In Transit: Why Do I Have to Click on "English" for English? -- Oh, Wait...

Y'all may not have noticed given my spotty posting this year, but I was away for a few days when I really wanted to do more writing.  The reason: I was getting ready for my upcoming trip to Korea.  Shopping for gifts, packing, etc.  And now I'm writing this in Narita International Airport in Tokyo, with not quite two hours before the final leg of the journey.  As you can see, it's quiet here at the moment, though that will no doubt change soon enough.  I haven't been here since 2010, because on my last trip I got a nonstop flight from the US to Korea.  I don't think they had free wi-fi here before, so I'm happy.

One reason I like flying is that being crammed into economy class leaves me little to do but read, and I get a lot of reading done on planes.  And I most appreciate e-books when I'm traveling, though as usual I've stuck half a dozen books into my luggage anyway.  One of them, The Handsome Man's De Luxe Cafe by Alexander McCall Smith, I polished off after we left Minneapolis. It became a small ritual of mine to buy the latest No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency book each time I traveled to Korea, and I've continued that habit this time.  They usually take me about two hours to read, and I enjoy them.

But I also finished the latter half of an e-book I began a couple of days ago.  Since I've sniped at some people who object to e-books, it occurred to me that I wanted to write about my current opinion of the format.  I have both NOOK and Kindle dedicated readers, but lately I got a cheap ten-inch tablet, downloaded the NOOK and Kindle apps to it, and now I do about half my e-book reading on the tablet.  It's not quite as compact, but I like the larger screen.  I got a protective case for it that holds the tablet at a good angle for reading without my having to hold it up, and it's very comfortable.  I will keep the dedicated readers, though.  For one thing, I can read outdoors with them; the tablet screen is washed out by glare if I try to use it outside in daylight.

One thing I noticed today:  not only do e-books facilitate rereading, they make it easier to switch from book to book without losing my place.  Today I was jumping from Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misperceptions of the English Language by Patricia T. O'Connor and Stewart Kellerman to a sample from Genetic Explanations: Sense and Nonsense, edited by Sheldon Krimskyand Jeremy Gruber (very good, but too expensive to buy the rest of it -- I'll check it out from the library when I'm back at home next month) to Alison Bechdel's Are You My Mother? (which I'm rereading a chapter at a time) and bits of a few others.  That wouldn't be as easy with physical books, let alone when I'm in the air a thousand miles from home.

I still love physical books and will go on reading them.  But I find e-books very convenient.

Cherchez la Lesbienne

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Identity: A Parable

Hi, my name is Duncan, and I identify as Having a Boyfriend.

I don't actually have a boyfriend right now.  In fact I haven't had a boyfriend in over twenty years. But having a boyfriend is totally who I am.  Ever since I was very young I've wanted to have a boyfriend, so I know I was born this way.  Having a Boyfriend is my nature, whether I have a boyfriend or not.  Don't look at those little surface details.  What I do doesn't matter.  Look at my heart.  If you do, you'll see that in my innermost heart, I have a boyfriend.  It's who I am.

To tell you the truth, though, I've been doing some hard thinking lately.  I've begun to realize that I'm not really about Having a Boyfriend after all.  I'm really about Getting Married.  Back in primitive times there wasn't gay marriage, but now that there is, I'm coming out as wanting to have a husband.  This is really important to me.  It must have been in my DNA all along.

So from now on, I hope you all will respect my identity: I'm Married.  I don't have a husband yet, and really, having a husband seems like more trouble than it would be worth.  But you shouldn't have to have a husband to be married.  That's like going by heterosexual stereotypes.  Being Married is just who I am, whether I have a husband or not.  I might want to have a wedding, though, a big glamorous wedding in a church, like in Sex and the City: The Movie.  I'll have to think about it some more, but when I get it planned, I hope you all will attend.  And give me presents.  Because that's what weddings are all about.

Mopping Up

Just a few thoughts that I couldn't find a place for in yesterday's post.

One of the other ironies about attempts to defend inarticulate feces-flinging as an expression of Deep Manhood is that critical reason, science, philosophy, and the entire enterprise of the critical intellect has traditionally been claimed as a male preserve.  Women who tried to intrude into this sanctum sanctorum were warned that they were unsexing themselves.  I didn't quote all of that "subculture" comment; here's more of the context (emphasis added):

I think you can describe it as that Sarkeesian launched a attack on a subculture using her style of rhetoric and that many people from that subculture responded with attacks using a style of rhetoric common to that subculture.

As far as I can tell, Sarkeesian's "style of rhetoric" could be called a male style of rhetoric, not her own.  I don't consider any style of rhetoric to have a sex, but intellectual women have often been accused of having or aspiring to have male minds.  Sometimes they are complimented for it, but in any case the assumption is that rationality is a male trait and practice.  I don't deny that vituperative abuse and threats are deployed by women as well as men; but that makes the defense of these tactics by men all the stranger.  Aren't these emotional outbursts kind of ... girly?  I don't think they are, remember; it's masculists who think so, except when it suits them to think otherwise.

Some feminists have bought into the masculist characterization of rationality as a guy thing, so let me stress again that I don't think critical reason has a sex.  But one of the hallmarks of the American mythopoetic men's movement of the 90s (which seems to have faded away, though maybe it only gets less press now) was a rejection of critical reason, on some rather dubious grounds.  Around the turn of the century, I had an online altercation with a self-styled mythopoetic, who accused feminists of rejecting reason.  I pointed out that so did the mythopoetics, and he indignantly denied it but didn't refute it.  His own style of argument was short on reason and evidence, long on homophobic and misogynist abuse.  But that's not because he is male; it's because he's human.  And that's only an explanation of his behavior, not a justification.

In connection with all this, I remembered a useful quotation from Mary Midgley's Evolution as a Religion (Methuen, 1985):

The effect [of specialization] is to leave many of today’s physical scientists rather unpracticed in general thinking, and therefore somewhat naïve and undefended against superstitions which dress themselves up as science.  Creationism, for instance, cuts no ice at all with humanists and social scientists.  Nobody trained to think historically is in any danger of taking it seriously, least of all theologians.  It makes its academic converts among chemists and physicists – sometimes, alarmingly enough, even among biologists [24].

Midgley's correct about the intellectual and professional base of Creationism and Intellectual Design, and I think she's correct about many of today's physical scientists' weakness in the area of  "general" or, as I'd call it, critical thinking.  There's a popular kneejerk reaction to any criticism of scientific claims among many science cultists, whether lay or priestly, that such criticism is the doing of religious nuts or ideologically-driven irrationalists in the humanities.

But there are plenty of religious nuts in the physical sciences today, as David F. Noble has shown (see his The Religion of Technology, Knopf, 1997), and scientific racism / sexism comes from the sciences.  It's true that the criticism of scientific racism comes largely (though not exclusively) from the humanities, from the anthropologist Franz Boas onwards, but that's an indictment of the physical sciences, especially when you consider that apologists for the latest brand of scientific racism admit that earlier brands were discredited but prefer not to admit by whom.  When physical scientists do criticize scientific racism, they frequently are accused of not being scientists, and the accusations are framed in almost paranoid terms.  A prime example of this was my liberal law-professor friend (her background includes doctorates in statistics and computer science) who, when I mentioned the historian of science Thomas Kuhn, snapped that Kuhn had no scientific training.  When I pointed out that Kuhn had a doctorate in physics, from Harvard, she boldly changed the subject.  It was like arguing with a Creationist, and now I understand why.  (I've seen denials of Kuhn's scientific training before, so I surmise it's an item of folklore among scientific fundamentalists.)  If someone is properly positive and uncritical about science, on the other hand, he or she needn't have any scientific training at all.  Again, this corresponds to religious piety.  As long as you respect duly constituted authority, you don't need to know anything, and no one will criticize you for your ignorance.

Another amusing example of this tendency was an academic geneticist who fumed that a paper claiming that human beings are progressively becoming less intelligent was "Arts Faculty science."  As it happened, the author of the offending paper was also a geneticist.  While some humanities faculty do indeed hold and express risible views of science, the true fount of this kind of wackery is the physical sciences themselves.  I imagine that the accusation was a kneejerk, less-than-fully-rational reflex against the supposedly woolly-minded arts and humanities.  Far from being Arts Faculty Science, Crabtree's paper is Science Faculty Science.  Recognizing that would be too painful to bear, I suppose.

I'm not saying that all scientists are irrational or that all humanities faculty are rational; of course they aren't.  But scientists who use the humanities and even religion as a straw man on which to blame attitudes they dislike are being irrational.  It's entirely possible for a person to be brilliantly rational in one domain, and bouncing-off-the ceiling irrational in others.  Think of Edward O. Wilson's pitiable cry, "multiculturalism equals relativism equals no supercollider equals communism."  Notice that Wilson here blamed declining funding for the supercollider on multiculturalism rather than on changing post Cold-War conditions, let alone on its cost overruns and the failure of the damn thing to work.  It would not be out of line to notice too that "communism," in the Soviet Union spent lots of money on scientific research and technology.  (In the good old days, cutting-edge technology pretty much got a blank check, especially if it might have military applications.  Today's scientific revivalists miss those great days.  There were giants in the earth then, or at least giant science budgets.  Now we can only show children Star Trek reruns and hope they'll catch the fire.)  Much of the wackiest (and sometimes harmful) ideas come from the science departments, though, and get published in peer-reviewed journals.

As with religion, I often must ask whom I am to believe among those who claim to speak with authority.  What if the teacher points to his miracles, his mighty acts of power, as proof of his authority?  As a layman, I'm not supposed to evaluate religious or scientific claims; I must simply believe.  Those who Fucking Love Science point to their authorities, but jeer at those who point to theirs.  And vice versa, of course.  Even worse, yesterday the curators of a liberal Facebook page linked to a Slate article which marshalled statistics to show that states with stricter gun laws have few gun deaths, and added their own judgment: "This is not a conversation. You are not entitled to a different opinion. These are FACTS."  It is a conversation. People are entitled to a different opinion, always. Only an authoritarian dirtbag says otherwise. Statistics, especially about social phenomena and policy, are always open to question and disagreement.  For example, on the most elementary level, are we talking about correlation or cause here?  This is not the way to settle a question, or even to discuss it.

I'm presently reading Feyerabend and Scientific Values: Tightrope-Walking Rationality by Robert P. Farrell (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003), which is quite interesting.  Farrell shows that many (most?) critics of the philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend misunderstand and misrepresent him.  (Like Kuhn, Feyerabend had training in physics, though unlike Kuhn he didn't complete a degree in it.)  This can't be entirely excused by the fact that Feyerabend wasn't always consistent, though like any philosopher, let alone human being, he wasn't always consistent.  Farrell shows that at one point in his career, in Science in a Free Society (Verso, 1978) Feyerabend did adopt something like that radically relativist position he was often accused of.  But the accusations also refer to (and misrepresent or misunderstand) the work he did before that book.  Granted, philosophy isn't easy at best, and I wouldn't necessarily blame a lab physicist for misunderstanding Feyerabend.  But I do blame other philosophers and historians of science, who should have been able to follow what he was doing: that is their job.

One conundrum I wasn't able to disentangle in F. G. Bailey's discussion of the moral mind in The Tactical Uses of Passion  (Cornell, 1983) was how much the public outbursts of emotion he describes are involuntary and how much they are conscious, willed performances.  For example:

Projecting from the way he has behaved in similar situations in the past, he is “beside himself” or “not himself” or “unlike his normal self” if he conducts himself as others would not have predicted: the calm man who flies into a rage, the irascible woman who remains passive when provoked, the bold person who shows fear, or the coward who confronts danger.  (Of course, if such displays happen often enough, then the definition of that particular “true self” is likely to be modified.)  Second, we may look not at the person and his unique and individual history, but at the status he occupies.  Profanity from the headmistress and sentimental tears from the sergeant major are evidence that these people are “beside themselves” or “not themselves” [51].

Supposedly people who are "not themselves" or "beside themselves" are "out of control."  The politician, the preacher, the salesman, may walk a fine line between being "carried" away by emotion and managing very carefully his or her effects.  Sometimes, however, those outbursts are surely deliberate, theatrically so:

It is a tradition, at least in the British army and I presume in others, that the drill sergeant should taunt the recruits, heap abuse upon them, and so conduct himself that, off the drill square, any normal person would reward him with a black eye.  Recruits are compared to pregnant ducks. They are told that if the Queen saw them, she would certainly abdicate. The trooper whose hair is the length of toothbrush bristles is asked if his head hurts, and, compelled to reply loudly and clearly that it does not, is told that it should, because the sergeant is standing on his hair.  All these things are formalized provocations, and the individual must learn not to fight back, not to get angry, not to show himself as an individual.  The training is generally effective. Very few people do fight back (at least openly – there are all kinds of interesting ways of doing so covertly), and those who fight back openly are heavily punished and generally judged by their peers to be stupid rather than brave ... In this performance not one iota of emotion is encouraged, unless it is collective and stage-managed.  For example, a drill was used at the funerals of important persons.  At the command “Rest on your arms reversed!” one placed the muzzle of the rifle on one’s toe, bowing one’s head.  We were told, “Look sad, you buggers!”  We were like hired mourners at a funeral, and no one expected us to feel sad.  There was also a drill for giving three cheers, laying down where the cap should be grasped (easier with the old peaked cap than the floppy forage hat), where it should be held during the “Hip! Hip!,” and the appropriate duration of the “Hurrah!”  The only occasions on which “genuine” emotion was enjoined were simulated encounters with an enemy: when thrusting a bayonet into a sandbag, one was required to shout with anger and exultation [52-3]

I think Gamergaters also walked this line: Oh, I was so angry to have my subculture vilified by that man-hating bitch that I saw red, I totally lost it, I was out of control.  And perhaps paradoxically, the person who claims to be basically rational expects to be congratulated for becoming irrational in the face of such provocation.  What else could I do, Your Honor?  The bitch was asking for it!  This is the rhetoric of the lynch mob.  The best thing about it is that if you weren't yourself, you don't have to make reparations to your victims afterward.  (The destruction was mutual: they failed to obey our orders, which was emotional violence on a vast scale, so we bombed them into the Stone Age.  It balances out!)

There's no shame in misunderstanding a complex discussion, and none in getting angry at someone for holding opinions you dislike.  But it's one thing to yell "You suck!" at the book you're reading or the post on your computer screen, and another to go public with the same words, to post them to the author's Twitter account; let alone to send the person threats of death and dismemberment.  Or, if I may speak allegorically, there's no shame in losing control of your bowels -- it happens to all of us sooner or later if we live long enough, and of course we all began our lives as incontinent, wailing babies.  There is shame in taking up those feces and hurling them at someone, and even more in defending such behavior as essential to your "subculture" or an inevitable result of your genetic makeup.  Feelings are, we were taught at the telephone crisis line where I volunteered for several years in the late 1970s; they aren't necessarily reasonable, and there's no reason why they should be.  What we do with them, how we act on them, does need to be reasonable.

When Death Threats Are Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will Make Death Threats

I haven't written about Gamergate here, because I didn't feel like sorting through the controversy and finding out what was really going on.  Plenty of other people who knew what they were talking about, and who love gaming, have written about Gamergate competently. I am not particularly interested in gaming myself, and I have nothing to add to their analyses.

What I am interested in are issues of civility (though maybe I should put that word in quotes), sexism, misogyny, anti-feminist backlash, homophobia, and freedom of speech.  So this post at Alas, a Blog about some reactions to journalist Anita Sarkeesian's testimony at the United Nations, gave me something to write about.  Here, courtesy of Ampersand, is the relevant portion:

Ampersand showed how certain of Sarkeesian's critics misrepresented her remarks (without actually quoting them explicitly, he says).  What interested me were the defenses of Gamergate by some commenters under that post, which eschewed the more typical frenzied misogynist rants in favor of mere condescension (referring to Sarkeesian as "Anita," for example) and superficially civil calls for freedom of speech and debate.

One commenter claimed that harassment must consist only of overtly hostile, threatening behavior.  But if someone were to call this guy up every night at 3 in the morning, say nothing for thirty seconds or so, and then hang up, I feel pretty sure he'd consider that harassment before the first week was over.  It wouldn't be necessary to tell him he was going to be raped anally with a fencepost or his nuts cut off and stuffed down his throat.  I think that if an anonymous caller merely said "Hi!" in a bright, friendly tone before hanging up over and over, he still would consider it harassment.

The most useful comment for my purposes was posted later in the thread, though.  It stated a notion that had been gestured toward by others, but stated it clearly and reasonably unambiguously.  Ampersand had linked to a sample of misogynist abuse of a feminist writer and asked if such stuff was "fair game."  The commenter replied:

None of those are in the vicinity of “you suck” or “you’re a liar” which is what she was complaining about, and which are valid responses to someone’s output.

We don’t think racist, sexist, homophobic, what-have-you insults are okay, even (especially?) when directed at public figures. But we do expect them to put up with generic insults, like “you suck”.

"You suck" is not a valid response to someone saying something one dislikes or disagrees with. If anything, it amounts to a confession that one has nothing valid to say in response to them. It doesn’t show rationality, finely-honed debating skills, superior knowledge about gaming or any other subject. Saying "you suck" shows that one is an inarticulate lump who has nothing of any interest or value to say about the subject about which one has gotten all hot and bothered.  This is not necessarily a bad thing -- some of my best friends are inarticulate lumps -- but it's not the same thing as being rational or articulate. The beauty of the internet, of course, as of free speech in general, is that no one has to be intelligent, or knowledgeable, or rational to share their opinions with the world. But no one is required to pretend that the equivalent of monkeys throwing feces is intelligent discourse. Yet I’ve noticed that these shit-throwing boys not only want to be taken for rational thinkers, but want respect and sympathy for themselves and their hurt feelings.  Much like bigots in general.

"You're a liar" has more promise, but only as a beginning.  It has to be followed, or accompanied, by some evidence for the claim it makes.  Not too surprisingly, that doesn't usually happen, and as in this case, when the attempt is made, the evidence is mostly or entirely false itself.

If you feel that you really and truly must say "You suck" to someone else, saying it once is enough.  You'll achieve nothing positive or constructive by saying it over and over, let alone escalating from there to dismemberment fantasies and threats.  (Bear in mind that the threats were not a response to escalating feminist criticism of gamer culture -- rather the opposite.  If their targets didn't respond in kind, they took that as license to come up with more baroque and vivid dismemberment and rape fantasies.)  And if you discover in yourself a certain ambition to be something more than an inarticulate lump, you can begin by seeing how many people have already told the offending person that he or she sucks.  You get zero points for originality after the first dozen or so.

The Gamergate notion that being a Gamer is an "identity" that must be defended at all costs was significant, I thought.  It ties into to the claim by another comment that Sarkeesian was not an innocent victim after all: she had criticized a subculture, and "many people from that subculture responded with attacks using a style of rhetoric common to that subculture."  This was intended to be a defense of the vitriolic attacks, by the way, though the commenter also claimed that they were the work of only "a few bad examples."  This kind of equivocation is common as a distractive tactic, I've noticed: first, the behavior was appropriate to the culture; second, it was not typical but the work of a few bad apples; third, criticizing those few bad apples strikes at the heart of the entire subculture.

Another thing about “subculture”: it’s one thing (though not above criticism and censure) for the members to engage in these antics among themselves, and quite another to direct them against those who didn’t ask, and don’t want to play. The funny thing is that the people who are here (and elsewhere) defending the monkeys are thereby inadvertently confirming everything derogatory anyone could say about boy-culture and gamer culture in particular.

The same commenter later accused me of misandry for comparing the more intemperate Gamergaters to feces-throwing simians.  I don't think so, though I'd pay attention to a rationally argued case for the accusation.  (Need I tell you that he didn't attempt one?)   But I think he missed something.  If I were to say that all human males are feces-throwing monkeys, and offered no compelling evidence to support the allegation, then yes, an accusation of misandry might well be called for.  But I didn't even compare all Gamergaters, or video-game players, to feces-throwing monkeys: I compared those whose total and mildest collective retort to criticism of the gamer subculture was "You suck" to feces-throwing monkeys.  I might have other characterizations of the scum who spammed their opponents with death threats.  Rabid feces-throwing monkeys, maybe.

There's an entertaining irony here that I've noticed before.  It's not I who am saying that the innate nature of human males is to screech "You suck" when someone criticizes (no matter how rationally) their little ways, it's the angry males who defend and justify their behavior by attributing it to male nature.   A friend told me that in a video of Jane Elliott's blue-eyes/brown eyes exercise, a white man expostulated that he didn't like being told he was ignorant because of the color of his eyes.  According to my friend, Elliott replied: "Oh no, sir -- your ignorance has nothing to do with the color of your eyes."  (There's a lot of feces-flinging in some responses to Elliott in this article from Smithsonian magazine.  From people of both sexes, by the way: it's not just a guy thing, only some guys claim that it is.) I myself have dealt with white people who claimed they were called racists simply because of the color of their skin; Christians who claimed they were called bigots merely because of their faith; heterosexuals who claimed they were called homophobes merely because of their sexual orientations; men who complained that they were called sexists just because they had a penis.  Oh no, sir -- your sexism has nothing to do with your penis.  At most it has to do with your conviction that having a penis (or a melanin deficiency, or an erotic fixation on the other sex, or you worship images of a crucified man) impels you to behave in certain ways, and should entitle you to certain privileges.

On the other hand, I doubt that the Gamergaters would have responded the same way to, Harvey Mansfield's association of violence with manliness, just as no conservatives accused Phyllis Schafly of hating men when she claimed that men wouldn't support their children unless the law made them do it.  As Callie Khouri, the writer of Thelma and Louise, pointed out, no one sees ultraviolent gangster or action or horror movies as defamatory of men.  What's unacceptable is to say that male violence is a bad thing, and even worse: merely to suggest that ultraviolence is not part of the essence of manhood, and that men don't have to be violent to be good men.  That's what sets off the flying feces.

Even when I speak of Boy Culture (I choose Boy to imply my belief that it's a construct of some immature males, not an expression of adult maleness), I cheerfully admit that not all males conform to it or support it -- indeed many are victimized by it -- and that many women also embrace and endorse it.  That's a big part of my point: that would-be alpha males are not only a small minority of men but that many or most men aren't interested in being at the top of a heap.  (As others have noticed, researchers have an unseemly tendency to focus on the cool kids and ignore the others who constitute the majority.)  The dominant (hegemonic, to use the jargon) model of manhood, like other dominant models, is often true of only a minority in a society, but it will be paid lip service as 'natural' or 'the way things are' by the majority.  That's a datum, but it doesn't make the dominant model true.

The most interesting response I got in the comments thread sought to catch me out in my own logic.

Would you ever apply this criticism to (using a group I identify with) gay activists who use intemperate, insulting language? Or do they get a pass because they never claimed superior rationality? I’m not actually a fan of people telling others “you suck” online, but I also don’t think it’s a particularly strong insult at all – consider the arguments about language changing above – and I think you’re articulating a double standard.

Hey, I identify with gay activists too!  I have been a gay activist myself, and may be one again (activist, that is; I’m still gay). And yes, I would criticize gay activists for using intemperate language, etc., though I'd have to see each case to evaluate. In fact I do criticize my fellow queers and our allies when they say “you suck” and “fuck you” and the like, because nothing says enlightenment and opposition to misogyny and homophobia like homophobic/misogynist language. Sometimes I tell people who say “fuck X person” that I’m glad they love Kim Davis (or Donald Trump, or whoever) and want to give her pleasure, but I don’t think that’s the message they are trying to convey. And yes, my people do like to present themselves as rational and enlightened compared to those stupid fundamentalist Bible thumpers who are fat and stupid. It’s painful to be reminded, constantly, that so many of my fellow gay people and liberals and leftists are stupid, bigoted swine. But I soldier on.

I’m not so much concerned with “insult” or how “strong” the insult is, in this case — I think he missed the point about that. I said that saying simply “You suck” to someone you disagree with is not a valid reponse to them. Yes, language changes, but “you suck” and “fuck you” still seem to me to convey the sense that being penetrated is debasing, and therefore throwing those words at another person effectively means to feminize and debase them. I’ve noticed some straight guys trying to argue that “faggot” isn’t really antigay, it’s a putdown of those who “bend the knee,” which is of course nonsense. And I must point out that the same excuse about changing language gets made for the kind of raving abuse that women like Sarkeesian are targeted with. They’re accused of being too sensitive, etc. One commenter on an article on Gamergate actually claimed that if he’s not allowed to make death threats online, all “our” freedom will have been stripped away by the feminazis.   (No permalink that I could find: see Atavax, 10/20/2014 9:00 PM EST.)

But leave that aside. It doesn’t really matter whether I’m right about the misogynist/homophobic punch of “You suck.” The important thing is that someone who says it is declaring his or her refusal to debate rationally. He or she is expressing his or her feelings, I suppose; but they’re not interested in anyone else’s. Over the years I’ve run into numerous homophobes online who’ve tried to discredit what I say by insinuating that I must be a homosexual, or by trying to “out” me. You can’t “out” someone who’s already out, and it drives them up the wall when homophobic shaming doesn’t work on me. If someone says “You suck” to me in such a situation, I’m likely to say, “Why yes, I do. What is your point?” I’m not interested in censoring them, but I am interested in censuring them, mocking them, deriding them, and withholding respect from them. That’s not a double standard; the double standard is held by people who want to hurl abuse at other people, threaten them online, etc., but panic and whine that they’re being persecuted when someone throws the abuse back at them. If they want me to tiptoe around their tender little feelings, they need to show the same consideration to others. And as I’m afraid even this relatively reasonable thread shows, there are many men who can’t see any discussion of sexism as anything but a call to castrate them, as shown by the misreadings of Sarkeesian that Ampersand has to keep correcting. Just as there are many whites who can’t see any discussion of racism as anything but a call to drive The White Race into the sea. And many heterosexuals who see the legalization of same-sex civil marriage as opposed and hostile to heterosexual marriage. I can sympathize with their irrationality and the pain that drives it, but I see no reason to call it “valid.” It’s not.

So no, I don't think I was articulating a double standard.  My interlocutor couldn't have known my history of criticizing my own side, of course, but it's significant that he chose to suppose that I don't do it.  I think he revealed a double standard of his own, however: that for ostensibly straight boys to attack their critics in these terms is at least understandable, but for gay activists to behave in the same way is not.

A curious thing, though, about that other commenter's claim that the frenzied response to Sarkeesian and other feminist critics of gamer culture was that the gamers used "a style of rhetoric common to that subculture."  It follows that Sarkeesian and her colleagues would have done better to use the same style of rhetoric in reply.  I doubt it would have worked.  I've occasionally experimented by responding to right-wing bigots with their own style of discourse.  They always attack me for incivility, irrationality, and dishonesty -- for sinking to their own level, in effect, though they're careful not to recognize their manner in the mirror.  The gamers conform to this pattern, though since their targets mostly do not respond in kind, they have to invent horrific feminist calls for the subjugation, castration, or elimination of all men.  Are they happy that women are learning to use the style of rhetoric common to the gaming subculture?  They are not; they are distraught that man-hating feminists are brutal misandrists.  Even the comparatively mild humorous trope about "male tears" is cast (see the comments) as a foreshadowing of the Androcide to come if feminists have their way, because of course women fear male violence, and males fear female laughter.  But isn't it misandrist to accuse feminists of sinking to men's level?

Whom Would Jesus Curse?

I admire Ella Shohat and Robert Stam's work.  Their Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, originally published by Routledge in 1994, is the best book on post-colonial theory I've read and one of my favorites among those I've read in the last several years.  Shohat and Stam are very good at covering complex topics; while they understand the theoretical tools and concepts they're working with, they write accessibly and are often actually fun to read -- very unusual for academic writers.  Stam's Film Theory: An Introduction (Wiley-Blackwell, 2000) surveys the history of film theory, giving a capsule account of each school or approach.  It's an excellent introduction because it shows that there's a wide range of doctrines and opinions about what Film is or should be.  The temptation for a beginning student is to suppose that the doctrine her teachers prefer is the answer; Stam's book shows that there are many answers, and the student must choose which ones she'll use.

So when I happened on their Flagging Patriotism: Crises of Narcissism and Anti-Americanism (Routledge, 2007), I was ready to dive in.  (As you can see, I tend to lag several years behind them; they have a more recent joint work, Race in Translation: Culture Wars and the Postcolonial Atlantic [NYU Press, 2012], which I'm adding to my reading pile.)  In Flagging Patriotism they compare how the United States, France, and Brazil see themselves, each other, and their places in the world.  They draw on writings and popular media from all three countries, especially the literature of anti-Americanism in France, and generally work that isn't available in English.  (I was highly intrigued by a Brazilian film comedy they mention, O Homen do Sputnik [The Sputnik Man; 1958], about a Brazilian peasant who finds a fallen space satellite in his field.  The Russians, the Americans, and the French all want to get at it, and the French score with a Brigitte Bardot lookalike [played by a Brazilian Bardot lookalike].  Looks like it's on Youtube, but without English subtitles.)

Much of Flagging Patriotism is very good: Shohat and Stam ably navigate the difficult waters between one-sidedly condemning the crimes of the United States while overlooking the crimes of its French and Brazilian critics, and excusing the United States by pointing to the crimes of its critics' countries.  Their guiding principle is that no country or culture is monolithic or homogeneous, and they carefully lay out the contradictions in each of their subjects' histories and present.  This part of the book, roughly its first half, will probably be useful to many people; I learned a lot from it.

But when Shohat and Stam discuss religion, they leave their guiding principle behind.

Although it is obvious why the Christian right sees itself as being on the right, it is less obvious why it thinks of itself as "Christian."  Perhaps the right is Christian in the same sense that the Crusade, the Spanish Inquisition, and the Salem witch trials were Christian.  But the right is clearly not Christian in the sense of "love thy neighbor" ... [253]

On the other hand, the right is clearly Christian in the sense of "Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire"; or "It is not meet to take the children's bread, and to cast it unto the dogs"; or "You are of your father the Devil"; or "Ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?"  These are also teachings of Christ, and liberal Christians are perfectly happy to quote them against those they don't consider their neighbors.  And why shouldn't they follow in the Master's steps?

Shohat and Stam go on to misquote Jesus, sometimes ungrammatically:

... his "politically correct" tolerance -- "judge not, lest ye be judged," "let he who is perfect cast the first stone," and so forth -- and ... his excessive love of peace ("Blessed be the Peacekeepers") ... [253]

I wonder if that last howler is deliberate, though it probably isn't.  Maybe in the Beatitudes Jesus was prophetically blessing the Peacekeeper missiles, which the Christian right would welcome.  Unfortunately, though Shohat and Stam have a pretty good sense of humor and made me laugh aloud a few times, I don't think they were being sarcastic in this case.  It appears that, like so many good, educated liberals, they don't know very much about religion.

In the last hundred pages of Flagging Patriotism, Shohat and Stam focus on the vileness of the Republican right, which is fair enough when you recall that the book was published in 2007, during the declining years of the Bush administration.  By way of contrast they mock the fecklessness of the Democrats:

The Democrats' mistake in 2004 was to accept the right-wing framing of the issue of patriotism and then offer a servile mimicry of "us too" militarism [236]

This is not so fair.  Democrats have shown themselves to be all too willing to shed the blood of dusky foreigners, and while Shohat and Stam couldn't have known what a warmonger Barack Obama would be, they tend to underplay Bill Clinton's horrible record.  From the occasional allusion it's clear they know about it, but they don't seem as eager to balance Bush/Cheney bloodlust with Clinton/Gore bloodlust as they are to balance American imperialism with, say, French imperialism.  They quote with approval the "When Clinton lied, nobody died" bumpersticker, which commits the very offense they ascribe to the Democrats in 2004: it accepts the Republican frame that the only Clinton lies that mattered were the ones he told about his sexual history, and not his lies about Iraq, Iran, Kosovo, Indonesia, welfare "reform," NAFTA, and other genuinely weighty matters.  Their analysis of media would benefit, I think, by taking the Herman-Chomsky propaganda model into account, but they never mention Chomsky and their discussion of media doesn't show his influence.  They do, however, mention Steven Colbert and Jon Stewart numerous times.  By the end of the book they're carrying on like any liberal Democrat, not the radical-left multiculturalists they claim to be.

I wonder what Shohat and Stam think about Obama.  A cursory search doesn't turn up anything, and though they don't seem to adulate him in this 2012 interview, the few references they make don't shed much light.  Maybe Race in Translation will tell me more; I hope to get to it this year.

But let me return to my main point.  It baffles and disturbs me that so many academics let themselves be sloppy and simplistic about religion in ways they would never tolerate in themselves on other issues, and certainly would not tolerate in their opponents.  It's not because they consider religion to be unimportant; it's easy to see from Shohat and Stam's condemnation of the Christian right that they consider it quite important. Christianity is no more monolithic than Americanism. (Of the errors and distortions promulgated by laypeople, the less said the better perhaps, but I have anyway.)  Christianity is much older, after all, so it could be expected to diversify; but even in the New Testament it displays the kind of internal contradictions one would expect of a much older and established cult.  This can be seen in the letters of the apostle Paul, the oldest surviving Christian writings.  Not only is Paul less than consistent, he refers to controversies with fellow believers that show rampant factionalism and disagreement about basic doctrines and practices less than a generation after Jesus died.  (Those interested might start by reading Galatians, which is one of his shorter letters and lays out the doctrinal rifts very clearly.)  The gay Catholic scholar Mark D. Jordan does a much better job of discussing historical and contemporary Christianity in all its contradictory messiness; it can be done.  See his Silence in Sodom (Chicago, 2000) for a good start.  Flagging Patriotism would be a better book if Shohat and Stam had taken the same care writing about Christianity that they did about politics and history.

Show Me the Critical Thinking; or, The Digital Natives Are Restless

Recently I read bell hooks's Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom (Routledge, 2010).  I haven't read much of hooks's work, mostly her first book, Ain't I a Woman? (South End Press, 1981) and the occasional article or interview since then.  It seems to me that she does better in short pieces than in books -- some of her critical essays on African-American film interested me, for example -- and that she gets lost when given the length of a book to move around in.

Teaching Critical Thinking confirmed that impression.  The writing is mostly slack, in the Culture of Therapy mode, and there's precious little critical thinking on display here.  To keep it personal, it takes very little critical thinking for me as a gay man to object to antigay bigotry and heterosexual supremacy.  I must also turn my critical faculties on my own views, on my condition as a gay man, on my responses to homophobia, sexism, racism, and classism in my own community.  It may not be fair to compare hooks to someone like Audre Lorde, but really, why should I read hooks when Lorde is so much more challenging, inspiring, and a much better writer?

I was especially annoyed by hooks's discussion of literacy.  She quotes some debatable numbers on American illiteracy and some typically bogus generalizations about the ignorance of Kids These Days, then goes on to complain:

Of course, there is much discussion about the role of technology, specifically about computers replacing books.  Yet reading books on computers can never be the same as holding a book in one's hand, returning to pages without the aid of electricity or batteries, reading passages aloud to oneself or another person, reading the book in bed, lingering over pages, reading aloud.  [Your Department of Redundancy Department.]  For many the book is vital to the practice of constantly re-reading, but more essentially it is necessary for genuine reading.  Books invite us to imagine [129].

And did I mention reading aloud?  This is appalling.  Oh, it's true, reading a book on a computer (and an e-reader like the NOOK or the Kindle is a dedicated computer) is not the same as holding a printed book in one's hand. But bookmarking -- to say nothing of the search function -- makes it easier to return to previous pages.  And there's nothing about a computer or a dedicated reader that interferes with reading passages aloud, reading in bed, lingering over pages.  Did I mention reading aloud?  As for re-reading, I do that often on my e-reader; perhaps too often.  Perhaps "many" find the printed book on paper to be "vital to the practice of constantly re-reading," but there doesn't seem to be any real basis for their compulsion.

"There is much discussion about the role of technology, specifically about computers replacing books." True, there's a lot of discussion about all kinds of issues, and much of it is empty babble.  I would expect a critical thinker to point out some of the history of failed predictions by technocratic triumphalists (analogous to the history of failed predictions of the Second Coming).  I'd also expect a critical thinker to point out that printed books are part of the history of technology, that the advent of printing in Europe inspired the same kind of panic and predictions of doom that e-books inspire now, and above all that "digital" and "electronic" books are still books.  A book isn't the material object but the virtual content.

About a week ago, FAIR reported on a New York Times story about the present state of e-books.  It appears that sales of e-books are slowing, sales of printed books show "surprising resilience," and even many younger readers ("digital natives," the Times calls them) say that they like physical books as well as digital books.  One of the more significant revelations in the story was that publishers had decided that "cheaper e-books would cannibalize their business," so they raised e-book prices, often above the price of physical books.  FAIR writer Jim Naureckas commented, "Well, yeah–when you raise prices of things, people tend to buy less of them."

Eastasia has always been at war with Oceania.  I seem to remember that corporate media previously touted and cheered on the "digital apocalypse," the inevitable trampling of print beneath the feet? hooves? claws? of the e-book.  Now that our Shadowy Publishing Overlords have changed their minds, the Times can exhibit relief that print is making a comeback.  The funniest part might be the surprise that many people -- even the hip, digital-native techno-savvy young! -- might use both print and e-books.  Just as they might collect vinyl LPs and listen to digitally-stored music on their phones!  Like, OMFG, are they allowed to do that?  Is it legal?  Is it even natural?

The science-fiction writer and gadfly John Scalzi wrote a good piece about the same Times article on his blog, reporting anecdotally that his teenage daughter, "(who now, as it happens, works at the local bookstore), ... [is] sucked into her phone as much as any person her age, or indeed, as much as most people alive, it seems. And yet, when she reads books, and she reads a lot of them, print is her preferred medium, and was even before the bookstore."  He then analyzes the article from the viewpoint of a successful writer who's attentive to the business of writing, publishing, and selling books.  He noted that the Times article didn't address sales figures by independent publishers, and declared: "[N]o matter how you slice it, if you’re lightly sliding over its existence, you’re not accurately describing the current publishing market."

There's good discussion in the comments too, some of which addressed "hybrid" readers and how we mix e-books and physical books.  Like Scalzi, "I like to read print books at home but am immensely grateful for eBooks when I travel."  Also, as an old man who's thinking about what to do with the thousands of physical books I already own, I anticipate that e-books are going to play an increasing role in my reading future.  I'd like to relocate, and I neither want to take all my books with me, nor can I, unless I get a massive infusion of money from somewhere to pay for shipping and other costs.  So far, the Prize Patrol from Publishers Clearing House has not shown up at my door.

Others pointed out something I should have thought about before myself: audio books.  The reason I hadn't thought about them was probably that I don't use them.  I've listened to a few, but 1) they're too slow compared to reading -- I'm a fast reader compared to most people; 2) I find the narrators' voices distracting, compared to the inner voice I hear when reading text; 3) I find it difficult to concentrate on listening -- how do people listen, as many do, while driving to work? talk about dangerous distractions! -- and my retention of content when I've tried has been poor compared to reading text. One thing about critical thinking that I must stress when I talk to my friend's class next year is that it is not a purely individual process but depends on the input and ideas of other people, who notice things I don't.  Several of Scalzi's commenters remarked on the sales of audio books (whether on physical media like cassettes or CDs or in digital files) as a proportion of book sales overall.  That certainly should be taken into account in any discussion of electronic publishing, not least because many audiobooks are electronically stored and played.

It also occurred to me, though, that when people are wailing about the supposed decline of literary e-books will inevitably bring about, no one seems to mention audiobooks.  Maybe I just haven't noticed it before, but I don't think so.  Even the people who mentioned them under Scalzi's post only discussed their impact on book sales and the publishing industry, not on literacy or the survival of dead-tree books and brick-and-mortar bookstores. Yet if any book format constitutes a threat to literacy -- not to mention the sensuous pleasure of holding a book in one's hands, rereading favorite passages, etc. -- surely audiobooks are more dangerous than e-books, which still involve reading text.  Ebooks bad, audiobooks good!  The relative silence about the growing popularity of audiobooks, when people are wringing their hands about the Digital Apocalypse, indicates to me that not critical thinking but a highly biased and selective technophobia is at work.