The essence thereof.
I’m not by any stretch of the imagination a difference feminist or a gender essentialist; there are differences, yes, of course there are, but they’re scattered in bell curves that overlap to an extraordinary degree, and even if one’s labeled Man and the other Woman, well, you never meet Man or Woman, do you? Just people. Who happen to be. And so.
I’m not a gender essentialist: for it to be at all meaningful (as essence, mind, essentially), you’d have to convince me that any conceivable woman has more in common with every other possible woman that she could with any conceivable man, and vice-versa. There are differences, of course there are, but we have so many different ways to be different together; why waste all your time looking for the Men who Always Do This or the Women who Never Do That and risk missing the people that are all around you?
Blanket statements like that, when the polarities are Male and Female, end up inevitably circling around one particular This ’n’ That which Men Always and Women Never (well, Hardly Ever): SEX. And while they can seem relatively harmless on the surface, leading to silly head-scratchers such as—
Men are simple creatures. Protoplasms. It is a strange irony that a woman can pretty much get whatever she wants from a guy with no arguments and no disagreements—nothing but “Absolutely, dear” and “Whatever you want, honey”—by doing just one thing (but doing it two or three or sometimes four times a week).
(And while I don’t doubt there’s some folks nodding along with the beat out there, there’s a whole lot of other folks going now hold on just a minute, what?) —But such seemingly harmless homilies can twist all of a sudden into duties and expectations the rest of us never knew were in the social contract—
What if your husband woke up one day and announced that he was not in the mood to go to work? If this happened a few times a year, any wife would have sympathy for her hardworking husband. But what if this happened as often as many wives announce that they are not in the mood to have sex? Most women would gradually stop respecting and therefore eventually stop loving such a man.
What woman would love a man who was so governed by feelings and moods that he allowed them to determine whether he would do something as important as go to work? Why do we assume that it is terribly irresponsible for a man to refuse to go to work because he is not in the mood, but a woman can—indeed, ought to—refuse sex because she is not in the mood? Why?
—and what was a seemingly harmless stupidity has become a collectively punishing generality, getting uglier with every Men Do and Women Don’t twist until we end up clutching at Spider Robinson’s Screwfly:
We’re all descended from two million years of rapists, every race and tribe of us, and we wouldn’t be human if we didn’t sometimes fantasize about just knocking you down and taking it. The truly astonishing thing is how seldom we do. I can only speculate that most of us must love you a lot.
Now Tiptree wrote “Screwfly” for a reason, and people who said shit like that were definitely part of the unbearable wrong that fueled that particular pocket of outrage in her head. But the coldly horrible what-if of the story is precisely what if Men Always Did; what if there really is an US and a THEM and an unbridgeable gender war between. —It wouldn’t look like a John Gray sitcom, is what.
(Yes. I know: Black mollies. —I never said the idea doesn’t exist. I said it isn’t true.)
I’m not a gender essentialist, but—
(Ha ha.)
No, seriously. Or at least as serious as I want to be, whistling once more past this graveyard. —When I’m out and about with the Littlest Wookie (so named because of her fluting and hooting and not at all because of her furry back), I’ve noticed it’s always women who are smiling at me, nodding, saying hello and oh my and how cute. It’s always women who are suddenly stepping close to rub her head without asking. It’s always women, and never men.
(And before you tell me it’s because as a father strolling through downtown with a baby Björned I’m clearly good breedstock and willing to invest energy in my offspring which does something all unconscious-like to her uterus or maybe it’s her hormones which explains why, you should note the crucial grammatical difference between “women always” and “always women,” and start maybe questioning what you should have been questioning all along: my perceptions, and yours, and theirs. —I’m lying, for instance: the cashier who gave us a 20% discount on a hefty load of groceries because the Littlest Wookie was fussy was, after all, a man.)
Okay, babies, but how about salesmen? —In my job I see a lot of email ripped from a lot of corporate email accounts and let me tell you: salesmen? Hands down the worst for the nasty jokes and the porn and the shockjock photos. Saleswomen? Not at all.
So there’s that.
Sing, Muse, of the wrath of Althæaphage—
Go, relish the rest of the post that surrounds this glorious catalog of truth-eaters:
...the howling roil of right-wing authoritarians, of spite retailers, blowhards, closeted gay ministers, cranks, Bible lickers, of nerds-gone-bad, of flag humpers, pseudo-intellectuals, chair-based saucer investigators, of stern-bodiced rape fantasists, of millennarians, Know-Nothings, Free Silver enthusiasts, jingoes, Oreos, Foursquare McPhersonites, splinter Baptists, pseudo-Methodists, Pentecostal highway parishioners, of cynical purveyors of purpose-driven things and of AMWAY, of Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, Graham’s miracle flour, Kellogg’s abstinence-promoting Corn Flake Cereal, or other products unevaluated by the FDA that are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease; of Goldwater idolators, ‘Scoop Jackson liberals,’ McCarthyites, Yankees fans, Likudniks, the mean of spirit, dupes, chumps, Dartmouth grads, shysters, four-flushers, dog-kickers, self-dealers, Professors of X at James Madison University, wingnut welfare skillet-lickers and beak-wetters; of wingnut welfare high-rollers, pimps, queens, bathroom-stall fellators, and generational dependents; of certain former or current WWF/WWE personalities and/or karate movie stars and/or minor Baldwin brothers, convicted Watergate felons, washed-up Red Sox pitchers, and/or 1970s Detroit-area rock musicians, as well as unnh and gaah, not to mention hunnh...
Form / Content,
or, The nail replaced.
Douglas Wolk incisively surveys the brand new and much-improved whitehouse.gov; Ben Orenstein tells you about the little, critical change you won’t see at first glance. (While we’re on about websites and such, would someone please give the New Republic whatever it takes to make theirs usable? The litany of “I’d link to this article I wrote for TNR but their website is as we all know borked” from the wonkosphere is beyond embarrassing at this point. —I ought to be able to click on a link from one of Douglas’s columns and bring up a directory of all of them; I ought to be able to search for his name and not have the first page of hits be nothing but front page teasers for the article I just read and a link to Marty Peretz’ columns. How else am I going to point y’all to the Critical Browser stuff?)
A cold day in hell.
I still haven’t heard the speech, or seen it. I did hear a bunch of attorneys and paralegals cheering from down the hall, and then I heard some historians talk about the speech on NPR (“I think it’s clear Obama decided to deliver one type of speech, and not another type of speech”). —I’m sorry, I’m just not much for this sort of thing, I guess, unless I am. And for whatever reason I’m not, today. But reading Spencer Ackerman gave me a taste of the thrill people are talking about, so hey. Thanks. (You are reading Ackerman, right?)
Brand new day.
(Also, there’s a new blog.)
Partisan hackery.
Shouldn’t the supposed crimes of the Bush administration be paid for by Barack Obama?
Yeah, I know. Maybe I’ll feel better about it all later today. But right now my back hurts and I’m grouchy and I have to load some data into a database downtown while he’s taking the oath of office and anyway his first words wouldn’t ever be arrest that sonofabitch. I guess I’m just a partisan hack. —I just wish I had a party, you know?
We’re gonna make it after all.
From Making Light, some photos by Scott Wyngarden:
I’ve never blogged under a Democratic administration. I wonder what it’s like.
But on the back side it didn’t say nothing
That side was made for you and me.
A whole lot of folks were thrilled beyond words when Pete Seeger stood up and sang the whole damn thing. They linked to uploaded videos of the historic public event to share with friends and family and country. HBO, who bought the rights to broadcast the inauguration concert, are busy yanking down every free copy they can find. —While you can apparently watch The Whole Damn Thing on hbo.com, there’s no linkable version of This Moment or That that I can find; what century are we in, again? (But apparently, neglecting to broadcast the invocation given by Bishop Gene Robinson—the sop tossed to Obama’s GLBTQ supporters, furious over the choice of Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at the actual inaugural? That wasn’t HBO. That’s all on Obama’s Presidential Inaugural Committee.)
Okay, so it isn’t as baldly bad as I’d thought. —Anyway, here’s a version from what looks to have been German television:
I need the whip of the thunder, and the wind’s dark moan.
The Rev. Al Sharpton steps into the rain:
I am tired of seeing ministers who will preach homophobia by day, and then after they’re preaching, when the lights are off they go cruising for trade… We know you’re not preaching the Bible, because if you were preaching the Bible we would have heard from you. We would have heard from you when people were starving in California—when they deregulated the economy and crashed Wall Street you had nothing to say. When Madoff made off with the money, you had nothing to say. When Bush took us to war chasing weapons of mass destruction that weren’t there you had nothing to say.
But all of a sudden, when Proposition 8 came out, you had so much to say, but since you stepped in the rain, we gonna step in the rain with you.
[…]
There is something immoral and sick about using all of that power to not end brutality and poverty, but to break into people’s bedrooms and claim that God sent you. It amazes me when I looked at California and saw churches that had nothing to say about police brutality, nothing to say when a young black boy was shot while he was wearing police handcuffs, nothing to say when they overturned affirmative action, nothing to say when people were being relegated into poverty, yet they were organizing and mobilizing to stop consenting adults from choosing their life partners.
Who are you going to believe, me or your own lying language?
I know I shouldn’t be surprised by the truth-eaters, but damn:
Like Lincoln’s plain manner of speaking, Joe [the Plumber]’s commentary is still unvarnished; it still “has the bark on” as the phrase was applied to Lincoln. And if anyone reading this immediately jumps to the conclusion that I am comparing Joe Wurzelbacher to Abraham Lincoln, you have a perfect example of the dynamic I am talking about.
What was Whittle thinking? —I suppose maybe if somebody called him on it, he could always point to this and this and say Obama says he doesn’t “compare” himself to Lincoln, but we know better, so QED?
Insecurites.
It’s a sad state of affairs when, in today’s pluralistic, post-racial society, a rich white man still feels the need to play let’s you and him fight.
It’s a chick thing; thank you so much!
Sometimes it’s nice to take a couple of disparate things from your daily media rounds and just sit ’em down next to each other. You know?
No wonder so many men are becoming gay, I mean really. You listen to women today. They’re afraid of ’em! It’s not that— A lot of guys become gay out of default. —There’s another epidemic that we’re not talking about: the lack of grandchildren epidemic. I’m gonna do a whole show on that, which is separate from the gay thing. But why so many white families don’t have grandchildren.
—Michael Savage, noted swimming partner
of Alan Ginsberg
—Jim Balent, noted writer and artist of Tarot,
Witch of the Black Rose
It took its toll on all of us.
Is it just me, or is the Beast’s 50 Most Loathsome of 2008 a little more… tired, than usual?
What Mads Gilbert said.
In case you’ve got less than half an ear on what THEY’re saying about the Gaza and you’re wondering Mads who?—
I am appalled by the terrorists attacks, but I am just as appalled by the suffering the USA has inflicted on others. It is in this context the deaths of 5,000 people must be viewed. If the US government has the legitimate right to bomb and kill civilians in Iraq, those who are oppressed also have a moral right to attack the USA with whatever weapons they can create. Dead civilians are the same, whether they are Americans, Palestinians or Iraqis.
Which is from the bad mad days of November 2001, which is when Solveig Torvik of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer said this about what Dr. Gilbert said:
Yes, dead civilians are the same. But are the reasons they are dead always the same? I think not. That’s where critical distinctions must be made. When civilians die, it matters whether they die as intended or unintended targets. To me, it matters whether you die in the service of liberty or tyranny.
Hear, hear! More light less heat, we always say. But how does one ensure the world shall know one’s aim is ever toward liberty? Perhaps a leafletting campaign?
Will no-one rid us of this truculent pundit?
I want to be good; I want to live up to the koan. But then I hear something so willfully, viciously stupid, so areal, something that does such violence to our already shredded discourse, something like this—
The New Deal—everybody agrees, I think, on both sides of the spectrum now, that the New Deal failed. The debate is over why it failed.
—and I get all Lewis Black again.
The trouble with Holbo’s Complaint (“I realize it is really a quite serious matter than the right-wingers have gone around the bend and apparently aren’t coming back”) isn’t that it’s hard on US to read their stuff without a sunny heart. It isn’t even that THEM ain’t coming back from around the bend ever at all. —To each their own, you know? If that’s what floats their boat, who am I to judge?
It’s that they’re determined to drag all the rest of us around the bend with them.
The site, with its ever-present Wikimania for lists, lists many scholars who have given up on the site, many more who are discontented, and only two who are happy with the status quo. The vandalism problem has received a lot of publicity, but that one’s actually fairly minor, or at least relatively fixable. More aggravating is “edit creep,” the gradual deterioration of a polished article by well-meaning but careless edits, and, even worse, “cranks,” which are classified with typical Wiki-precision as “parasites, scofflaws or insane.” And a crank can single-handedly destroy an article’s usefulness.
The problem is that Wikipedia forces its contributors to come to a consensus, and building consensus with a crank is a fool’s errand. Many of the departing scholars note the incident that finally brought them to leave; mine was a truculent teenager who refused to acknowledge that minimalist music was considered classical, because, as he put it, “it sounds more like Britney Spears than like Merzbow.” Let that sink in a minute. A person who insists that Einstein on the Beach, or Phill Niblock’s Four Full Flutes, or Tom Johnson’s Chord Catalogue cannot be considered classical because it sounds like Britney Spears is not a person one can seek consensus with. Because of that and his flippant rudeness I refused to argue directly with him, and appealed to the Wiki editors. Yet because of the Wikipedia policy about consensus, I couldn’t get around him, either. And when I checked the “Expert retention” page, I realized that this was not an isolated bit of bad luck, but that this recurring problem bars the dissemination of knowledge throughout Wikipedia.
Kyle Gann gave up on Wikipedia because of it. But giving up the body politic is a bit more difficult. A lie gets halfway around the world by the time the truth gets its shoes on, and that was before a professional corps of altheaphagei took up their stations outside its door, forks aloft. What do we do to beat it back? Must we each of us Epimenidean soldiers take up steel-edged rulers and station ourselves at the palaces of the pundits and whack their knuckles as they wax stupidic—
Oh. Hey. Army of Davids. Self-correcting blogosphere. Wikitopia.
—We will never be done with the long slow slog of the koan: word for word, person by person, dismantling the stupidity, alleviating the ignorance. The wood to be chopped, and the water carried; the dishes washed and the laundry done.
Still. It’s hard, seeing intellectual violence like this, wolves outside the door the way they are, not to want to punch someone in the face. (Or at least spit in their coffee.)
Otto’s rede.
John Judis is worried that Obama doesn’t realize just how bad things are. Me, I think he has some idea. (The signs are all about us.) —I think Obama’s fetishizing Otto Von Bismarck: “Politics is the art of the possible.” And, yes, I know:
Mark Schmitt has some typically wise things to say about momentum and naïvetie:
Bush’s mistake [in attempting to privatize Social Security after the 2004 election] was an unsurprising one. It is rooted in the naïve idea that presidents get a mandate from their election in the same way a gyroscope gets its spin. The bigger the victory, the bigger the mandate, and as time passes, the mandate diminishes. Bush didn’t have a big victory in 2004, but it was at least a solid, uncontested affirmation, and he decided that with a little extra spin and some abuse of power, he could get more out of it.
For all the romance of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first 100 days, history suggests that presidents do not get a mandate as a mechanical function of their electoral margin, but in fact they build it over time. They earn it not by winning but by governing. They assemble coalitions and use them again and again, and build institutions and make them work. While many good policies and necessary emergency measures were passed in the first 100 days of the New Deal, the innovations that lasted—those that defined politics until Reagan—came later, after FDR had consolidated power, forced the Supreme Court to accept a new set of assumptions about government’s role in the economy, and won the 1934 mid-term election.
Yes but well you see, as Rick Perlstein points out—
Progressive political change in American history is rarely incremental. With important exceptions, most of the reforms that have advanced our nation’s status as a modern, liberalizing social democracy were pushed through during narrow windows of progressive opportunity — which subsequently slammed shut with the work not yet complete. The post–Civil War reconstruction of the apartheid South, the Progressive Era remaking of the institutions of democratic deliberation, the New Deal, the Great Society: They were all blunt shocks. Then, before reformers knew what had happened, the seemingly sturdy reform mandate faded and Washington returned to its habits of stasis and reaction.
The Oval Office’s most effective inhabitants have always understood this. Franklin D. Roosevelt hurled down executive orders and legislative proposals like thunderbolts during his First Hundred Days, hardly slowing down for another four years before his window slammed shut; Lyndon Johnson, aided by John F. Kennedy’s martyrdom and the landslide of 1964, legislated at such a breakneck pace his aides were in awe. Both presidents understood that there are too many choke points — our minority-enabling constitutional system, our national tendency toward individualism, and our concentration of vested interests — to make change possible any other way.
Taking the long view, building on the nines, this is without a doubt important, and FDR did win big after those 100 days. But one of the ways he built institutions to allow him to govern lastingly was by nailing some damn thing to the wall and saying there, see? We’ve done that. What’s next?
I don’t know. My hopes were never that high. But I’m starting to worry that in his chilled and admirable pragmatism Obama’s fallen far far short of what we need, far further than I’d feared. “The art of the possible,” after all, isn’t the art of what is possible.
It’s the art of making things possible.
