humanity.  (As opposed to networking, which has the aim of doing business, building a career, and so on.  But remember the risk of the false dichotomy: the two can and do overlap.  Networking is probably more pleasurable for everyone involved if a bit of contact is exchanged.)  I wouldn't say Xixi to a waiter in a Chinese restaurant with any goal in mind except a moment of contact in Delany's sense.  I try out my Korean in a Korean restaurant because I'm interested in other people and that's one way of showing it.  (In Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, one character asks another: “Do you think love is the greatest emotion?” “Why, do you know a greater one?” asks the second. “Yes,” answers the first, “interest.”)  It would be better to learn more than just a couple of words, but a couple is better than none.

A couple of weeks ago, someone wrote to Yo, Is This Racist?, asking if her dad was racist for telling her she couldn't dress up as Mulan as a kid, because she was white.  Ti dodged the issue with "Honestly, it would be problematic for someone of any race to dress up as any character from that racist-ass movie." 

This connects to issues of cultural appropriation that I won't go into today, and I guess I can't blame Ti for not wanting to open that can of worms either.  Is it racist if little white kids want to be rappers?  What about little Asian kids?  Ti does, I believe, and I've got the CDs to show the popularity of rap in South Korea. There isn't a clear dividing line between "race" and "culture," but I'm really suspicious when anybody tries to raise and reinforce barriers between cultures and between people, and on the most charitable reading I can't see Ti doing anything else in those posts.  We need to encourage white Americans to learn and use other languages, dammit, not discourage them.

Literally Literate

I wanted to do a post on this subject before, but I think I'll sneak around on it from the back, briefly. I'm reading Conversations with Octavia Butler, one of the University Press of Mississippi collections of interviews with a wide range of writers. It includes a transcript of a joint appearance by Butler and Samuel R. Delany at MIT in 1998 (which, happily, is also available online). The main topic they address is literacy, from a variety of perspectives. One person in the audience explains:

I'm in the computer entertainment industry. In the computer entertainment industry, literacy has vanished. Whereas in 1984 about one-third of the best-selling game programs were text-based games, by 1986, there were none--zero--on the market. And, in fact, I've just read a couple of interviews with John Romero and Ken Williams where they're asking, "How can we get the rest of the text out of the games. How can we get rid of these text-bubbles?" And there are still people writing text-games, but it's sort of goes on by samizdat; it's underground. And the thing is that the people playing these games are very literate; they're not unable to read. They don't want to read.

I was mildly annoyed by the misuse of "samizdat" and "underground" here. "Samizdat" means "self-published," but it originated among dissidents in the Soviet Union who copied forbidden material and circulated it hand-to-hand. When I read about it in the 70s and 80s, it involved typing the material on typewriters, often with as many carbon copies as possible (which meant a lot of barely-legible copies circulated). According to Wikipedia the practice extended "to printing on mainframe printers during night shifts, to printing the books on semi-professional printing presses in larger quantities." In any case it was illegal and dangerous for the people involved. "Underground" has similar origins. As far as I know, there are no laws against, nor any official suppression of text-based adventure games; the game manufacturers simply decided not to produce them any more.

Also annoying is the claim that "literacy has vanished" in the game industry. It's like saying that "literacy has vanished" in the movies since the advent of sound.

I never was very good at the text-based games, but I spent more time on them than I ever have with their all-graphics successors. As the speaker told Delany and Butler, the trend was toward "graphical violence games that introduced this concept of running around and killing everything you see and watching its blood spurt ... And I thought, 'This is interesting. This is the kind of thing that he wants to do and the kind of game he wants to make.'" This was socially acceptable as the US became an increasingly militarized garrison state that didn't mind if young males think of war itself as a video game.

Still, I think there were other issues involved. A popular buzzword at the time of this discussion (1998) was virtual reality, born partly of cyberpunk science fiction that imagined jacking in, direct brain-to-computer link that used the brain as both input and output device. Instead of a game controller, you used your thoughts; instead of a monitor, the visuals were generated in your brain, in your literal mind's eye. A year after this conversation, the Wachowski Brothers released The Matrix, which used these concepts to advance a postmodernist Gnosticism, though most of the fans didn't get it and just wanted to be able to do all those cool stunts.

Having already been infected by the heresies of various computer skeptics, I always viewed claims for this technology critically: as usual with computers and science, the claims always far outstripped anything that was actually possible at the time. I once had a funny conversation with an undergraduate who was thrilled by the possibilities of virtual reality. He didn't realize, and strongly resisted grasping, that any virtual reality can only be as "real" as the data that the programmers put into the host computer; he seemed to think that it would grow in there by itself somehow. I have some friends and relatives who play a lot of video games, so I've been able to sample the current state of the art; it's pretty impoverished, even worse than 60s TV sci-fi shows. I'm even less tempted to get one of these things than a smartphone.

Anyway, I think the reason why so many game programmers wanted to get rid of the text-bubbles (and I get the impression they haven't quite succeeded yet) was less hostility to literacy than a desire to engineer virtual reality: you wouldn't need a text-bubble to tell what is over the next hill, or what you're smelling or tasting or how many coins you have in your money pouch; you'd perceive it directly through your senses. If a guy who just wanted cooler 3-D blood fountains happened to be a talented game designer and programmer, so much the better, though of course it was convenient that he was in touch with the mindset of potential players and the Reagan/Rambo zeitgeist.

Another related topic that came up in the MIT discussion was "hypertext." The World Wide Web was touted at first as the advent of hypertext, and though it fulfilled its promise a little better than virtual reality, hypertext isn't the buzzword it used to be, for similar reasons. Delany pointed out, though not quite explicitly, that hypertext too is only as good as the links you put into it. He mentioned a few "hypertext novels" that he'd found interesting, but went on:

All texts, in a sense, are hypertext. You come to a word you don't understand, so you look it up in the dictionary. You read a passage and you stop and you think about another book; you may even put it down and go get another book off your bookshelf and read something about something else. Texts are not linear. Texts are multiple and for anybody who really reads and enjoys reading, it is an interactive process.

What hypertext and the interactive material do is make that a much less energy-intensive process; as such, on the absolute scale, they are less interactive than the ones we've got now because in order to interact with the ones you've got now, you have to put out more energy. Now I think something is gained by having the interactivity require less energy. It becomes a medium in itself that's interestingly exploitable.

But not only do you limit the amount of interactivity, you also limit the places you can go. So the interactive text is not an expansion of what we've got now; it's a delimitation of what we've got now. If you read, as I was doing a couple of days ago, Walter Pater's "Plato and Platonism," I stop every two pages or less and have to go read a section from Heidegger or read a section by Derrida where he's talking about Plato. "Is that where this idea came from? Oh! Why is he using this word 'parousia'? Didn't I see this word?"

Just bear in mind that the interactivity in the new different interactive art is less energy-intensive and there are less places that you go within it. It's fascinating, and it's lots of fun, but it's not more interactive than what we had before; it's less interactive.

Much of this linking is serendipitous. The writer of the text doesn't know where the reader will go from material the writer has put into the text, but the range of possibilities is much greater for just that reason. As Delany also said,

It's the same thing with the physical books on the shelves. Anybody who does actual research in a library knows that you look on this shelf and then you turn around and you look on this thing, it's not related alphabetically; it's not related subject-wise; it just happens to be the book you need. And if you don't have the physical propinquity of the way the books are arranged, you're going to miss out on this opportunity, and this limits the kinds of research gems that can come up.

This has happened to me many times. Something similar can happen when you follow a link to another page, which also contains links to some "related articles" generated by software. The possibilities of computer searching are also great -- I love the ability to search a book online for a word or idea that otherwise would take hours to find, if I found it at all -- but we need both virtual and physical libraries.

On a more cynical note, I have long believed that elites consider literacy dangerous. They'd love to limit it -- ideally, by direct intervention into the brain so that readers could only look for, read, or understand, approved texts. That's because elites need the rabble to have minimal functional literacy in order to serve elite ends; but once you teach someone to read, it's hard to predict or control what she'll read next. This is why schools teach reading and writing so badly, in order to get a few fluent readers and writers, and many who just stumble along, regarding text as something vaguely unpleasant. I'm not saying that someone sat down and consciously decided to do it that way; but our current, traditional approach works well enough for official purposes, to produce enough literates to do the necessary work while leaving the rest only half-taught. The ongoing drive by corporate and government elites to censor the Internet might just give a boost to physical print, though: the forbidden, as Butler pointed out in connection with slaves' great desire to learn to read and write, automatically becomes attractive.

And despite all the handwringing, the Internet hasn't killed literacy yet, and I see no danger that it will: people still need to know how to write so they can leave bigoted and misinformed comments on Youtube and their local newspapers' websites, after all.

People Are Not Excess

I finally got a copy of Fred Barney Taylor's 2007 documentary The Polymath; or, The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman, and watched it tonight. TLA Video had it on clearance, so I snapped it up, but it can be ordered directly from the filmmaker. It's an odd sort of documentary, consisting largely of Delany talking over solarized footage of water, rivers, train tracks, and the like; there are also Delany family home movies and clips of Delany receiving awards, traveling, and walking around New York City. Still, it's highly interesting and well worth seeing.

Towards the end, Delany reads from his book Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, page 90:

The easy argument already in place to catch up these anecdotes is that social institutions such as the porn movies take up, then, a certain social excess -- are even, perhaps, socially beneficial to some small part of it (a margin outside the margin). But that is the same argument that allows them to be dismissed -- and physically smashed and flattened. They are relevant only to that margin. No one else cares.

Well, in a democracy, that is not an acceptable argument. People are not excess. It is the same argument that dismisses the needs of blacks, Jews, Hispanics, Asians, women, gays, the homeless, the poor, the worker -- and all other margins that, taken together (people like you, people like me) are the country's overwhelming majority: those who, socioeconomically, are simply less powerful.

That sounded familiar! Noam Chomsky says almost exactly the same thing -- though I don't think he'd agree with Delany about the value of men having sex with each other in (mostly heterosexual) porn theaters. Much as I love Chomsky, he has his blind spots. But still, their coincidental agreement on the notion that the margins put together equal the country's overwhelming majority was too striking not to mention.

The Rule

I've been meaning for a long time to write about "The Rule", a 1985 episode of Alison Bechdel's comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. About a year ago it was featured on National Public Radio, which is some kind of sign of cultural arrival, but it had long been discussed online and elsewhere. As with anything that catches on, there's a certain amount of confusion about it -- what it means, or even what to call it. The name of the episode is "The Rule," but you'll find it referred to as "Mo's Rule" (though this was before the character Mo was introduced), as "The Bechdel Rule" and (as on NPR) "The Bechdel Test." So read it for yourself (click on the image to enlarge it for better readability).

Bechdel has mentioned in interviews that she stole the idea from her friend Liz Wallace, whom she credits in the strip's opening panel, but only hardcore Dykes to Watch Out For fans would recognize a reference to "Liz Wallace's Rule." So I'll try not to be too pedantic, especially since there are other, serious issues involved.

First of all, you might wonder if too much isn't being read into The Rule. As it appears in this strip, it's as much a dating strategy as anything. The woman who describes it is as much interested in getting her date alone for some romance as in watching a movie. (Better to eat popcorn at home than in a crowded theater.) But that's part of what makes Alison Bechdel fun to read, and reread: at her best, she mixes interesting ideas with entertaining human stories, and one of her primary aims in Dykes to Watch Out For was to make a comic strip about lesbians and their loves at a time when media images of women-loving women were scarce, even in alternative media. That's what keeps DTWOF and this strip in particular from being a mere exercise in didacticism.

The fact that The Rule has stuck in many people's minds over the past quarter-century, though, while they often forget the story in which it's embedded, shows that the idea has been important for them. Sometimes I think that the idea becomes just an excuse for sloppy list-making, like the quizzes you find on social and tabloid news sites. ("Ten Things You Should Never Say To Your Date." "Which Character in Twilight Are You?") The NPR story is a painful example of this sort of thing, with its clumsy attempts to come up with "rules" for other minorities. It's also arguably mistaken that one reason for the paucity of good female characters is the scarcity of female writers in film and TV. As blogger Jennifer Kesler tells it, the industry is aware of what it's doing, and aspiring female writers will be told not to write scripts that conform to The Rule.

I had to understand that the audience only wanted white, straight, male leads. I was assured that as long as I made the white, straight men in my scripts prominent, I could still offer groundbreaking characters of other descriptions (fascinating, significant women, men of color, etc.) – as long as they didn’t distract the audience from the white men they really paid their money to see. ...

... there was still something wrong with my writing, something unanticipated by my professors. My scripts had multiple women with names. Talking to each other. About something other than men. That, they explained nervously, was not okay. I asked why. Well, it would be more accurate to say I politely demanded a thorough, logical explanation that made sense for a change (I’d found the “audience won’t watch women!” argument pretty questionable, with its ever-shifting reasons and parameters).
At first I got several tentative murmurings about how it distracted from the flow or point of the story. I went through this with more than one professor, more than one industry professional. Finally, I got one blessedly telling explanation: “The audience doesn’t want to listen to a bunch of women talking about whatever it is women talk about.”
“Not even if it advances the story?” I asked. That’s rule number one in screenwriting, though you’d never know it from watching most movies: every moment in a script should reveal another chunk of the story and keep it moving.
He just looked embarrassed and said, “I mean, that’s not how I see it, that’s how they see it.”
Right. A bunch of self-back-slapping professed liberals wouldn’t want you to think they routinely dismiss women in between writing checks to Greenpeace. Gosh, no – it was they. The audience. ...

Kesler also mentions in a comment that "the passing or failing of the Bechdel test is not the sole measure of a film’s feminist value", and another commenter adds:

Also, I wouldn’t want anyone to fall into the trap of assuming that just because a movie does pass the test means it’s either a feminist movie or a great movie. Beaches passes the test. I’m not going to stand up and say it’s either great cinema for the ages or a great feminist story (again with the breakdown of women’s friendships over men *sigh*), but I still own it and watch it.

If you look again at Bechdel's original comic strip, you'll see that the Rule is a minimum criterion for acceptability in a movie, not artistic quality or exemplary feminist consciousness. It means that if I am going to give my money to the movie industry, it must pander to me at least this much. I've gotten into some weird online debates with people who got upset if I dissed this or that mediocre gay Hollywood film, like Philadelphia, because if we don't support it, Hollywood won't make any more gay movies. (Promises, promises!)

Which brings me to one of the reasons I finally got off my butt to write about The Rule. I recently read the new edition of gay African-American science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany's book of critical essays, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw. It includes a blistering "Letter to the Symposium on 'Women in Science Fiction' under the Control, for Some Deeply Suspect Reason, of One Jeff Smith", written in 1975. Among much else, Delany talks about his efforts to improve his own depiction of female characters, influenced strongly by his then-wife, the poet Marilyn Hacker. Among the "parameters" he developed was this one (page 102):

Women characters must have central-to-the plot, strong, developing positive relations with other women characters. The commercial/art novel would be impossible without such relationships between men: from Ishmael and Queequeg, to Fafhrd and Mouser, to Huck and Jim, to Holmes and Watson, to Nick and Gatsby, such friendships are the form, content, propellant and subject of the novel. I would pause here to state, from thirteen years' distance, that any novel that does not, in this day and age, have a strong, central, positive relation between women can be dismissed as sexist (no matter the sex of the author) from the start.

In short, we have a formulation of The Rule, ten years before it appeared in Bechdel's comic strip. (Or even longer, considering that Delany worked it out in the 1960s.) After more discussion, Delany concluded (page 103):

I still think these parameters are primary. And they still don't go anywhere near far enough!

I don't bring this up to imply something like "See, girls, a man got there first!"; rather something more like Great Minds Think Alike. Delany had been influenced by Hacker.  His account made me wonder how many other writers of either sex had come to the same or similar conclusions about the depiction of female characters. There is, for example, Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own from 1929, where Woolf describes an imaginary novel, Life's Adventure by Mary Carmichael, featuring characters Chloe, Roger, Olivia, Tony and Mr Bigham:

And, determined to do my duty by her as reader if she would do her duty by me as writer, I turned the page and read . . . I am sorry to break off so abruptly. Are there no men present? Do you promise me that behind that red curtain over there the figure of Sir Charles Biron is not concealed? We are all women you assure me? Then I may tell you that the very next words I read were these—’Chloe liked Olivia . . .’ Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women.

‘Chloe liked Olivia,’ I read. And then it struck me how immense a change was there. Chloe liked Olivia perhaps for the first time in literature. Cleopatra did not like Octavia. And how completely ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA would have been altered had she done so I As it is, I thought, letting my mind, I am afraid, wander a little from LIFE’S ADVENTURE, the whole thing is simplified, conventionalized, if one dared say it, absurdly. Cleopatra’s only feeling about Octavia is one of jealousy. Is she taller than I am? How does she do her hair? The play, perhaps, required no more. But how interesting it would have been if the relationship between the two women had been more complicated. All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. So much has been left out, unattempted. And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. There is an attempt at it in DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS. They are confidantes, of course, in Racine and the Greek tragedies. They are now and then mothers and daughters. But almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen’s day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman’s life is that; and how little can a man know even of that when he observes it through the black or rosy spectacles which sex puts upon his nose.

This isn't quite The Rule; but the principle that underlies it is present. (If anyone knows of any other, especially earlier, examples, I'd love to hear about them. The e-mail button is up there...)

Another thing that made me want to write about The Rule was noticing films that conformed to it, though they came from what most people would consider unlikely places. The "conservative" East, for example. When I first saw the South Korean film Blue Swallow (2005), among my many reactions to it was that it passed The Rule with flying colors. A biopic about Park Kyeong-won (1901-1933), one of the first Korean women to become a pilot, it showed Park going to Japan to learn to fly. At the training school she bonded with other young women and discussed the joys of flight and their hopes for their careers. The film was controversial because it dealt with a painful period in Korean history, when Japan colonized and controlled Korea; any ambitious young Korean had to become a collaborator. Park Chung-hee (1917-1979) who later became dictator of South Korea, also trained in Japan.

Park Kyeong-won died when her plane crashed in Manchuria on a propaganda flight. (Jang Jin-young, the actress who played her also died young, of gastric cancer, in 2009.) While Blue Swallow shows Park falling in love with a Korean man (hence the poster image above), as I recall it spends at least as much time on her friendships with other women. It's a very good film in its own right, worth seeing; I like to imagine the two women in "The Rule" stopping off at a video store, picking up Blue Swallow on DVD, and watching it over popcorn. (Image credit)

I've seen a surprising number of other films that conform to The Rule, and I'll probably write about them here in the future.