Never the Twain Shall Meet, One More Time

I'm still reading Mark J. McLelland's Male Homosexuality in Modern Japan, and still finding contrasts between Japanese gay life and "Western" gay life that don't seem to work. In his discussion of Japanese gay male media, for example, he says that

Gay media in Japan do not, on the whole, address issues of lifestyle and tend to avoid discussion of homosexuality in terms of legal reform or human rights -- issues which take up considerable space in gay media in Europe and the United States. ... Thus the American Advocate, the British Gay Times and the Australian gay newspaper Sydney Star Observer, although containing a few erotic pictures, are mainly news and lifestyle oriented whereas pornographic magazines such as or Honcho or Torso focus more specifically upon erotic fantasy. Japan so far has no nationally distributed glossy magazines similar to the Advocate or Gay Times which, directed at gay men, lesbians and transgender individuals, focus on issues of gay identity, lifestyle and rights, although as I point out in the current chapter, such articles are occasionally sandwiched in between the pornography in Japanese gay magazines [127].

Fair enough, but McLelland seems not to be aware that the Advocate used to have a big personal-ads section, known as "Trader Dick," that probably kept it afloat financially. The balance between politics, "lifestyle," and the erotic was always controversial. By 1992, Trader Dick was spun off to a separate publication, as the "gay market" caught on and it became easier to sell ad space to non-gay publications. The word "lesbian" was added to the Advocate's masthead only in 1990, which made many of the magazine's male readers throw hissyfits, writing angry letters denouncing the lesbian writers who'd been hired. Political papers like Gay Community News that refused to take sex-oriented advertising always had trouble surviving financially, however prestigious their content was. (And I say that as one who preferred, subscribed to, and wrote for the political papers.) I don't know much about the relative circulation of The Advocate and Honcho, but I wouldn't assume that Honcho moves fewer copies.

As for movement politics and "identity" (a word that always bugs me for some reason, partly because it's stressed so much in books like this without much clarity about what it means), politics and the social/sexual have always jostled each other for space in the American gay movement, with the latter usually winning out. Daughters of Bilitis, the first successful lesbian organization in the US, founded in the 1950s, was primarily a social organization for many years, until second-wave feminism politicized many lesbians. Mattachine, founded in 1948 by the ex-Communist Harry Hay and a few other politically minded gay men, was soon purged of its politicos and became largely a social club. Most American gay men really aren't that political. If Japanese magazines don't contain much political content, that could have something to do with the fact that there is no Japanese gay movement to speak of.

The most noteworthy difference I observe about the Japanese gay monthlies McLelland describes is their high price (1500 yen, or about $12 at the time he was writing) and their size: 500 pages. That's much bigger than any American gay magazine I've ever seen. The table of contents for one such magazine McLelland describes, Barazoku for April 1994, doesn't appear until page 54, "suggesting that the magazine is bought more on the basis of the boys in the pictures than the articles listed in the contents!" (130) Duh! This made me think of Playboy; the boys and men who bought it never hung its articles on the walls of their dorm rooms either.

The April 1994 issue of Barazoku also contains "54 pages of personal ads (777 in total)", and "259 pages of ads headed 'Barazoku men's town guide'", ranging from "'Gay nights' at major disco venues (few Japanese gay bars are large enough to permit dancing)" to "a huge number of adverts for both domestic and foreign videos (with stills) covering the usual gay fantasy figures ... Telephone sex is also on offer", along with "ads offering sexual services" (133). All this is roughly what you'd find in the classified ads of the Village Voice, it seems to me.

In the personal ads McLelland analyzes,

In keeping with the general lack of opportunity for developing or expressing a 'gay identity' many of the men placing ads describe themselves as ordinary ... or manly ... and are looking for other men like themselves who are cheerful ... and honest ... Very few men except those with a fetish for transgendered men, specifically request feminine or effeminate partners ... Many ads definitively reject them along with smokers, guys wearing glasses, fat men and foreigners. In fact, such men are rejected so often in the ads, that some ads make a specific mention of not minding such things as glasses or foreigners. Activities are the mainstays of Japanese recreation: driving, karaoke, going eating/drinking, travel and sports. ... The majority of writers are thus men who see themselves as being honest and ordinary, seeking other men to consult about problems as well as relax in very ordinary Japanese ways [145].

Again, this sounds exactly like gay personal ads in the US, where one constantly reads of "normal guy looking for normal guy" and "masc seeking masc", no fats fems or freaks plz. McLelland doesn't make any explicit comparison between cultures in this part of his discussion, except for that bit about the lack of opportunity for developing a "gay identity" -- but evidently even here in the land of Gay Identity, gay men want to see themselves as "ordinary," except compared to other gay men. "I'm not like most gay guys, hate the gay scene" is a familiar refrain in American personal ads and online profiles, so common that you'd have to conclude that most gay guys are different from most gay guys. Isn't that what the dread pirate Assimilation (which takes no prisoners) is all about, the claim that except for what we do in bed we're no different from anyone else? And it appears to be true; seventy-five percent of Americans consider themselves above average, so why should gay Americans be any different in that respect?

McLelland describes

H-san, an editor of the gay magazine G-Men and an AIDS activist, who, although a macho 'bear' himself, has been trying to get a variety of homosexual people together for the purposes of socializing. ... H-san was quite clear that for him the 'bear' type was a fantasy (specifically a sexual fantasy) figure that he did not want to be limited by in his personal interactions ... He would particularly like to see increased visibility for women in the Ni-chome scene as he clearly feels a solidarity with all people, irrespective of their sexual orientation, who are marginalized in Japanese society through their refusal to abide by normative understandings of sex roles [127].

I'd like to meet H-san, who sounds like an interesting person. But he's clearly no more typical, or representative, of most gay Japanese men than an American with similar ideas would be of most gay Americans. It sounds, from McLelland's description, as if gay life in Japan and the US are converging: what with the Internet, it's possible to have a gay sexual life without ever having to set foot in a physical space full of gay people. One can specify one's type -- McLelland has a lot to say about the "typing" of gay men in Japanese gay media and bar life, which mirrors the proliferation of sexual types in the US: bears, leather daddies, clones, twinks, and so on -- and stick to it, or him, as exclusively as one wishes. Though there are evidently more gay political activists in Japan than there were, say, thirty years ago, it's American gay life that is becoming more like the Japanese: a hive of commercialized niches based on sexual types, humming invisibly beneath a bland conformist surface.

(Santa Muscle Bear by the Japanese artist Jiraiya, via Bearotic)

Never the Twain Shall Meet Redux

I'm reading Mark J. McLelland's Male Homosexuality in Modern Japan: Cultural Myths and Social Realities (Curzon, 2000), and I'm struck by how often his descriptions of Japanese culture sound just like American culture. For example, "although there are now well-publicized Japanese gay activists, who have adopted a western agenda of gay identity and gay rights, many ordinary Japanese gay men remain sceptical about the usefulness of this discourse in a Japanese context" (19). You could substitute "American" for "Japanese" in that sentence, and it would be just as true; especially in the early 1970s when the American gay movement was first starting to make waves, but I heard similar reservations expressed by American gay men well into the 1980s, and (not always coherently) right down to the present. I think McLelland (who's Australian, I believe) knows this, since he mentions correcting the misperceptions Japanese had about gay life in the West, so I'm not quite sure what his point was here, unless it was to let non-Japanese readers know that gay Japanese don't unanimously endorse gay activism either.

Then there was this on page 86, on the absence of women in the comic books or manga, very popular among Japanese women, which depict sexual love between beautiful, androgynous boys.

This [i.e., the absence of women] is not unusual in postwar Japanese popular culture however, as Susan Napier has pointed out. In her book on The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature (1990) she includes a chapter entitled 'Woman lost: the dead, damaged, or absent female in postwar fantasy' where she charts a paradigm shift in the treatment of women in Japanese literature which took place after the war where 'women are no longer caretakers but objects of prey, only acceptable as victims upon which to enact male rage' (1990: 53). The male ego, rendered so fragile now that women have encroached upon all the areas of life that were once the sole domain of men: the realm of education, the workplace and even the sexual market-place, sees itself as under attack. Napier comments that in literary portrayals, 'male characters are shown damaged and angry' (1990: 57) and women 'are frequently seen as agents of entrapment or humiliation' (1990: 56), resulting in a situation where 'women seem to have become increasingly Other, unreachable, even demonic' (1990: 57).

Again, my first thought was Wow, that sounds like postwar American fiction too: Norman Mailer, William Burroughs, Philip Wylie, and many others. Not to mention film noir, with its femmes fatales trying to feed on men's precious bodily fluids, and its boring homemakers trying to sap their men's lives of all excitement, which drives them into the clutches of the femmes fatales. There's often a tendency to blame such crises in masculinity on the loss of a war -- WWII for the Japanese, Vietnam for the Americans -- or on colonialism. But the US won World War II! What did our guys have to whine about? I don't want to oversimplify, because I think that many, maybe most American veterans wanted nothing more than to live quietly and safely with their wives and children; but there was a countermovement, partly among male youth who thought they'd missed something by not having gone into combat and having their legs blown off. (You can see this in the Western Shane, in which the annoying little boy character wants Shane to be the hero and defeat the bad guys, and his father droops a little because he's not an expert in violence. Send the little brat to boot camp, I says.) The theme of the demonic female is of course much older and widespread than just the post-WWII period in Japan and the US, so this is something I'll have to look into some more.

Let me stress, by the way, that I'm not saying there are no differences between Japanese and American cultures, only that the similarities are so very interesting.

The Truth Lies Somewhere In Between

I've started reading Terry Eagleton's Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (Yale, 2009), after dragging my feet because there were so many other things I needed to read. But now it's due at the library in a couple of days, and I've run out of renewals, so it may be a while before I finish it. (No way am I going to spend money on it.) I have read the first 25 or so pages, though, and while I agree with some of what Eagleton says, much of it is wackery. He reminds me slightly of Philip Kitcher, whom I wrote about here before, because of his attempt to distance himself both from religious conservatives and the New Atheists -- especially Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, whom he schmears together with donnish humor as "Ditchkins", hur hur hur. So, I reject religious conservatives and I reject the New Atheists, but I also reject those who try to split the difference like Eagleton, Kitcher, and Chris Hedges. Where does that leave me?

For those who don't know, Eagleton is a Marxist literary critic of Irish Catholic extraction at Oxford University, a former student of the great Raymond Williams. I believe I tried to read one of his books, perhaps his attack on postmodernism, but for various reasons never finished it either; it might have been the one I'd seen reviewed in The New York Times, where Eagleton evidently raved about the barbarians at the gates of academe with their dirty French philosophies. He's cute, but cute don't get the job done.

The more I read, the more it seemed that Eagleton is not really an atheist, but a Christian. He says not, though he mentions having been influenced by liberation theology in his college days. Still, he writes (or rather talks -- the book was originally a set of lectures, very chatty in tone) like a fighting liberal priest who's not afraid to talk to the young. For instance:

There is a document that records God's endless, dispiriting struggle with organized religion, known as the Bible. God the Creator is not a celestial engineer at work on a superbly rational design that will impress his research grant body no end, but an artist, and an aesthete to boot, who made the world with no functional end in view but simply for the love and delight of it. ... The Creation is the original acte gratuit [8].

Eagleton's existentialist roots are showing here. But, of course, the Bible is not a "document" but an anthology of documents; if it depicts Yahweh's "endless, dispiriting struggle with organized religion", it also shows him setting up that organized religion he's struggling with, right down to the dimensions of the Tabernacle and, eventually, the Temple; that's when his engineering side comes into play. Sometimes he pretends he's not interested in sacrifices (the sweet smell of burning fat in which he delights), but at other times he complains that the cattle are scrawny, blemished, and not numerous enough. (As I've said before, the Bible is the ultimate source of the Borscht Belt joke about the food here being terrible -- and such small portions.) He's not even averse to sacrificing the occasional virgin. And overall there's the pity party for Yahweh, poor little guy, he gets no respect, sometimes it gets him down.

The world thus belongs to that exceedingly rare class of objects which, in a way that would have delighted the heart of Oscar Wilde, exist entirely for their own sake and for no drearily utilitarian end -- a category which along with God includes art, evil, and humanity. It is part of the world's sharing in God's own freedom that it works all by itself. Unlike George Bush, God is not an interventionist kind of ruler [9].

Just to nitpick, it doesn't sound like his class of non-utilitarian objects is really all that "rare," since it would have to include everything in the world as well as the world itself. But how do you like that timely bit about George Bush? However, Yahweh as depicted in that "document" the Bible is very much an interventionist kind of ruler, quite hands-on in fact: walking around the Garden of Eden at dusk, kicking out Adam and Eve when they disobey, killing everything in the world because he was peeved at humanity, visiting Abraham and opening Sarah's womb, sending plagues on Egypt, rejecting Saul in favor of David, and neither last nor least, sending his Son to die on the cross for the sins of humanity.  No sparrow shall fall, and the hairs on your head are numbered, bitchez. To this day he's cooking up tsunamis and earthquakes, famines and viruses, just to keep us on our toes. The doctrine of Yahweh as not just creator but sustainer of the world is found in the Bible as well as in later theologians. That he is "interventionist" is a pillar of modern apologetic theology: Yahweh intervenes in history, unlike those pagan gods who just run around in cycles.  With his Thomist background (and he has quite a boner for Aquinas), Eagleton must know all this, but he's got all this fine blarney to unreel for our entertainment.

For theology, science does not start far back enough -- not in the sense that it fails to posit a Creator, but that it does not ask questions such as why there is anything in the first place, or why what we do have is actually intelligible to us. Perhaps these are phony questions anyway; some philosophers certainly think so. But theologians, as Rowan Williams has argued, are interested in the question of why we ask for explanations at all, or why we assume that the universe hangs together in a way that makes explanation possible [13].

Funny, in my experience it has been precisely philosophers who asked such questions, including philosophers of science. The theologians I've read usually don't write about such interesting stuff, they're usually trying to reconcile the Bible with Plato or Aristotle or Heidegger or Charles Schulz. In general, Eagleton seems to talk about "theologians" when he means "philosophers," but it sounds like he's still stuck in the era of logical positivism, when a clique of mostly British philosophers did claim that such questions were bogus, and that was around the time when Eagleton was in college. But things have changed since then.

The morality Jesus preaches is reckless, extravagant, improvident, over-the-top, a scandal to actuaries and a stumbling block to real estate agents: forgive your enemies, give away your cloak as well as your coat, turn the other cheek, love those who insult you, walk the extra mile, take no thought for the morrow [14].

While Eagleton was revisiting the Sermon on the Mount, he should have noticed the bits about cutting off your arm and plucking out your eye to avoid sin, lest your whole body be cast into Hell. But that's not quite compatible with Jesus the Warm Fuzzy Hippie, I guess, so he leaves it out, along with becoming a eunuch for the kingdom of heaven and observing every jot and tittle of the Torah, the lesser commandments along with the greater.

Jesus probably preached this kind of ethic because he thought the end of the world was just around the corner, which turns out to have been rather a grave miscalculation. His sense of history seems to have been a little awry. ... Even so, it is not quite the kind of morality one associates with chartered accountants or oil executives [15].

Oh, that's all right then. But I don't go along with the bogus loaded alternatives Eagleton posits here: either take no thought for the morrow, or become an oil executive. That's the sort of fake choices I most associate with religious believers, though I admit they're not the only ones guilty of it. And it is entertaining when Eagleton quotes Hitchens fuming like a Dickensian miser or an American Teabagger about Jesus' lifestyle choice: "The analogy of humans to lilies ... suggests -- along with many other injunctions -- that things like thrift, innovation, family life, and so forth are a sheer waste of time". But it doesn't appear that Eagleton is any more interested than Hitchens is in actually emulating Jesus in this respect; he doesn't live on pure thoughts and the kindness of strangers, he's a hardworking professor and a prolific author (forty or so books, and recently a visiting faculty at Notre Dame University). He goes on (and on and on):

Because God is transcendent -- that's to say, because he doesn't need humanity, having fashioned it just for the fun of it -- he is not neurotically possessive of us [15].

Really? We're talking about Yahweh here, remember, Yahweh the jealous god, his name is Jealous, and you shall have no god but Yahweh, or he shall strip you naked before your lovers, et cetera, et cetera. "Neurotically possessive" is just how I'd describe the god of that "document" the Bible. Like most theologians and religious laymen, Eagleton makes up a god he likes to think about, and projects it onto the Bible, even though his fantasy clashes in many obvious ways with the picture of Yahweh most readers find there.

Eagleton does say in the Preface that he's just trying "to 'ventriloquize' what I take to be a version of the Christian gospel relevant to radicals and humanists[;] I do not wish to be mistaken for a dummy" (xii). But since he accuses 'Ditchkins' and their ilk of "writ[ing] off a worthless caricature of the real [New Testament], rooted in a degree of ignorance and prejudice to to match religion's own" (xi), he's casting the first stone in a glass house. Except that Eagleton clearly isn't ignorant: he's disingenuous.

Eagleton claims that

the Jewish and Christian religions have much to say about some vital questions -- death, suffering, love, self-dispossession, and the like -- on which the left has for the most part maintained an embarrassed silence [xii].

I don't think so -- that is, I don't think that the left has "for the most part" been silent on such issues; it's exactly the left that has dealt with them in ways that made sense to me; and I don't agree that the Jewish and Christian religions have much to say about those vital questions. Or rather, they do have a lot to say, but what they have to say is usually inhumane, irrelevant, and downright wrong. Sure, some Jewish and Christian writers have contributed useful ideas to my worldview, but they were not, as far as I can tell, representative of their faiths. (Most of the numerous Jewish writers I've learned from were aggressively non-observant.) Which reminds me, at one point Eagleton tries to adduce Spinoza as a "key theorist of toleration ... a Jewish rationalist who was also a mystic" (18), conveniently neglecting the facts that Spinoza's god was not the God of the Hebrew Bible, and that Spinoza was thrown out of the synagogue for his heterodox views.

Finally, there's this popular evasion:

For it is of course always easier to buy one's rejection of a belief system on the cheap, by (for example) triumphantly dismissing a version of Christianity that only seriously weird types, some of them lurking sheepishly in caves too ashamed to come out and confront the rest of us, would espouse in the first place [5].

You know what I'm talkin' about -- Christians love to complain that critics of the faith are either attacking a totally fabricated straw man, or are stereotyping all Christians on the basis of a few bad apples like Fred Phelps or that marginal guy with the pointy hat in the Vatican. The trouble with Christianity as far as I'm concerned lies in the New Testament itself (though it can of course always be reinterpreted to mean whatever one likes) and in versions of Christianity that are held by millions of ordinary believers. Dismissing them as "seriously weird types" is a popular way to try to distract critics from the real problems, but it's 1) dishonest and 2) doesn't work with me. I always ask the people who use this tactic which version of Christianity I should go by, then, and that's how I developed my rejection of that belief system -- not on the cheap, but by doing quite a bit of study, more than most Christians do. So I can say pretty confidently that the version of Christianity that Eagleton is "ventriloquizing" here is espoused only by a few seriously weird types, not lurking in caves but, like Eagleton, in Oxford and the Notre Dame campus. It's based on a shamelessly selective reading of the Bible generally and of the gospels in particular, which means that Eagleton is relying on the ignorance of his audience and their readiness to believe the best about Christianity, whatever the facts may be.

Moral Relativism for Professionals

Andrew Sullivan muses on the current abuse scandals troubling Holy Church:

It's very odd - and deeply revealing - to see theocons dancing with moral relativism and cultural context on the issue of child abuse.

What's so odd about it? Theological conservatives have always used moral relativism when it suited their purposes, and as Sullivan has also acknowledged (via), the sexual abuse of children has been covered up for a very long time, not by liberals but by the conservatives who run the institutions. And I won't do more than mention physical abuse of children -- beatings, overwork, starvation, et cetera -- which is a tradition of great antiquity.

Up through the period when Meibom composed his De Flagorum Usu, flogging was the standard method in Europe of punishing unruly children. In early modern England, both in homes and schools, across the boundaries of social class, the birch rod - as administered by parents, servants, nurses, tutors, or teachers - became the conventional instrument of retribution. Both boys and girls were expected to be unremittingly deferential to their elders and were beaten routinely for a great range of offenses: disobedience, obstinacy, laziness, a missed stitch, a flubbed Latin conjugation. And the punishments varied enormously in severity, from a gentle hand slap to prolonged, violent whippings that sometimes resulted in the death of the child. For the determined castigator, the child’s hand, mouth, face, and buttocks (either naked or clothed) were fair game. In addition to the birch rod, a ferula - a wooden slat with a large rounded end and a hole in its middle - could be used to raise a large and painful blister. Lawrence Stone notes that in the grammar schools (which drew a far greater number of boys than they had during the late Middle Ages) the standard method of administering the rod required one active and two passive participants: a boy would be beaten “with a birch” by his master “on the naked buttocks while bent over and horsed on the back of another boy.” Even in universities, young men were regularly submitted to public whippings, floggings over a barrel, or detention in the stocks. ...

(David Savran, Taking it like a man: white masculinity, masochism, and contemporary American culture. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998, pp. 17-18.)

To Serve Man -- It's a Cookbook!

I'm in the middle of reading Julie Grossman's Rethinking the Femme Fatale in Film Noir: Ready for Her Close-up (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), which is the kind of academic writing I enjoy. Grossman knows her stuff, and thinks for herself. She doesn't summarily reject psychoanalytic interpretations so much as notice their severe limitations, and tries to move beyond them, to notice what some film theorists would deride as the "literary" aspects of film, such as characters, cultural factors, and mise-en-scene. (I have long harbored a suspicion that psychoanalytic [especially Lacanian] interpretation is popular among film theorists because it simplifies the task of criticism so much. Despite its popularity among post-colonial critics, for example, it flattens out all cultural and even individual difference, so that any film from any culture can be written about without the critic's needing to know anything about the culture. It allows the critic to know a priori how the audience will understand a work without doing messy, expensive research to ask the audience how they understand the work. And so on.)

Grossman's basic take is, of course, feminist, which is fine with me.

One central obstacle to becoming more sensitive to the portrayals of female experience in film noir is the rigid way feminist perspectives are conceived by some critics. Hirsch claims, referring to Cain's [The] Postman [Always Rings Twice], "The original material was not written under a feminist watch and can profit little from a humanizing [?] feminist perspective." ... Neither was Chaucer's Canterbury Tales written under a modern "feminist watch," and yet this has not delegitimized reading the Wife of Bath's tale as a text that has things to tell us about language, class, and female power. The defensive tone of phrases such as "feminist watch" keeps Hirsch, I think, from engaging the diversity of feminisms and their potential for helping us to understand the role of the "femme fatale": the extent to which texts can be usefully subjected to a variety of feminist approaches in ways that will illuminate the text, the cultures that produced and were influenced by the texts, and the reading practices that affect (in some cases quite profoundly) the reception of the text in criticism and popular culture [47-48].

I should probably read Foster Hirsch's book, or at least the context of the part Grossman discusses here. (I think she's referring to Detours and Lost Highways, but she's not very clear, so it could be The Dark Side of the Screen.) Grossman says that Hirsch has "made significant contributions to the study of noir" (48), so I'm not assuming that he's necessarily a sexist porker with no redeeming qualities as a critic. But I think I would go further than Grossman in her response to Hirsch's remark about "a feminist watch," which I think is not just "defensive," it's anti-feminist backlash of a familiar kind.

When Hirsch tries to shield The Postman Always Rings Twice from feminist scrutiny because it "was not written under a feminist watch and can profit little from a humanizing feminist perspective," he's being absurd. All sorts of works from before the rise of second-wave feminism have been read and studied through feminist lenses in the past forty years -- not just the Wife of Bath's Tale, but probably most of the canonical texts of English and American literature. Kate Millett got the ball rolling with Sexual Politics, published in 1970, in which she discussed (among others) Charlotte Bronte, and James Cain's older male contemporary D. H. Lawrence. Indeed, none of the writers she discussed wrote "under a feminist watch." Of course the works themselves did not "profit ... from a humanizing feminist scrutiny", but many readers and writers have benefited from the results of this work. Hirsch's remark reminds me of people who try to exculpate famous people of the past from imputations of racism, say, because they lived before the Civil Rights Movement and so could not have known any better. Me, I'd like to know when it was 'discovered' (as America was 'discovered') that black people were human beings -- though I suspect that black people knew it all along.

What makes Hirsch's remark downright malign, however, is the whole notion of "a feminist watch." I will have to try to track down the context to make sure I understand him correctly, but he seems to be expressing a widespread attitude that is usually phrased in terms of "political correctness." We men have to watch what we say now, har har, because you ladies are keeping an eye on us to make sure we don't do anything chauvinist, har har har. Too bad the old days are gone, giggle titter. Of course the "feminist watch" hasn't been all that effective, as so many elements of popular and more-or-less high culture show. Music videos, Hollywood movies, pop songs, the writing of male heterosexual literati, and much more, all express the conviction that women exist to entertain, excite, and serve men. If women have minds of their own, they're bitches who want to turn men soft. If they turn men down for sex, they're bitches who want to run men down. If they accept men's sexual overtures, they're whores who want to sap men's precious bodily fluids and keep them away from their boyz. If they insist on the use of condoms, they're killjoys who want a guy to wear a raincoat in the shower. If they get pregnant, they're trying to get their hooks into him, plotting to use him as a money machine. (These last two sentences in particular are specifically based on conversations I've had with straight guys.)

Now, of course these are generalizations, not universals. There are men who see women as people in their own right, who don't see women's autonomy as a threat to their own. (To normal men, such men are called "pussywhipped fags.") But these generalizations are part of the cultural mainstream and should be recognizable to anyone who lives in contemporary American society. Case in point, not a noir: I recently saw Forgetting Sarah Marshall, initially to see how it handled the frontal male nudity that had freaked out numerous straight male viewers. It turned out to be better and more interesting than I'd expected, but in the end the filmmakers made one crucial blunder. Sarah Marshall gets dumped by the rock-star boyfriend for whom she originally dumped the protagonist, Peter Bretter, and decides to get Peter back by trying to seduce him. Peter has been getting involved with Rachel, the friendly hotel worker, but he's still not over Sarah, so at first he succumbs to her wiles -- and, I contend, "wiles" are just how her behavior is depicted. There's no real recognition or exploration of her pain at being dumped, her fear of being alone, her need to go running back to the man she knows and lived with for several years. None of this excuses her dumping him in the first place, of course, or implies that Peter should have gone back to her, but we've seen Peter in all his messy complexity and insecurity and been expected to sympathize with him; it would be possible to do the same with Sarah, sympathize with her, and still conclude that she screwed up royally, and can't go back to what she had before. What makes Sarah Marshall a run-of-the-mill picture is this one-sidedness. Filling it out wouldn't make it great, but it would have made it significantly better.

And Forgetting Sarah Marshall, remember, is a comedy -- not a noir, not a crime film. Back to Julie Grossman, who writes (63):

Paying close attention to the desperate and violent exploitation of women by men in noir also helps to reveal the inextricable link between the variety of crimes of the male protagonist and the construction of the "femme fatale" as an immutable category, a fixed given the predetermines our thinking about women in noir. As Angela Martin says in a comment that ends the second edition of Kaplan's Women in Film Noir:

It is also clear that in most of these films women have ended up with bad partners and/or are victims of male violence, perversity or authority. But that in itself throws a different perspective on badness, which is, clearly, usually male in these films, not female [222].

This reminds me of the time Callie Khouri, whose Thelma and Louise was criticized for demonizing men, told an interviewer, "But overall I think I am certainly not showing anything like the animals you're likely to see in a movie by Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Quentin Tarantino, or Oliver Stone ... You can show the most low-life, scum-fucking sicko in the world doing all kinds of violent shit to each other, or to women, and nobody says boo. But you have a woman point out that a guy is a sick fuck and blow up his truck, or have a good time with a guy they already kind of know is not on the up-and-up, and all hell breaks loose."

Another useful comparison would be the highly controversial neo-noir Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992), which I wish Grossman had mentioned somewhere in her book. Basic Instinct was built around the idea of a femme fatale, a rich, murderous bisexual writer and psychologist played by Sharon Stone, who plays a complicated game with the murderous cop, played by Michael Douglas, who's trying to get the goods on her. Stone's character is so amazingly wholesome, and Douglas's character so unremittingly sleazy, that I was startled when I read that Douglas had insisted on, and got, some changes in the script to make his character more sympathetic. The film was attacked during production by (primarily male) gay media activists for its use of the killer-dyke trope, but after its release a number of feminist critics found that it made more sense as a satire of male paranoia, and that, viewed that way, it was hilarious. All the women turned out to be killers or dykes or both, and the men flailed around futilely, pausing only to drool and sweat when Stone revealed in an interrogation room that she had gone commando that day. After reading their analyses, I saw the film and agreed with them: I and the friends who went with me kept giggling helplessly at scenes where the rest of the audience were gasping in dismay and shock. (Whenever Stone kissed another woman, one guy a few rows back would repeat with deep disgust, "Sick ... sick ...") Even if Stone's character was a femme fatale, Douglas's was someone whose defeat you could easily root for. I saw an interview with Verhoeven in which he made his own understanding clear: "She is evil, she's a devil, she wants to kill him, she wants to destroy him." Go, team! Yay, team!

P.S. I found the relevant part of Hirsch's Detours and Lost Highways online, and I'd say I was right about it. He explains the changes in the 1981 version of The Postman Always Rings Twice (dir. Bob Rafelson) in terms of "postfeminist consciousness" and "the captains of political correctness", and seems to blame them on the actress who plays Cora, Jessica Lange, "who is clearly not content to be so self-effacing," and refuses "to duplicate [Lana] Turner's approach to the material." No credit goes to the director (not known for his postfeminist consciousness), the male lead (Jack Nicholson, ditto) or screenwriter David Mamet (megaditto!).

Assigning a 1981 film to a "postfeminist consciousness" is absurd to begin with, but consider Hirsch's complaint that

Unlike their counterparts in 1946, the characters in 1981 are shown in graphic sexual encounters. The impassioned lovers copulate on Cora's baking table in a sustained, semi-explicit scene. The steamy passages, reprised throughout the film like song-and-dance numbers in a musical, are purely decorative; the sex scenes are lit with hot yellow "passion" lighting and are explicit in ways that could not have been attempted in 1946. Depicting the characters' rutting embraces, however, violates the decorum that underwrote both the earlier film as well as Cain's novel, in which sexual freedom was not so easily plucked.

Hirsch's basic point probably has some validity, but blaming the changes on the actress and postfeminism while ignoring the other technicians involved, the demise of the Production Code and other forms of censorship that had imposed the "decorum" Hirsch misses, the eagerness of (especially) male movie makers to exploit the new "explicitness" that was available to them, ascribing these changes to a "humanizing [!] feminist consciousness," to say nothing of complaining about lack of fidelity to source material in a Hollywood film -- all this confirms my earlier suspicion about Hirsch's sexual politics. Moreover, his choice of adjectives ("graphic," "semi-explicit," "steamy," "rutting") suggests that he's even more reactionary than I thought.

You Make Me Feel Mighty Real

Notice: The following material contains language, ideas, and jokes that may be offensive to some readers. If you are easily offended, This Is So Gay recommends that you exercise your choice to not read.

NARRATOR: Jesus is carrying His cross along the road to Calvary, where He will suffer a prolonged and excruciating death. This fate could have been avoided if He had a Sassy Gay Friend.

[Theme music plays over Sassy Gay Friend throwing his headscarf over his shoulder.]

[Sassy Gay Friend jumps out from behind a Roman soldier and confronts Jesus.]

SGF: What are You doing? What, what, what are You doing?

JESUS [I picture Jonah Hill in the role]: Judas betrayed Me, Peter denied Me, and Mary Magdalene eloped with the disciple I love!

SGF: I told You, even the Son of God can spread Himself too thin...

JESUS: My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?

SGF: So, You got dumped by Your boy toys. It happens! But what is this mortification of the flesh here? The crown of thorns, the stripes of the lash on Your back, this tacky cross! Don't be such a drama queen!

JESUS: The Son of God can be a drama queen if He feels like it.

SGF: I don't think so! The Son of God is a role model for millions of kids. Think of the endorsements You'll lose.

JESUS: I don't care! I want to die! Then they'll wish they hadn't treated Me like this! And I'll be laughing!

SGF: Oh, I'm so sure, like You're going to rise on the third day and watch them feel guilty. Now I want You to stop this nonsense, come down off Your cross, and show me the Jesus I know, Who told the scribes and the Pharisees where to get off. Enough of this whining -- I want to see the Judge of the quick and the dead, Who will separate the sheep from the goats!

JESUS: But what about My beloved disciple?

SGF: Honey, there are plenty of fish in the sea -- 153 to be exact. Look at that humpy number over there. Hand him the cross.

JESUS: Well ... I guess you're right. [He passes the cross to a guy with a linebacker's build, who's wearing a jersey that says CYRENE 00.]

SFG: C'mon, You stupid bitch, let's get out of here and I will make You a fisher of men.

JESUS: Does this loincloth make Me look fat?

SFG [smugly, to the camera]: She's a stupid bitch.

The first Sassy Gay Friend video was funny, the second one (about Juliet) still funny but a bit weaker, and the newest one (about Desdemona) didn't do much for me at all. I got this idea shortly before the third turned up on Youtube; one advantage of writing over video is that one can conjure up all sorts of effects (Jonah Hill as Jesus, the crowds along the road to Calvary) without actually having to stage them. I hope this offering fits the spirit of Good Friday.

All in the Family

Another interesting bit from the New York Times Magazine article I wrote about yesterday.

Since 2003, in addition to his investigation of female-female macaque sex, Vasey has also been studying a particular group of men in Samoa. “Westerners would consider them the equivalent of gay guys, I guess,” he told me — they’re attracted exclusively to other men. But they’re not considered gay in Samoa. Instead, these men make up a third gender in Samoan culture, not men or women, called fa’afafine. (Vasey warned me that mislabeling the fa’afafine “gay” or “homosexual” in this article would jeopardize his ability to work with them in the future: while there’s no stigma attached to being fa’afafine in Samoan culture, homosexuality is seen as different and often repugnant, even by some fa’afafine.)

There's nothing particularly remarkable about these men. "They're attracted exclusively to other men" -- presumably not to each other; if I'm right, they fit a pattern that turns up in societies around the world, including the US. Even the repugance for "homosexuality" is familiar: from Annick Prieur's Mexican vestidas who are repulsed by the idea of two mustached men kissing each other, to Megan Sinott's Thai toms and dees who reject the label "lesbian" because for them it refers "to two feminine women who are engaging in sex with each other", to any same-sex but hetero-gender-oriented people who think of two sissies having sex as "lesbianism" or "cannibalism." The ideas in this article conform to the tendency I've pointed out before, of confusing roles in sexual activity with sexual orientation.

In a paper published earlier this year, Vasey and one of his graduate students at the University of Lethbridge, Doug P. VanderLaan, report that fa’afafine are markedly more willing to help raise their nieces and nephews than typical Samoan uncles: they’re more willing to baby-sit, help pay school and medical expenses and so on. Furthermore, this heightened altruism and affection is focused only on the fa’afafine’s nieces and nephews. They don’t just love kids in general. They are a kind of superuncle. This offers support for a hypothesis that has been toyed around with speculatively since the ’70s, when E. O. Wilson raised it: If a key perspective of evolutionary biology urges us to understand homosexuality in any species as a beneficial adaptation — if the point of life is to pass on one’s genes — then maybe the role of gay individuals is to somehow help their family members generate more offspring. Those family members will, after all, share a lot of the same genes.

Yeah yeah yeah, we've heard this before. But there is no evidence to back it up: no evidence that these "superuncles" are genetically different from other Samoan men, no evidence that this pattern occurs outside Samoa, let alone that it appeared in prehistory. ("Prehistory" is a convenient place, where anything is possible, little can be proved or disproved, and people can be supposed to be driven by their biology with little interference from culture.) I expect that this "hypothesis" will dissolve when further research is done in other places and other situations; that's the normal outcome.

Is there a genetic basis for this tendency to assume that every human difference is the result of genetic difference? I once had an online exchange with a gay man who had a degree in some biological science. He said that all his scientific training required him to assume that there must be a biological cause for any human trait, including behavior. This may well be true -- so many scientists make exactly that assumption, and refuse to let go of it when it is undermined by evidence. Which is what I replied to this guy: I thought science was supposed to be a quest for truth, not the imposition of assumptions on reality. In many cases, clearly it isn't. But that makes it difficult, maybe impossible, to come up with useful, testable hypotheses about the real world.

Vasey and VanderLaan have also shown that mothers of fa’afafine have more kids than other Samoan women. And this fact supports a separate, existing hypothesis: maybe there’s a collection of genes that, when expressed in a male, make him gay but when expressed in a woman, make her more fertile. Like Wilson’s theory, this idea was also meant to explain how homosexuality is maintained in a species and not pushed out by the invisible hand of Darwinian evolution. But unlike Wilson’s hypothesis, it doesn’t try to find a sneaky way to explain homosexuality as an evolutionary adaptation; instead, it imagines homosexuality as a byproduct of an adaptation. It’s not too different from how Vasey explains why his female macaques insistently mount one another.

Again, Vasey and VanderLaan are assuming that having more kids must be genetically determined. It could be (almost anything is possible), but there is no scientific evidence to support it, no reason to believe it, and of course the very idea has its roots in long-discredited scientific racism. This "hypothesis" reminds me of Dean Hamer's genetic marker theory for gay men, which has not been replicated, but still gets cited by biological determinists of various sexual orientations.

Read that second sentence carefully: "this fact supports" an already existing "hypothesis": "maybe there's a collection of genes ...". There's no there there, as Gertrude Stein said of Oakland. (I also notice that the reporter is violating the requirement of not calling the fa'afafine "gay" in this paragraph; if the Samoans refuse to work with Vasey in the future, we'll know who to blame, or who to thank.) I'm beginning to suspect that, since it is now well established that a single-gene theory can't explain the traits or behavior that biological determinists have their eyes on, they are now stipulating "collections of genes" to suggest a vague complexity that they don't understand either. ("Predisposition" was a popular hand-waving term for a while too.) This is a pretty speculation, but it isn't even a hypothesis yet.

Something else occurs to me. It looks as though the Times writer (and possibly Vasey too), however he tiptoes around the delicate cultural sensibilities of the Samoans, does not agree that the fa'afafine are not "gay" or "homosexual." Presumably they both buy into the standard scientific conception of homosexuality as a "third gender" (far from being a primitive notion of colorful native cultures, this is the foundation of contemporary scientific work on homosexuality), where the "homosexual" is by definition and genetic endowment the "catcher" sexually. (In women, the "homosexual" is the one in the smoking jacket, smoking the cigar, with a dildo.) So there's a lot of same-gender copulation going on this world, that the psychologists and biologists (along with the vestidas, the fa'afafine, the toms and dees, the bakla, the katoey, and so on) can't begin to account for, and may not even be aware of. The biological types they postulate can only be tip of the iceberg of same-sex eroticism, yet apparently these scientists and science writers are only interested in this sub-group, because it fits their primitive concept of what sexuality is.