It's a Bird! It's a Plane! It's ...

Over the weekend I came across (ahem: minds out of the gutter, please!) this article by Michael Lucas, self-described "adult performer and entrepreneur" who complains that he has been disrespected by "supergays" and "superlesbians." He's not much of a writer, in fact he's pretty bad, but I agree with a fair amount of what he says. It's packaged as though it were somehow cutting-edge, daring, out-there commentary, but it's all pretty standard middle-of-the-road stuff. You'll hear assimilationists say similar things, right down to the obligatory tribute to the drag queens who led us at Stonewall and the clarion call to diversity. Le yawn.

What I don't get is "supergays" and "superlesbians," terms he uses repeatedly and casually, as though their meaning was well-known. For a moment I thought it meant something like A-gays, given their clout and ability to get photos of Lucas removed from a news site, though Lucas himself evidently knows some "GLAAD donors" whose calls caused the pictures to be replaced the next day. Does that make him a supergay too? Are we witnessing a Clash of the Titans at the pinnacle of supergaydom? Does the earth, like, tremble as these colossi contend?

The Urban Dictionary entry was no help. Neither definition it supplied seemed to fit Lucas's usage, though they fit with the way "supergay" is used by other people. Maybe it's this guy?

Naw, too foofy.

I'd just about concluded that Michael Lucas decided that "supergay" and "superlesbian" would be totally cool insults to hurl at Homo-Americans who disrespect him, at least when he found out that the Advocate wouldn't let him call them "poopy faces." But then I found this in a book I was reading today, LGBT Issues: Moving Beyond Categories, edited by Rebecca L. Jones and Richard Ward (Dunedin, 2010). In the book's opening chapter, Phil Eaglesham, a Scottish activist, public health advisor for NHS Health Scotland, and academic, discusses competing labels for the LGBT community, including these:

Table 1.5: Terms used in American social marketing theory to target LGBT people
‘Super Gays’ – most aware of gay identity and the most conscious of anti-gay discrimination
‘Habitators’ – in long-term relationships and are primarily concerned with domestic issues like children and health care
‘Gay Mainstream’ – mix their interest in gay issues and media with mainstream concerns
‘Party People’ – the most cutting edge and urban in their tastes and the most likely to spend money on personal pampering
‘Closeted’ – older, living in small towns and aren’t likely to have many gay friends or belong to LGBT organizations
(New American Dimensions / Asterix Group (2007) ‘Real World Lesbians and Gays’)

(For perspective, compare this headline of another report from the Oracle, February 4, 2008: "A New Poll by New American Dimensions Finds that Only Half of Hispanic Immigrants Feel that the United States is Ready for an African American President.") It's good to see that market researchers still have their fingers on the hot, throbbing pulse of GLBTQ America (he's dead, Jim), and I'm wouldn't be surprised if an entrepreneur like Lucas had picked up the term here, even though it doesn't really fit the tantrum he's throwing.

Oh well. There are some things that Man was not meant to understand.

It's All Fun Until Somebody Loses an Eye

I've long been fascinated by Stanley Milgram's 1960 obedience experiment, in which people administered what they thought were lethal electric shocks to another person, who was actually a confederate of the experimenter; and by Philip Zimbardo's 1971 Stanford prison experiment, in which male college students, divided randomly into "guards" and "prisoners," showed how easily people fall into scripted roles, the guards turning abusive and the prisoners mostly submissive within just a few days. (Zimbardo himself, who complicated matters somewhat by appointing himself the prison superintendent as well as the director of the experiment, played his own role to the hilt, probably as he'd learned it from old movies.)

Both these canonical explorations of human nature get dredged up whenever there's a crisis, such as Abu Ghraib, to be tutted over and explained away. I've seen references to Milgram, especially, in the wake of Wikileak's release of a military video showing an American helicopter crew slaughtering Iraqi civilians in 2007. I don't remember much of what I thought about Zimbardo's experiment when I first heard about it, but nowadays I find myself asking different questions, especially when I read Tamler Sommers's interview with Zimbardo in A Very Bad Wizard. I know that I need to read Zimbardo's recent book, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (Random House, 2007), but it's over 500 pages long and I don't know when I'll be able to do that. Martha Nussbaum's review is here, though, and it raises some interesting points. For now, I'll have to trust that Sommers represents accurately what Zimbardo said to him.

Somewhere on the web I saw someone dismissing Milgram's work because his subjects were all college students, but this apparently is wrong. Zimbardo explained to Sommers that

His subjects weren't Yale students, though he did it at Yale. They were a thousand ordinary citizens from New Haven and Bridgeport, Connecticut, ages twenty to fifty. In his advertisement in the newspaper he said: college students and high-school students cannot be used. It could have been a selection of people who were more psychopathic. For our study, we only picked two dozen of seventy-five who applied, those who scored normal or average on seven different personality tests. So we knew there were no psychopaths, no deviants. Nobody had been in therapy, and even though it was a drug era, nobody (at least in the reports) had taken anything beyond marijuana, and they were physically healthy at the time. So the question was: suppose you only had kids who were normally healthy, psychologically and physically, and they knew they would be going into a prisonlike environment and that some of their civil rights would be sacrificed. Would those good people put in that bad, evil place -- would their goodness triumph? It should have! [33]

I'm a little less sanguine about the "goodness" of those people than Zimbardo is. He also says that "It was 1971 and a time of enormous social change in our country, especially in California, where a lot of social movements started. The hippies, the love-ins, the be-ins, the beat poets -- all of it was here. There was a strong antiwar movement; I was heavily involved in that ... And the question is: how much of that is rhetoric? Do we have a new generation of independent free thinkers?" [32]. That's all very well, but I wouldn't take for granted that "normal" college students got involved in the antiwar movement; I think Zimbardo is begging the question here, though I also doubt it makes a big difference. I'm just, you know, curious. If his recruits hadn't used any drugs beyond marijuana, they may well have been normal college kids of the day, but were they typical of the counterculture?

Zimbardo's account of the experiment, of his own paranoia as prison superintendent -- he became obsessed with the fantasy that a "prisoner" who broke down and had to be released "was going to lead a prison break-in" (36) -- and of the way that not only the students but the chaplain and the students' parents fell into line with the conceit of the experiment, is fascinating and chilling. In the end the experiment was only terminated because Christina Maslach, one of Zimbardo's graduate students, told him (as Zimbardo recalls it), "This is horrendous! This is dehumanization. This is a violation of everything that humanity stands for. And you're allowing this to happen, basically" (45). (As just about everybody, including Sommers, feels compelled to tell us, Zimbardo and Maslach got married the following year. Why do these heterosexuals always feel compelled to shove their sex lives down our throats?)

Given Sommers's interest in questions of free will and responsibility, it's not surprising that he asks Zimbardo about them.

TS: ... It seemed that in other interviews that people were worried about your work being a threat to moral responsibility and free will. And often, it seems, you assured them that it isn't. You say a few times in the book, "I'm not saying they're not responsible, this isn't 'excusology' -- they're still responsible for their immoral behavior." In one interview I think you even used the phrase "ultimately responsible." My take here is the opposite. It seems like your work does undermine moral responsibility. I mean, look at the Stanford Prison Experiment. It was a coin toss that led the guards to be where they were. How can we hold people responsible for bad luck, for a bad coin toss? [47]

This is a revealing distortion. The students were not responsible for the results of a coin toss -- they were responsible for what they did in the places they were assigned as a result of the coin toss. I say "students" there because this applies both to those who became "guards" and those who became "prisoners." I can't help thinking that a professional philosopher should be more scrupulous than this in his thinking, but hey, Sommers isn't responsible either, nobody is. Like Mongo, we are just pawns in game of life. Anyway, Sommers presses on:

TS: Let's talk about the free-will question for a moment. In the interviews I've heard, you seem to try to dodge questions about free will.

PZ: Yes. ... I mean, free will is something people really want to believe in. It's the inner individual control over his or her fate. Certainly individualistic societies want to believe in it. We want to believe -- that's the most fundamental motivation. I did it because I chose to do it. In fact, one reason the book [The Lucifer Effect] doesn't sell is that nobody wants to hear this argument. It's just alien to what it means to be a citizen, to be a person. ...

But I think it's an illusion. I just read a great quote this morning -- something like, "I don't believe in God, but I miss him." I don't know who said that, but it's like ... I don't really believe in free will, but I can't live without it. I can't live without the belief. I think it's about the dignity of individuals.

TS: But it's an illusion nevertheless.

PZ: I think I would have to say free will is an illusion. A lot of control is an illusion. Advertisers give you an illusion of control: You're choosing Kellogg's Corn Flakes over another brand because ... Or take all the tobacco companies. Their whole thing was freedom of choice -- that the anti-smoking fanatics are taking away your freedom of choice, and you have the freedom to choose to smoke whenever you want, wherever you want, So it's giving people an illusion of choice [49-51].

As I've said before, if free will is an illusion, then it's pointless to bitch about the illusion. Zimbardo ties himself in knots here: people can't help believing in free will, and they shouldn't, but they can't because they don't have free will. Maybe he's right, but I think it should be possible to be a bit more coherent about the matter if you've thought about it a lot.

But I think Zimbardo is wrong, partly because he doesn't understand the philosophical issues involved and partly because people often want to believe in free will and responsibility for other people, but not for themselves or people they want to excuse for whatever reason. When they get caught doing something they shouldn't, it's not their fault. When the antigay evangelist Billy James Hargis was caught coercing students of both sexes into his bed, he blamed his chromosomes. (But aren't adultery and sodomy choices, Reverend Hargis? Only when other people do them, I guess.) When Christian antigay campaigner Anita Bryant decided to divorce her husband and took flack from her fellow Baptists, she accused them of being a bunch of narrow-minded Bible thumpers. Many people complain about how bad television is, but they'd rather watch American Idol than read The Critique of Pure Reason. There are plenty of strategies for evading responsibility; those are just a few of them.

In the paper on free will that I mentioned before, Antony Flew cleared away a certain amount of deadwood that seems to have accumulated again since. When someone says, "I had no choice" (like Martin's Luther's "Here I stand, I can do no other"), we usually understand them to mean that they had no reasonable alternative. Flew gave the example of a bank manager, a gun held to his head, who gives the robber the bank's money as ordered. We understand "he had no choice" to mean that it is not reasonable to expect him to put the bank's money before his life -- he did choose, but his choices were limited. On the other hand, a man who is picked up by hoodlums and thrown through a plate glass window has no choice. (And yet -- how many people would try to insist that it was his choice?  What was he doing walking around in that area, provocatively dressed? He was totally asking to be picked up and thrown through a window!)  When we channel surf, when we get a divorce, when we assume an odor of sanctity while secretly seducing our students, we are choosing, however much we want to believe that our freedom is on vacation at the moment. I suspect that The Lucifer's Effect's slow sales (which didn't keep it from going into paperback) could be due to people's not wanting to be reminded of the times they chose not to do the difficult thing. Not that I blame them, I'm no different; but I do insist that we chose.

Zimbardo planned the structure of the Prison Experiment carefully in advance, with familiar forms of coercion in place. Among his advisors was a prisoner on parole, whom he made head of the experiment's parole board (41-42). This guy was merciless in denying parole to petitioners in the experiment (which, remember, lasted only a few days). Sommers says, "You'd think that if anyone would be sensitive to the sort of suffering that goes with being in front of a parole board, it would be Carlo. And yet he jumped into the role with both feet." Zimbardo agrees: "He told me afterward, when the whole thing was over, 'When I think back it makes me sick.'" I find this odd. The point of the experiment, as everyone knew, was not to create a model humane prison, but to replicate an institution of coercion and unequal power. Carlo was playing the role he was supposed to play, and which had been played in real life by others who had real power over him. The same goes for everyone, including the prisoners and Zimbardo himself, who seems to have relished playing The Warden from a Jimmy Cagney movie while the game lasted.

Human beings have several thousand years of experience in creating coercive institutions: governments, prisons, schools, families, armies. When someone constructs a replica of one of those institutions, I don't consider it remarkable that people in it fall into step with what is expected of them, especially when it was explained to them from the beginning what the plan was and what they were supposed to do in it. Plus, as my reference to old movies suggests, we've grown up seeing these roles played, even practiced them in "play" as children. (In a smart review of the 1990 movie version of William Golding's Lord of the Flies, an allegory of Original Sin and innate human depravity in which pubescent boys are stranded on an island without adults and turn into Savages, Gary Giddins pointed out that the boys were not blank slates: they knew from stories and TV shows and movies how Wild Indians and African Savages were supposed to behave, and followed the script.) By the time we are adults we've had two decades of training in exercising and submitting to authority. We are taught very little about disobedience, especially thoughtful disobedience, which takes as much practice as obedience. Despite that, people do disobey from childhood onward.

Zimbardo says that no one in his experiment rebelled, but that's not quite true. Some did, but they were punished and put back in their place. In Milgram's experiment, according to Sommers's summary, one-third of the subjects refused to obey when ordered to administer shocks to another person merely for answering questions incorrectly. I'd say one-third is a significant number when you consider how disobedience to authoritative-acting adults is discouraged, even in our supposedly individualistic society. Do we know anything about the people who disobeyed? (I'll have to read Milgram too.) Were there differences between them and those who obeyed? ... But any study of people who disobey would be co-opted by institutions of coercion to try to figure out how to stamp out the disobedient.

Near the end of the interview Zimbardo touches on this.

It's like the elementary school teacher who didn't let you get out of your seat unless you raised your hand to go to the toilet. And it didn't matter if you peed in your pants. I still remember in first grade, a little girl raised her hand and said, "I have to go to the bathroom." The teacher said, "No, put your hand down." The kid peed all over herself. Everybody laughed at her. We carry these kinds of heuristics and we never get trained to be wary of the exception to the rule. Because that's where the danger lies. Sometimes the majority is wrong. In Nazi Germany, the majority was saying, "We gotta kill Jews." ... [56]

Whenever you walk into a situation, the first thing you do is look for the exits, because you know if there's a fire, everybody's going to go to the exit they came in through, and you'll be crushed. And you're going to walk out the other one. It should be part of our basic training, of being situationally sensitive, situationally savvy.

TS: Basic training at the parental level or the school level?

PZ: The school level, because again, most people are good most of the time, but there's always a bad apple. Three's always the bully of the class. There's always the hustler. ...

TS: You can always stumble in a bad barrel [57].

Whoa! I know Zimbardo means well, but he's tripping. Schools are in a difficult position to begin with, because they are handed large numbers of children and not enough money, plus a cultural mandate to make those children behave, obey. Many parents want it that way. The structure of the school day is meant to teach "discipline"-- sitting in one place doing boring things, ruled by the clock, asking permission to go to the bathroom -- as preparation for the adult workplace. Zimbardo rightly singles out the abusive teacher who wouldn't let a first-grader [!] go to the bathroom when she asked according to the rules, but why should children have to ask permission in the first place? Partly it's to avoid chaos, but that can be avoided by other means. Mostly it's to teach them to obey authority. (Orwell's 1984: "‘How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?’ Winston thought. ‘By making him suffer,’ he said.") Many, maybe even most teachers don't want to do things that way, because they know that children don't learn well in a coercive environment. But the schools themselves, as they are designed, are a bad barrel to begin with. I agree that everybody needs to learn situational skepticism, but nobody wants it to start on their watch.

[P.S.: Notice Zimbardo's remark, "most people are good most of the time, but there's always a bad apple." In practice, in schools and in families, "good" means "obedient." The person who refuses to do what he or she is told, who questions authority, is a troublemaker, one of the bad ones. Again, shouldn't philosophers and psychologists think about such things?]

Finally, Zimbardo declares,

Most heroes, most heroic acts, are also done by ordinary people who aren't special in any way. They just happen to be put into a certain situation of emergency, or evil, of immorality, of corruption, that gives them the opportunity to act on it.

TS: Joe Darby, the Abu Ghraib whistle-blower, for example. You discuss him in your book.

PZ: Yes. Most people are ordinary people put in a situation, often only once in their lifetime, that gives them the opportunity to act. So what I've been trying to do has been to democratize heroism and demystify it. There're two kinds of heroes. There are impulsive heroes, and there are reflective heroes -- people who blow the whistle on Enron, Sherron Watkins and others. Christians who helped the Jews. But what I'm saying -- Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Teresa, they're exceptional. The reason we know their names is that they organized their whole lives around a sacrifice. And it's great that they did it. I'm not gonna do it. I'm not going to give up my whole life to any cause. But in fact, I think Obama said his grandmother was the unsung hero. Most people who do heroic things, sacrifice for others, they do it in silence. Every single person who's identified as a hero always says, "How could I not do it?" [58-59].

This is romantic, mystifying claptrap, which has the function (if not the deliberate intent) of devaluing the heroes it purports to celebrate. So many things are wrong with it that it's hard to know where to begin, but I'll start at the beginning. "Opportunities to act" are all around us, all the time. No special situation of "emergency" or (Cthulhu help us!) "evil" is needed, since such situations are commonplace. What is special is, first, that someone acts, and more important, that he or she finds a way to work with others to make the act effective. It's not accidental that most resisters "do it in silence", because the powerful want to make sure that people don't hear about successful resistance. But no "hero" acts alone: either he or she works in the context of an already-existing movement, or helps to build one. Concentrating on "heroes" is intended to ignore the collective context, and to aggrandize the "hero" so as to intimidate most people from acting. (Who do you think you are, little worm? Do you think you're Gandhi? Why, you probably think you're Jesus Christ. Go back to your seat and wait until a real hero comes along.) And Barack Obama isn't a hero of any kind.

Zimbardo's claim that most resisters "are ordinary people put in a situation, often only once in their lifetime, that gives them the opportunity to act", is hard to evaluate. But someone like Rosa Parks doesn't fit this mold. She was not in a unique situation, and she didn't decide to act out of nowhere: she was already an activist, an officer of her local NAACP, and she'd had to give up her bus seat before. I'd bet that the "situation," the "opportunity", usually recurs, especially in conditions of social oppression: African Americans who worked in the Civil Rights movement lived their whole lives in a racist system. They were heroic every day for years on end, never knowing when white thugs would come to burn down their houses with them in it, or walk up to them at a voter registration station and shoot them dead where they stood.

Zimbardo talks earlier in the interview about "collectivist" cultures versus our supposedly "individualistic" one (47). One thing I've been wondering about since I read A Very Bad Wizard is that so much resistance to oppressive institutions has arisen in societies which stress the collective over the individual, in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. We Americans with our fine individualism seem to be more afraid of standing alone than people in "collectivist" societies, though of course those latter also know that change doesn't happen because One Man stands up and whips the Bad Guy, but because people organize with other people.

How should we think about the people in the Civil Rights movement, the antiwar movement, the women's movement, the Democracy movements around the world? Were they sociopaths? Were they defective in some way? The rulers of our society and their media collaborators try to prevent a recurrence of the 1960s partly by portraying activists as lone crazies, weirdos, people with father issues, losers who rage against society because they know they have nothing to contribute to it. No doubt some were, but there's no reason to suppose such types are more numerous among activists than among corporate CEOs, Wall Street bankers, members of Congress, or the Roman Catholic hierarchy. But it appears that most democratic activists are as sane as anyone else. It's not that an opportunity comes along and lets them act -- that's just another excuse meant to deny their agency, to pretend that dissenters and resisters are just cogs who were directed by the "situation." Rather, they chose to disobey, not like a two-year-old who says "No!" to everything, but like adults who weigh the options, the danger, and the worth of the goal and decide to act.

It's Not a Bug, It's a Feature

I imagine that most people who read this blog have already seen by now the Wikileaks video of a US attack helicopter crew massacring Iraqi civilians, including two Reuters journalists. If you haven't, here it is: not work-safe, not human-safe. It's pretty disturbing, but since your tax dollars paid for it if you're an American or Briton or citizen of other members of the Coalition of the Willing, you should see it.



As I begin writing this post, the video has been viewed more than 4 million times on YouTube alone. There's been some good discussion, notably by Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com, John Caruso at The Distant Ocean, and this piece at Counterpunch by Alexander Cockburn. (Greenwald was smeared by the libblogger Oliver Willis, whose commenters took him apart while he whined and lied and generally followed the canons of mainstream political discourse in the US nowadays. That's what's wrong with mainstream political discourse in the US nowadays, of course.) World media have covered the case while US corporate media have done their best to brush it aside; again, no surprise.

One reason I haven't written about it before, though, is that while it's disturbing and awful and criminal, it doesn't strike me as news, or even particularly disturbing and awful and criminal. Compare the more recent atrocity in Afghanistan, where American special forces soldiers murdered several Afghan civilians (including two pregnant women and a teenaged girl) and then tried to cover it up, or American terrorist warlord Barack Obama's announcement that he has the right to order the murder of American citizens on his own executive authority.

Like any other aggressive state, the US has directed its soldiers to do such things throughout its history, yet even some leftists are professing themselves shocked! shocked! to learn that there's massacring going on here. ("Your body count, Sergeant." "Thank you.") Professing shock over the 2007 massacre buys into the line that defenders of such violence will push: that this was an aberration, the work of a few bad apples, not the fault of the United States of America, which is not a perfect country but its virtues outweigh its defects.

I'm more troubled by liberals and leftists who are demonizing the helicopter crew and other military killers, and who even accuse others of justifying the atrocity. This commenter (DavidByron at April 9, 2010 01:56 p.m. -- sorry, no permalink) in this thread, for example:

I find the number of comments trying to pretend that soldiers are nice people really pretty depressing.

What do these monsters have to do to convince you all? They'd all cut their own mother's head off and spit down the neck for giggles. They are merciless killers and they enjoy their work.

You all need to get real about that.

This is exactly what apologists for US violence have said about our enemies, be they Red Indians, Viet Cong, or Islamofascists. Because they are like that, the US can't afford to be Mr. Nice Guy. What measures DavidByron hoped to justify against Iraq veterans, I don't know; maybe, like another commenter (eatbees at April 7, 2010 05:34 AM), he believes "we shouldn't bring them home. We should give them a phony war to fight in which half of them are the Blue Team and half of them are the Red Team, and they can take out their fantasies on each other." Their fantasies?

Now, I don't "pretend that soldiers are nice people"; that's irrelevant. As I wrote in a comment in that same thread, invaders cannot invoke self-defense. Suppose you're a Mafia hood, and your boss tells you to break into someone's house. The resident pulls a gun on you; you kill them. You can't plead self-defense. The American invaders of Iraq are in a similar position, morally if not legally. Even if someone on the ground in this video had weapons (as apologists for the massacre claim, following the Army's propaganda), the Americans were not acting in self-defense, even pre-emptive self-defense: they were invaders and murderers.

That's not to say that they're "pure human shit to begin with", as another commenter (the pair at April 7, 2010 06:43 PM) declared. The Mafioso I just invented might be a nice guy, good to his buddies, respectful to his superiors, kind to his Mom, a regular at Mass and confession. All that is irrelevant when he breaks into your house and, confronted by you and your shotgun, blows you away.
The glee the helicopter crew exhibit as they kill people is distasteful, of course, but I doubt that Iraqi insurgents (or Vietnamese resistance forces, or American Indian warriors at the Little Big Horn) are coolly dispassionate as they kill American soldiers or other Iraqis. John Caruso (April 9, 2010 at 3:01 PM) asked another commenter, "Are you really saying you'd choose to keep that policy in place as long as it was carried out by nicer soldiers? It's a false dichotomy, but assuming it actually did hold I most definitely would choose to 'lose the policy but keep the murderous thugs' (keep them here in this country, that is, rather than massacring civilians in Iraq and elsewhere)."

When you invade and occupy a country, the people there are going to shoot at you, put bombs by the roads to blow you up, and so on. They will do this no matter how many candy bars your soldiers give to their kids, how many sick children they give medical treatment, how many freeze-dried meals they give to people whose homes they've blown up. (Speaking of medical treatment for children, there were two children in the van the copter crew destroyed; their father was among the people killed. Headquarters overruled taking them to a US military hospital, and ordered them sent to an Iraqi hospital. The outcome is reported here.) And even the "nicest" soldiers will stop being so nice in the face of being shot at and blown up. The only right invaders have is to leave.

But the American invaders aren't going to leave. And while I sympathize with unemployed, under-educated working-class kids who join the military with an eye to improving their career options, since 2003 no one can enlist without knowing that they are likely to be sent to Iraq and Afghanistan to kill innocent people. No matter how they feel before they enlist, they are entering a meat grinder that will teach them to treat other people as things -- not their fellow soldiers, of course, but gooks, dinks, hajis. One of the more interesting points raised in Alexander Cockburn's Counterpunch article, when he quoted a "retired U.S. Army man," who wrote,

The damage this incident and its video evidence will do is immense … it will irrefutably confirm for many that large chunk of anti-American propaganda which insists the American flyers are just playing computer shoot-em-up games using real flesh and blood as a proxy for the digital figures they usually slaughter only in the arcades.

How much is simulator training responsible for the disconnection from reality demonstrated in this incident? The crew was detached from reality …

It ain't propaganda if it's true. If you train your soldiers with hypercharged video games, which is what simulators are -- advanced versions of the video games (often with military themes) that kids have been raised on since early childhood -- and then put them into engagement using video equipment that resembles a video game, then of course they'll be "detached." Simulators are probably very effective in overcoming the normal human inhibition about killing other human beings; those who've read Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game may recognize the pattern. (Even a bigot like Card has written some good books.) But that's what armies are for: to kill people and blow shit up.
That is why Cockburn's retired Army source is wrong when he continues, "How [is] the Army … producing crews that, having the potential for such incompetence, cannot detect it among themselves. If anyone in that crew had paused and asked if the action being taken was correct, surely it would have been aborted … The Army has to find out why." The crew was not incompetent; if you've seen the video, you know that they checked their actions every step of the way with headquarters. They were doing what they were expected and supposed to do: to kill hajis. They are part of an occupying army in a country that wants them out, one way or another. That's why the original Army investigation exonerated the killers, as Cockburn wrote:

Reuters, which by that time had already had four employees killed in Iraq by the U.S. military (ultimately, to date, eight), demanded an investigation, which the Army says it undertook but found no breach of its Rules of Engagement by the pilots or U.S. Army intelligence.

This massacre was not a failure, but a success. It was bad public relations, to be sure, but the entire US presence in Iraq is bad public relations. Incidents like this one are not a bug of the military system -- they're a feature.

Identity Crisis

Believing as I do that being gay is what you make of it, I am constantly baffled by the way "gay identity" has become a bogeyman in both academic and popular discourse. It seems to have the same function for gay academics as "the gay lifestyle" has for homophobes, connoting a sinister, all-devouring, vampiric shadow that sneaks up on unsuspecting young faglings and dykettes, recruits them by deceit, and sucks out all their vital force. And once they've succumbed to it, alas, there is no escape. I don't think I'm exaggerating here at all, not least because it's so unclear what either "gay identity" or "the gay lifestyle" is. It is, as I said, a bogey, a lurking horror to be dreaded (Be afraid, be very afraid), not understood or defined. "Gay identity" doesn't sap your individuality (or does it?) because in this discourse it is the epitome of individualism. I've been picking on Mark McLelland lately, though despite this niggling little problem Male Homosexuality in Modern Japan is a fine, valuable book, so let me quote another scholar who covers roughly the same waterfront, Song Hwee Lim, who writes in his Celluloid comrades: representations of male homosexuality in contemporary Chinese cinemas (University of Hawai'i Press, 2006, 50-51):

In terms of the cinematic representation of homosexuality, the logical corollary to the contestation of negative representation often means the creation of openly gay characters, since the rhetoric of gay liberation dictates that to remain in the closet is a sign of self-loathing, whereas to come out is an affirmative act of pride. Over the decades, the act of coming out has acquired such an unquestioning and sometimes unquestioned status that not to come out is seen as an unfathomable form of behavior [50].

My dear! First of all, it's dishonest to claim that coming out has "acquired such an ... unquestioned status" when it is still being argued about, debated, fought over, in life and in print -- and not just in postcolonialist academic tracts, but among American queers in every walk of life. (What an "unquestioning ... status" would be, I have no idea.) Second, it should be noticed again that "coming out" has distinct, yet partially overlapping meanings. It used to mean making one's debut in Gay Society, getting to know other gay people and getting one's cherry popped. After the Stonewall riots of 1969 and the emergence of the Gay Liberation Movement another meaning was added, without replacing the earlier one: "coming out of the closet" to straight people as well, or becoming "openly gay." It's this latter meaning that is the "affirmative act of pride." While it's possible to get along without being openly gay, it's hard to have much of a life as a gay person without knowing other gay people; though for gay men, anyway, it is possible to have an anonymous sex life without socializing in gay society or telling one's mom about it. Is it "unfathomable"? I don't know. Is it necessary for gay cinema to have "openly gay" characters? I don't know, but both forms of coming out provide easy ways to move a narrative forward, and supply ready-made drama of various kinds, quite apart from any political concerns. I think that in his apparent eagerness to distance himself from gay politics, Lim overlooks these points. I'm also not sure that not-coming-out is "a form of behavior," but leave that aside.

To borrow a Cartesian formulation, the rhetoric of gay liberation beseeches the homosexual to declare, "I come out, therefore I am."

Well, no it doesn't; this may have sounded cute or witty to the author, but it's neither. In its most famous form, gay liberation exhorted (not beseeched) "the homosexual", to come "Out of the Closets and Into the Streets!" Not, in other words, just for Gay Pride Day Parades each June, but to work with others to make the streets (indeed, the whole world) safe all year round for gay people, against cops, thugs, priests, families, and others who sought to keep us scared and invisible. I want to stress this because Lim prefers to keep "the homosexual" individual and isolated, standing alone against his family and society.

This line of argument raises several questions: Who decides if homosexuals should come out? Does the act of coming out necessarily promote understanding and acceptance of homosexuality? If coming out is chiefly linked to Western epistemologies and practices (as argued [but not proven! -- DM] by Munt via Foucault), should it be regarded as universal and imposed indiscriminately on other cultures? [51]

Well, of course, homosexuals should decide if homosexuals should come out -- that is, each homosexual must decide for him or herself. (Lim does not take up the question of outing.) The act of coming out doesn't necessarily promote or automatically understanding and acceptance of homosexuality, but it is the only way that homosexuals can take that project into their own hands. You can only pretend to be a disinterested heterosexual for so long in challenging bigots. As for the question whether "coming out is chiefly linked to Western epistemologies and practices", leaving aside Lim's misunderstanding of Foucault, Lim skates perilously close to a racist essentialism there. He then relies on the blind passive: "should it be regarded as universal" by whom? Should it be "imposed indiscriminately on other cultures" by whom? This is especially pertinent because Lim here is criticizing other gay Chinese critics who, according to him, are demanding "positive representation" and "openly gay" protagonists in Chinese film. Either he's insinuating that they are collaborating with the monolithic Gay Western Imperialists to impose coming-out indiscriminately on all cultures, haha!, or he's attacking a straw man. The first seems likely:

To begin with, I suggest that there is no inherent moral high ground in coming out, the rhetoric of gay liberation notwithstanding. Demands on homosexuals to come out, whether in reel life or real life, often reflect the need of gay activists and critics for greater visibility, alliance, and support for their political cause.

As though "activists" were some weirdly distinct group, not really gay at all! Of course, "their political cause" will get nowhere if they/we can't persuade other gay people that the strategies and goals we advocate will be useful to them. What Lim calls "demands on homosexuals to come out" were, in the US, part of an often acrimonious debate between the open and the closeted that isn't over yet.

I want to point out, though, that whatever role the "political cause" and evil Western epistemologies and practices may play, I and many other gay people choose to be openly gay for a bluntly personal reason: to stop the heterosexuals in our lives from nagging us about when we're going to get married, why aren't we married yet, let me introduce you to a wonderful girl/boy I know, oh of course you want to meet her/him, when are you going to settle down, don't you want to have children? Where are my grandchildren? Those gay people who aren't bothered by this sort of thing, of course, needn't come out to their straight friends and family; but they also needn't gripe privately to me about how annoying it is to put up with all those questions.

However, who would have to bear the consequence of coming out? Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues that when gay people come out to parents, it is "with the consciousness for a potential for serious injury that is likely to go in both directions."

But Lim is only interested in the injury that the children inflict on the parents, not the reverse. It's also highly dishonest of him to enlist Sedgwick as an advocate for the closet.

Particularly in a homophobic society, the gay person's coming out may in turn plunge the parents "into the closet of [their] conservative community" (1990 [Epistemology of the Closet], 80). Questions of ethics, responsibility, emotion, and family ties are so intricately intertwined that the rhetoric of oppression and liberation seems simplistic and naive by comparison.

As though American gay people hadn't been debating those questions for 40 years and more! As though "gay activists" hadn't been struggling with, arguing about questions of ethics, responsibility, emotion and family ties all that time! And as I said before, Lim pictures "the gay person" as standing alone, with no questions of ethics, responsibility, emotion, and family ties to other gay people, especially our partners. As Sarah Schulman wrote in 1990:

Most gay people stay in the closet -- i.e., dishonor their relationships -- because to do so is a prerequisite for employment, housing, safety, and family love. Having to hide the way you live because of fear of punishment isn't a "right" nor is it "privacy." Being in the closet is not an objective, neutral, value-free condition. It is, instead, maintained by force, not choice [emphasis added].

Notice that she was writing here about the US, twenty years after Stonewall. It doesn't occur to Lim that lying, "hiding the way you live," has consequences for our partners, the gay people we love. Whether we have any responsibilities to them has been hotly contested among gay people, let alone straights, for decades. (Evidently Lim thinks the answer is no.)

It is highly possible that the complications and consequences of coming out may, for both the homosexual and the family, be so constricting as to make the closet a relatively liberating place to inhabit. Indeed, coming out cannot necessarily be presumed to achieve the dual goals of liberating the homosexual from the suffocating closet and gaining the understanding of those to whom the homosexual comes out. As the coming-out scene in The Wedding Banquet shows, getting the message across is not always easy [52].

Well, duh! We Western homosexuals never ever noticed that! We never expected, or experienced, any difficulty in getting acceptance of our declarations from friends, family, or anyone else!

It should also be noticed that you can't use The Wedding Banquet to argue that "the closet [is] a relatively liberating place to inhabit," because the whole point of the story is that being closeted with respect to his family has been very uncomfortable for Wai-tung and his partner Simon, even when his parents are at home in Taiwan. When they come to New York in anticipation of his (heterosexual) wedding, the pressures of pretending that Simon is no one to Wai-tung nearly destroys their relationship. (Someday I should write about the way that The Wedding Banquet uses deceptions of various kinds, and their consequences, as leitmotifs.) "Relatively liberating"? Please! But Lim sees only Wai-tung as "the homosexual" in the story; Simon doesn't count. In the end, it's Wai-tung who has to decide whether to come out to his parents, and there is no pretense that it's easy or magically makes all the problems go away. But if Lim were to watch a thoroughly American movie like, say, Torch Song Trilogy, he'd see the very same issues in play. To claim that "Western" gays, whether artists or activists or both, ignore the complications of coming out is outrageously dishonest, yet it's a very common accusation in this kind of writing.

In The Wedding Banquet, does the mother's failure to fully comprehend her son's sexuality, despite his coming out to her, shut the closet door back on Wai-tung?

"Refusal" would be a better word than "failure," and it sure as hell is intended to shut him up.

Does the father's tacit acknowledgment of Wai-tung's homosexuality leave the closet door half open?

It's not intended to, since the father insists that Simon keep "our secret". (Some say the closet door is half open ...) Which is an irony that many gay people who've been through this experience will recognize: the way that family members will try to practice damage control by insisting that the revelations stop with them, and that no one else be told. I've always hoped that Simon told Wai-tung, if not immediately (they had conflicts of their own to resolve) then at least as soon as the parents went back to Taiwan.

It is clear from the above that the metaphor of the closet has its limitations, whatever the cultural context.

Well, duh. All metaphors have their limitations. And again, it's not as if American gays haven't been wrassling with this conundrum, too, for decades.

More important, the political evaluation accompanying the issue of coming out must be brought into question. That is, an implicit acknowledgment of a family member's homosexuality may not always be morally less acceptable than an explicit one, and the atmosphere surrounding such tacit acknowledgment cannot be regarded as simply "homophobic" [54-55].

Each case would have to be evaluated on its own merits of course. I'd agree with Lim if, for instance, the family stopped insisting that the "family member" get heterosexually married, stopped asking about his or her heterosexual involvements, when will they pop out a grandchild, and so on. If the pressure continues, then "such tacit acknowledgment" must be "regarded as simply 'homophobic.'"

Even the most radical militant queers have always recognized that some homophobes will never change, but can be tolerated if they make some adjustments. If not, they can be resisted. Just looking at The Wedding Banquet, the mother remains homophobic and surely wouldn't stop applying emotional pressure if she stayed in New York; back home, it's likely that the father, while he lives, will simply withhold support for projects to pressure Wai-tung to be heterosexual -- Wai-tung is, after all, not only married but a father-to-be now. Would the father be as 'accepting' if a grandchild weren't in the pipeline? I doubt it. His manipulativeness reminds me (and maybe Lim too, who mentions her on 63) of Dona Herlinda, who now that I think of it is a cinematic ancestor of Mr. Gao.

As the response of the mother illustrates, the act of coming out cannot be assumed to be the best, if not the only, "solution."

It doesn't illustrate anything of the kind. For one thing, "coming out" is always a beginning, not an end; in Wai-tung's case, it can mean the beginning of his refusal to let his mother bully him into marrying heterosexually -- a ongoing struggle, but so is life. We inscrutable Occidentals have a phrase, "the best of a bad lot," which implies that the best available option is not necessarily a positively good one. Lim should learn from our ability to transcend easy binaries.

Going My Way, Little Boy?

Love the hat, Your Holiness, so much that I'm not even going to mention how much you look like Uncle Fester. Oops! I just did. (I see, however, that I'm not the first to notice it. Just sayin'.)

I don't think that the allegations of Ratzinger's complicity with the coverup of priestly abuse are likely to do any serious harm to the Roman Catholic Church, or even just to the Vatican. It apparently has been suggested that Ratzinger should resign or abdicate, as if he were an American politician tainted by scandal. Hah! Who do these people think they're dealing with? Ratzinger doesn't think he owes anything to the world, or to most Catholics, or to anyone. (I doubt his belief in God is more than merely ceremonial.) He's a tough, ruthless ecclesiastical politician, and he comes from a tradition that administers authority to the plebs. The monarchical episcopate does not derive its unjust power from the consent of the governed; claiming to derive it from Heaven merely eliminates any accountability at all, short of armed uprising.

It's not surprising that many Catholics at all levels have gone on the offensive, from the cardinal who (following the pontiff's own lead) dismissed the scandal as "petty gossip" to the Pope's personal preacher who compared it to a pogrom ("collective violence suffered by the Jews", an especially unhappy choice considering the Church's historical role in perpetuating anti-Semitism), right down to this commenter at FAIR's blog:

How about reporting the sex abuses in Yeshivas? How about reporting the sex abuses in Koranic schools? How about reporting the sex abuses in boarding schools? How about reporting about abuses in American Schools? How about reporting the sex abuses and pedophilia in Buddhist countries? How about reporting – over and over and over – the traveling, pedophile, married Western men who travel to Buddhist countries? What a bunch of hypocrites you all are. The Church is pummeled over and over and yet, sexual abuse is rampant in every other denomination – religious or secular – and yet the very FAIR garbage crowd don't give a damn shit about reporting them. When the Hasidic Jews were caught in their organ harvesting scheme, the press ran the story just a couple of days. Had it been the Catholic Church caught in the macabre trade, the press would have had a field day – for days, and days, and days on end…

How about those abuses? I'm perfectly willing to condemn them, and to tangle with anyone who wants to minimize them. As it happens, though, there is a fair amount of news coverage of those "traveling, pedophile, married Western men who travel to Buddhist countries" (none of whom, I'm sure, are Catholics), much coverage and agitation about sexual trafficking. And the Boy Scouts of America, invoked by another commenter, are facing their own very similar day of reckoning as I write. (To enhance my Schadenfreude, the Mormons are evidently being caught in the backwash. It couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of people.) It should be getting more media attention, but you can't have everything. Given their antigay and religious policies, they're not going to get any defense from me.

But this writer has a rather skewed view of moral issues. One thing that makes it so irresistible to snap at the Ratzinger's ankles is his hypocrisy. He was Wojtyla's point man in attacking the gay movement in the 1980s and after, ranting about morality and decency. To find that at the same time he was sheltering abusive priests is just too delicious to ignore. (But it wasn't his fault, it was Teh Gay.) And it wasn't just Ratzinger, it was the entire church hierarchy, treating its flock as the enemy, silencing and intimidating parents who complained, shielding abusers and moving them from one diocese to another so that they could find fresh victims. The hypocrisy of Ratzinger on Easter, declaring that "humanity was suffering from a 'profound crisis' and needed 'spiritual and moral conversion'", is not surprising -- I suspect that he really, sincerely can't see what all the fuss is about and doesn't believe that he could have done anything wrong -- but it shouldn't be ignored either. He, and the rest of the Catholic leadership, should be jeered at whenever they try to lecture anyone else on morality until they clean their own house. Katha Pollitt makes this point in a good recent column.

One of Noam Chomsky's basic arguments (similar to Martin Luther King's) is that it's easy to condemn the crimes of official enemies, harder but essential to condemn the crimes of one's own group. Picking on the Pope, as fun as it is, really isn't my job, though as a gay person I'm one of his targets when he can manage it, and I'm entitled to attack him when it suits me. It should be Catholics who take up the pitchforks and torches and demand accountability, and the most hopeful aspect of this resurgent scandal is that they're doing just that. They won't be bought off by multimillion dollar settlements, though they may want damages paid, and they won't be appeased by transparently insincere papal apologies. I don't think the Pope realizes just how much trouble he's in.

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.