The Awl http://www.theawl.com/ Be Less Stupid Mon, 23 Jan 2012 13:20:29 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.2 The Battle For Planet Flanagan http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/the-battle-for-planet-flanagan http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/the-battle-for-planet-flanagan#comments Mon, 23 Jan 2012 13:20:29 +0000 Maria Bustillos and David Roth http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/the-battle-for-planet-flanagan David: I need a haircut, Maria. I look like a duckling right now.

Maria: And a stiff drink, if you listened to that radio interview with Caitlin Flanagan, like we were supposed to. Evidently the women of America had calmed down too much since her last book, To Hell With All That, caused such a ruckus over what was widely perceived as the author's throwback and essentialist anti-feminist ideology. So not content to get people in a stir with Atlantic Monthly and New Yorker appearances, she's written a new one, Girl Land. Even the cover of which is pretty provoking.

All these moms are fine with their teen daughters going around giving blowjobs to pretty much whomever, she seems to think? "Servicing boys" she calls this. It is baffling.

David: Yeah, I couldn't tell what crisis she was very certitudinously diagnosing and decrying, there. But the world she describes is certainly bleak and very much in-crisis. I just don't know what or where that world is located. It's like she's been watching the Pirates franchise of porn films as documentaries. "Young kids, dressing like inexpensive pirates, having all these casual, athletic and oddly well-lit threesomes, and always with swords lying around. And because of feminism it's politically incorrect to get mad about that."

Maria: There was a rash of stories about a middle-school blowjob epidemic some years back, I remember. It seemed to many moms, shall I say, overblown.

David: Yeah, "rainbow parties!" If there wasn't a "CSI: Miami" episode about it featuring buff 26-year-old teens, a shivering, clammy Tom Sizemore and some powdery moralizing from David Caruso, I owe you a Coke.

Maria: It reminded me of "wilding" in a way. Pure hysteria-baiting. Razor blades in the apples.

David: Total blowjob apple-blades. The new Satanism. So hot right now.

Maria: And then, right when you start thinking, eh, this is ridiculous, they find another actual monster with an actual dungeon on Halloween. There is a grain of plausibility to every paranoia.

David: It's amazing how different Irin Carmon's "it's not always good, it's not always bad" assessment of adolescence in that interview sounds from Flanagan's DefCon4 Oral Sex Crisis vision of how young women live now.

Maria: Yes. But the bewilderment of Carmon did her no favors in this interview, much as I share it. Flanagan's sangfroid is devastating in the face of the slightest doubt. Although her critique of Girl Land that ran in Salon was awesome.

David: Bewilderment is the rational response to confronting a Palinesque queen bee who writes so maddeningly well about Joan Didion. Have you read Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs?

Maria: A bit. Totally infuriating, I thought.

David: I like Levy a lot, and that to me seems a way more rigorous approach to whatever problem Flanagan believes she's diagnosing. She seems to be actually working towards a diagnosis of specific unfairnesses and uglinesses, instead of working backwards from a sense of same, as Flanagan does.

Maria: Yes, that is true. She is less crazy, in a way. But in another way, equally crazy? Because no one woman knows how all other women should do life.

I mean please, leave enough oxygen in the room for someone to respond: look, you don't care for thus and such a way of life, but it works fine for me.

David: So, at the risk of playing my total-toolish-sports-dude role too well, here: sisterhood is Levy's big thing, and the erosion of it by a casually misogynist culture. Flanagan's thing is telling other wealthy people why they are doing things wrong.

Maria: And yet Levy rejects so many of these alleged sisters.

Anyway, there was zero real "support" or "solidarity" between Carmon and Flanagan in this talk. Carmon was forced to defend herself rather than have a conversation, so she's not to blame. But I suspect that Carmon doesn't approve of the Flanagan approach either, not even for Flanagan.

David: But what should sisterhood look like? How do you teach that sort of basic human solidarity to a child? It seems like Flanagan's idea—sequestration today, sequestration tomorrow, sequestration forever—is based around a fundamental wish to withdraw, which is kind of the opposite of that.

There is totally nothing wrong with cooing and fixing martinis. It's only when you act as if that's the only way women can or should relate to men.
Maria: Children already know it so much better than adults do, is the thing. Four- or five-year-olds tend to love and accept everyone instinctively. Unless someone is mean or hurts them. But puberty is bound to wreck that colorblind, gender-blind paradise no matter how "evolved" the adults are. I guess in the form of death-awareness and also the insecurities that go with sexual awareness. With the fear dawns the oppression. Then you start to unlearn.

David: That, and I think the beginning of the idea that we are supposed to compete with one another. And the first (and way exaggerated) sense of what failure would mean in that regard. Eventually you learn to live with that balance of failing and succeeding, or at least that's the idea.

At that age there's this very real sense of NEVER RECOVERING from the time you barfed in art class.

David: What puzzles me about Flanagan is the same thing that baffles me about your Katie Roiphe types—I can't figure out who she's talking to, or whose fantasies these are, besides hers. There's not a sense of actual engagement or concern.

Maria: She's addressing that caller in the radio interview who goes, "I don't allow the children to have Facebook." Control freaks piquing themselves on their virtue. "Traditionalists."

David: Ha. Nice demographic. Cool peers.

David: I sense her real audience is male magazine editors at The Atlantic. I sense that is her constituency. What Flanagan does is what The Atlantic does—gently provokes wealthy people. Because they are not putting a cartoon of Bernie Sanders kissing a hippie on the cover, or whatever Weekly Standard does, we assume The Atlantic is more forward thinking than it maybe is. I say all this as a subscriber, for whatever that's worth.

Maria: I would expand that to include male anything. This "let me fix you a martini" cooing thing is undeniably seductive. And why not, indeed.

David: They're delicious!

Maria: Also, there is totally nothing wrong with cooing and fixing martinis. It's only when you act as if that's the only way women can or should relate to men. Maybe you think men and women should be friends, equals. These aren't even mutually exclusive strategies.

David: By all means fix your husband a martini, if you want.

Maria: PLEASE. He's crazy! Mr. Flanagan, I mean, elsewhere known as Rob Hudnut, regarding whom more anon. He needs a martini at the very least.

David: He also has no idea how to do it himself. He just takes two pieces of wheat bread and pours gin on them. "My cocktail is defective, dear."

Maria: Left to himself he would just dissolve into hysterical tears and starve, probably.

David: I have been meaning to talk to you about your husband and how bad he is at fixing drinks. Some Crystal Light, Egg Beaters and some Southern Comfort does not add up to an old fashioned.

David: (I am sure your actual husband is excellent at fixing drinks.)

Maria: He's sobbing silently right now. Empty cocktail shaker in hand. I can see him from here.

David: Oh man, is he going to be okay?

Maria: Oh sure, there's gin and bread downstairs in the kitchen.

David: Tell me what you think about Flanagan's husband. Does he mean anything, besides he and his job as a Mattel executive being hilarious in the context of her Goddess of Scorn routine?

Maria: Rob Hudnut explains so much about Caitlin Flanagan. She is always going on about her husband, whom she lives but to serve. It emerges however that this man has to be completely off his rocker. Rob Hudnut is the executive producer of the animated Barbie DVD series, which has sold over 100 million copies, and he's been in charge of it pretty much the whole time, apparently. He has a shared writing credit for the first computer-animated one, Barbie in The Nutcracker (2001).

For some unfathomable reason, nobody seems to have delved too far into the Hudnut oeuvre.

David: Well, it's terrible. That's a fathomable reason.

Maria: But we braved it anyway. Namely: Barbie: A Perfect Christmas, the twenty-second and most recent installment.

David: The Sims-in-leggings production values are good, I can report. But I watched a 15-minute YouTube chunk. You watched the whole thing.

Maria: Yes. And I came away with a much-altered sense of what life must be like chez Hudnut. Because as Flanagan tells it, she is tendin' the hearth, and looking after the boys, and in comes Hudnut after a rough day, and she's all attractive and available and yay, lord and master-ing, right? Dinner on the table, high heels on. Come hither!

David: Dude had a long day out there selling some fucking Dream Houses and Skipper dolls.

Maria: It's far more than that. He also writes lyrics for these hallucinatory Barbie songs for girls on the DVDs, which is what I suspect slowly drove them both into a pink and frilly madness. "Get your sparkle on!" "Magic happens when you believe in yourself!"

Maria: In the Perfect Christmas one, the mystery snow lodge where Barbie et al. wind up is some kind of North Pole Wal-Mart distribution center. And all this, complete with hair-raising songs for "little girls" that make Justin Bieber look like Slipknot, is overseen, for the twenty-second time, by Caitlin Flanagan's husband. Is it any wonder her concept of pretty much everything has gone clean off the rails?

These are the girls Flanagan wants to see more of, according to Girl Land, her new book. Diary-scribbling "dreamers" with soft toys on the bed. Stepford Girls.

David: In every sentence, a voice can be heard commanding, "To a frilly-ass canopy bed, go."

David: Goof on Hudnut all you like, he's making enough to keep her in twin sets, nannies, personal organizers and cask-aged sanctimony.

Maria: I know, I know! So here is a quote from Flanagan in in The Atlantic, because she doesn't want men to be "more feminine". "I might be quietly thrilled if my husband decided to forgo his weekly tennis game so that he could alphabetize the spices and scrub the lazy Susan, but I would hardly consider it an erotic gesture."

David: What a turn-off. Bitch move, Hudnut!

Maria: IRL he is not alphabetizing spices, though: he is producing Barbie Mariposa and her Butterfly Fairy Friends.

David: "In a minute, I just need to finish writing the lyrics to this song 'To Be A Princess.' Then I am going to TEAR THAT AZZ UP."

(Sorry to type that)

Maria: Ack.

Maria: Here is a quote from Variety:


"We are great believers in the power of little girls," says Rob Hudnut, Mattel executive producer. "We believe they deserve the best entertainment that we can give them. [...]

Illustrating the painstaking nature of the production, Hudnut recalls, "It was the job for six months of one 'Nutcracker' animator to keep Barbie's dress from going over her head. The company has made a serious financial investment in ensuring these movies are the quality that girls deserve."

David: That actually arrives unpacked, doesn't it.

Maria: Barbie's skirt, stubbornly floating over her head! Both Hudnuts trying frantically to keep the damn thing down.

David: When so much is trying to lift it up, up, up.

Maria: Barbie's pink marabou slippers are to blame for much of this, maybe. Plus, the lady is very good-looking.

Flanagan I mean, not Barbie. And in no way disinclined to play the MILF card, as her 2006 appearance on "The Colbert Report" demonstrates so harrowingly.

David: Not at all! She's "using her influence" to get what she wants from boys, or whatever. Which is their undivided attention/hornball obeisance, and which is how she suggests young women empower themselves in general. But what else, do you think, does she really want?

Maria: It's difficult to avoid the impression that the marabou slippers and levitating skirt are playing an, erm, seminal role.

David: Naw, dude, don't type that.

Maria: Maybe she can only relate to men as The Opposite Sex; that happens to a lot of beautiful women, I think.

David: Certainly the amount of dude-flattery—the "let me get that for you, baby, you had a hard day doing whatever it is you do in that big office" that's implied in her whole shtick—seems for that audience, as opposed to her notional sisters.

Maria: I was impressed at how she got even Colbert thinking about her Chamber of Secrets during this interview, from 2006. She is totally smirking. I don't think I have ever seen anyone play Colbert like that.

David: It's funny, watching older—by which I mean younger—Colbert. He's more commanding, now. But she's also awfully persuasive. Pearls, winks and straight white teeth. She's funny, too. And good at flirting!

Maria: She is AWESOME at flirting.

Maria: Okay, the other funny thing is, her dad was an academic, at Berkeley. And Flanagan has written about being a Democrat. So.

David: Oh, she's no Democrat. Has she really said that?

Maria: Yes, she wrote about it for Time in a piece called "We're Here, We're Square, Get Used To It."

David: I'm not buying that. She's a Rockefeller Republican down to her underdrawers. Oh lord, her endless issues with The Feminists. She is always enraging them, simply by being right.

Maria: The really toxic thing about Flanagan is that 2% of her criticism of feminists is valuable and useful. And she poisons that 2% to the point where it becomes difficult to discuss.

He also has no idea how to do it himself. He just takes two pieces of wheat bread and pours gin on them. "My cocktail is defective, dear."
David: What's correct is inaudible over the sound of her just beating the shit out of her strawmen, though, at least to me. It also scans so much weirder when you hear it aloud, as in the radio bit. Her "some people think" caricature/formulations are maddening in print, but when you hear someone saying those words out loud, it's so jarring.

David: "Oh, I don't know that fathers are terribly important in raising a child. And look, if my daughter wants to give some blowjobs on the bus or whatever, then that's her journey, I guess. I am mostly into keeping a healthy diet, personally." That is the person she's debating. That's not a person, Caitlin!

Maria: Yup.

David: I guess she'd change blowjobs-on-the-bus to "servicing boys." Which is 100,000% grosser. Such a simultaneously technocratic and telling word choice.

Maria: She has boys; it's like why doesn't she talk about teaching them to make friends with girls and respect them and talk to them like they are peers?

David: For someone who is impressively exacting with her language and general public performance, it's amazing how lazy she gets when that part of the boy/girl binary comes up. Her men are just these helpless appetite-driven erection-beasts, waiting to be directed, influenced. Which, you know, guilty as charged, but also you are raising sons and that's what you think they're destined to be?

Maria: Her own role in raising boys doesn't just get short shrift, it is weirdly, entirely absent.

David: There's a bit that Heather Havrilesky quotes in her BookForum review of Flanagan's book, where CF mentions it like some sort of slam dunk.

David: "Well, I have boys." QED like a motherfucker.

Maria: That review was great, I thought. But I don't exactly disagree with the helpless boner thing, actually.

David: It'd make me more angry if it wasn't half true. And I suppose her bit about the male of the species responding to direction—that is, her argument that we're more inclined to be good when it's clear that we must be—is good, too, insofar as it's mostly accurate. But men do not exist outside the culture, either.

Maria: In my posse of moms, they are so keen to try to influence their sons to be kind, to think about the consequences of their actions. For a good reason, which is that you will be a happier person and your life will be better if you control your appetites. A unisex message. And you can have real love and friendship if you honor the differences honestly, patiently. And you don't just grab.

David: Boys learn that by participating in the culture the same as girls do. There are people who take, in kindergarten and in finance and wherever else. You learn in life to identify those people and avoid them, is the hope. I always blame the cheapening tendencies of the everything-is-the-market worldview for all this. Mostly because I am a parody of myself.

Maria: Haha, though "the market" is just another way of saying, "never learned not to grab, despite multiple attempts to hammer this lesson into your thick skull from kindergarten through age fifty-seven."

David: Yes, it is. But the kind of sour paranoia and other-denying acquisitiveness—the sense that getting equals taking—in our popular culture all seems to me to spring from the same thing. That being the ubiquito-market's constant, demeaning competition, which is the opposite of a basic, respect-based solidarity grounded in the recognition of our shared and intrinsic human worth. There's a place to compete, it can be fun and useful, but there's something terribly bleak about hearing "I'm not here to make friends," over and over, when that is mostly what we are HERE, as in on earth, to do.

David: And believing that is the sort of thing that both comes from and reinforces a fear of the rest of the world, which you can't control. No wonder Flanagan wants to Rapunzel girls into their bedrooms. Look at what she thinks the world is like.

Maria: If you haven't figured out this self-evident truth, though, you are thrown back on the sugar-coating of the Us and Them materialist purgatory that is Barbie: A Perfect Christmas.

David: And you're terrified of everyone.

Maria: Especially middle-school boys!

Maria: Wagging their insistent erections everywhere.

David: Porn! It's everywhere, they're sending it to your homes, baked into loaves of bread. Feminists! Telling you it's wrong to get mixed up in your daughters' lives. Dog the Bounty Hunter! In general. That last one is mostly me, but I'd want to lock all that out, too.

Maria: And you might not be able to! If you turn on Facebook, fetishists leap right out onto your canopy bed! With erections!

David: Always with the erections.

Maria: That need servicing, and pronto!

David: "Servicing." Like you're getting your tires rotated.

Maria: In her New Yorker piece about visiting Hawaii Flanagan goes on this thing about "an empty tube of 'personal feminine lubricant'" floating over to them in the pool.

David: What a beautiful image for her world.

Maria: The planet Flanagan is a sordid, scary and, thankfully, distant planet.

David: She is only trying to enjoy this luxury vacation in some posh locale—where the food, frankly, is not as good as she'd expected or whatever—but somehow, always, there is some Astroglide bobbing in her direction. Is no place safe?

Maria: NO! But really yes!

Maria: Also: I have girls!

David: QED, motherfucker.



Maria Bustillos is the author of Dorkismo and Act Like a Gentleman, Think Like a Woman.

David Roth writes "The Mercy Rule" column at Vice, co-writes the Wall Street Journal's Daily Fix, and is one of the founders of The Classical. He also has his own little website. And he tweets inanities!

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See more posts by Maria Bustillos and David Roth

46 comments

]]> David: I need a haircut, Maria. I look like a duckling right now.

Maria: And a stiff drink, if you listened to that radio interview with Caitlin Flanagan, like we were supposed to. Evidently the women of America had calmed down too much since her last book, To Hell With All That, caused such a ruckus over what was widely perceived as the author's throwback and essentialist anti-feminist ideology. So not content to get people in a stir with Atlantic Monthly and New Yorker appearances, she's written a new one, Girl Land. Even the cover of which is pretty provoking.

All these moms are fine with their teen daughters going around giving blowjobs to pretty much whomever, she seems to think? "Servicing boys" she calls this. It is baffling.

David: Yeah, I couldn't tell what crisis she was very certitudinously diagnosing and decrying, there. But the world she describes is certainly bleak and very much in-crisis. I just don't know what or where that world is located. It's like she's been watching the Pirates franchise of porn films as documentaries. "Young kids, dressing like inexpensive pirates, having all these casual, athletic and oddly well-lit threesomes, and always with swords lying around. And because of feminism it's politically incorrect to get mad about that."

Maria: There was a rash of stories about a middle-school blowjob epidemic some years back, I remember. It seemed to many moms, shall I say, overblown.

David: Yeah, "rainbow parties!" If there wasn't a "CSI: Miami" episode about it featuring buff 26-year-old teens, a shivering, clammy Tom Sizemore and some powdery moralizing from David Caruso, I owe you a Coke.

Maria: It reminded me of "wilding" in a way. Pure hysteria-baiting. Razor blades in the apples.

David: Total blowjob apple-blades. The new Satanism. So hot right now.

Maria: And then, right when you start thinking, eh, this is ridiculous, they find another actual monster with an actual dungeon on Halloween. There is a grain of plausibility to every paranoia.

David: It's amazing how different Irin Carmon's "it's not always good, it's not always bad" assessment of adolescence in that interview sounds from Flanagan's DefCon4 Oral Sex Crisis vision of how young women live now.

Maria: Yes. But the bewilderment of Carmon did her no favors in this interview, much as I share it. Flanagan's sangfroid is devastating in the face of the slightest doubt. Although her critique of Girl Land that ran in Salon was awesome.

David: Bewilderment is the rational response to confronting a Palinesque queen bee who writes so maddeningly well about Joan Didion. Have you read Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs?

Maria: A bit. Totally infuriating, I thought.

David: I like Levy a lot, and that to me seems a way more rigorous approach to whatever problem Flanagan believes she's diagnosing. She seems to be actually working towards a diagnosis of specific unfairnesses and uglinesses, instead of working backwards from a sense of same, as Flanagan does.

Maria: Yes, that is true. She is less crazy, in a way. But in another way, equally crazy? Because no one woman knows how all other women should do life.

I mean please, leave enough oxygen in the room for someone to respond: look, you don't care for thus and such a way of life, but it works fine for me.

David: So, at the risk of playing my total-toolish-sports-dude role too well, here: sisterhood is Levy's big thing, and the erosion of it by a casually misogynist culture. Flanagan's thing is telling other wealthy people why they are doing things wrong.

Maria: And yet Levy rejects so many of these alleged sisters.

Anyway, there was zero real "support" or "solidarity" between Carmon and Flanagan in this talk. Carmon was forced to defend herself rather than have a conversation, so she's not to blame. But I suspect that Carmon doesn't approve of the Flanagan approach either, not even for Flanagan.

David: But what should sisterhood look like? How do you teach that sort of basic human solidarity to a child? It seems like Flanagan's idea—sequestration today, sequestration tomorrow, sequestration forever—is based around a fundamental wish to withdraw, which is kind of the opposite of that.

There is totally nothing wrong with cooing and fixing martinis. It's only when you act as if that's the only way women can or should relate to men.
Maria: Children already know it so much better than adults do, is the thing. Four- or five-year-olds tend to love and accept everyone instinctively. Unless someone is mean or hurts them. But puberty is bound to wreck that colorblind, gender-blind paradise no matter how "evolved" the adults are. I guess in the form of death-awareness and also the insecurities that go with sexual awareness. With the fear dawns the oppression. Then you start to unlearn.

David: That, and I think the beginning of the idea that we are supposed to compete with one another. And the first (and way exaggerated) sense of what failure would mean in that regard. Eventually you learn to live with that balance of failing and succeeding, or at least that's the idea.

At that age there's this very real sense of NEVER RECOVERING from the time you barfed in art class.

David: What puzzles me about Flanagan is the same thing that baffles me about your Katie Roiphe types—I can't figure out who she's talking to, or whose fantasies these are, besides hers. There's not a sense of actual engagement or concern.

Maria: She's addressing that caller in the radio interview who goes, "I don't allow the children to have Facebook." Control freaks piquing themselves on their virtue. "Traditionalists."

David: Ha. Nice demographic. Cool peers.

David: I sense her real audience is male magazine editors at The Atlantic. I sense that is her constituency. What Flanagan does is what The Atlantic does—gently provokes wealthy people. Because they are not putting a cartoon of Bernie Sanders kissing a hippie on the cover, or whatever Weekly Standard does, we assume The Atlantic is more forward thinking than it maybe is. I say all this as a subscriber, for whatever that's worth.

Maria: I would expand that to include male anything. This "let me fix you a martini" cooing thing is undeniably seductive. And why not, indeed.

David: They're delicious!

Maria: Also, there is totally nothing wrong with cooing and fixing martinis. It's only when you act as if that's the only way women can or should relate to men. Maybe you think men and women should be friends, equals. These aren't even mutually exclusive strategies.

David: By all means fix your husband a martini, if you want.

Maria: PLEASE. He's crazy! Mr. Flanagan, I mean, elsewhere known as Rob Hudnut, regarding whom more anon. He needs a martini at the very least.

David: He also has no idea how to do it himself. He just takes two pieces of wheat bread and pours gin on them. "My cocktail is defective, dear."

Maria: Left to himself he would just dissolve into hysterical tears and starve, probably.

David: I have been meaning to talk to you about your husband and how bad he is at fixing drinks. Some Crystal Light, Egg Beaters and some Southern Comfort does not add up to an old fashioned.

David: (I am sure your actual husband is excellent at fixing drinks.)

Maria: He's sobbing silently right now. Empty cocktail shaker in hand. I can see him from here.

David: Oh man, is he going to be okay?

Maria: Oh sure, there's gin and bread downstairs in the kitchen.

David: Tell me what you think about Flanagan's husband. Does he mean anything, besides he and his job as a Mattel executive being hilarious in the context of her Goddess of Scorn routine?

Maria: Rob Hudnut explains so much about Caitlin Flanagan. She is always going on about her husband, whom she lives but to serve. It emerges however that this man has to be completely off his rocker. Rob Hudnut is the executive producer of the animated Barbie DVD series, which has sold over 100 million copies, and he's been in charge of it pretty much the whole time, apparently. He has a shared writing credit for the first computer-animated one, Barbie in The Nutcracker (2001).

For some unfathomable reason, nobody seems to have delved too far into the Hudnut oeuvre.

David: Well, it's terrible. That's a fathomable reason.

Maria: But we braved it anyway. Namely: Barbie: A Perfect Christmas, the twenty-second and most recent installment.

David: The Sims-in-leggings production values are good, I can report. But I watched a 15-minute YouTube chunk. You watched the whole thing.

Maria: Yes. And I came away with a much-altered sense of what life must be like chez Hudnut. Because as Flanagan tells it, she is tendin' the hearth, and looking after the boys, and in comes Hudnut after a rough day, and she's all attractive and available and yay, lord and master-ing, right? Dinner on the table, high heels on. Come hither!

David: Dude had a long day out there selling some fucking Dream Houses and Skipper dolls.

Maria: It's far more than that. He also writes lyrics for these hallucinatory Barbie songs for girls on the DVDs, which is what I suspect slowly drove them both into a pink and frilly madness. "Get your sparkle on!" "Magic happens when you believe in yourself!"

Maria: In the Perfect Christmas one, the mystery snow lodge where Barbie et al. wind up is some kind of North Pole Wal-Mart distribution center. And all this, complete with hair-raising songs for "little girls" that make Justin Bieber look like Slipknot, is overseen, for the twenty-second time, by Caitlin Flanagan's husband. Is it any wonder her concept of pretty much everything has gone clean off the rails?

These are the girls Flanagan wants to see more of, according to Girl Land, her new book. Diary-scribbling "dreamers" with soft toys on the bed. Stepford Girls.

David: In every sentence, a voice can be heard commanding, "To a frilly-ass canopy bed, go."

David: Goof on Hudnut all you like, he's making enough to keep her in twin sets, nannies, personal organizers and cask-aged sanctimony.

Maria: I know, I know! So here is a quote from Flanagan in in The Atlantic, because she doesn't want men to be "more feminine". "I might be quietly thrilled if my husband decided to forgo his weekly tennis game so that he could alphabetize the spices and scrub the lazy Susan, but I would hardly consider it an erotic gesture."

David: What a turn-off. Bitch move, Hudnut!

Maria: IRL he is not alphabetizing spices, though: he is producing Barbie Mariposa and her Butterfly Fairy Friends.

David: "In a minute, I just need to finish writing the lyrics to this song 'To Be A Princess.' Then I am going to TEAR THAT AZZ UP."

(Sorry to type that)

Maria: Ack.

Maria: Here is a quote from Variety:


"We are great believers in the power of little girls," says Rob Hudnut, Mattel executive producer. "We believe they deserve the best entertainment that we can give them. [...]

Illustrating the painstaking nature of the production, Hudnut recalls, "It was the job for six months of one 'Nutcracker' animator to keep Barbie's dress from going over her head. The company has made a serious financial investment in ensuring these movies are the quality that girls deserve."

David: That actually arrives unpacked, doesn't it.

Maria: Barbie's skirt, stubbornly floating over her head! Both Hudnuts trying frantically to keep the damn thing down.

David: When so much is trying to lift it up, up, up.

Maria: Barbie's pink marabou slippers are to blame for much of this, maybe. Plus, the lady is very good-looking.

Flanagan I mean, not Barbie. And in no way disinclined to play the MILF card, as her 2006 appearance on "The Colbert Report" demonstrates so harrowingly.

David: Not at all! She's "using her influence" to get what she wants from boys, or whatever. Which is their undivided attention/hornball obeisance, and which is how she suggests young women empower themselves in general. But what else, do you think, does she really want?

Maria: It's difficult to avoid the impression that the marabou slippers and levitating skirt are playing an, erm, seminal role.

David: Naw, dude, don't type that.

Maria: Maybe she can only relate to men as The Opposite Sex; that happens to a lot of beautiful women, I think.

David: Certainly the amount of dude-flattery—the "let me get that for you, baby, you had a hard day doing whatever it is you do in that big office" that's implied in her whole shtick—seems for that audience, as opposed to her notional sisters.

Maria: I was impressed at how she got even Colbert thinking about her Chamber of Secrets during this interview, from 2006. She is totally smirking. I don't think I have ever seen anyone play Colbert like that.

David: It's funny, watching older—by which I mean younger—Colbert. He's more commanding, now. But she's also awfully persuasive. Pearls, winks and straight white teeth. She's funny, too. And good at flirting!

Maria: She is AWESOME at flirting.

Maria: Okay, the other funny thing is, her dad was an academic, at Berkeley. And Flanagan has written about being a Democrat. So.

David: Oh, she's no Democrat. Has she really said that?

Maria: Yes, she wrote about it for Time in a piece called "We're Here, We're Square, Get Used To It."

David: I'm not buying that. She's a Rockefeller Republican down to her underdrawers. Oh lord, her endless issues with The Feminists. She is always enraging them, simply by being right.

Maria: The really toxic thing about Flanagan is that 2% of her criticism of feminists is valuable and useful. And she poisons that 2% to the point where it becomes difficult to discuss.

He also has no idea how to do it himself. He just takes two pieces of wheat bread and pours gin on them. "My cocktail is defective, dear."
David: What's correct is inaudible over the sound of her just beating the shit out of her strawmen, though, at least to me. It also scans so much weirder when you hear it aloud, as in the radio bit. Her "some people think" caricature/formulations are maddening in print, but when you hear someone saying those words out loud, it's so jarring.

David: "Oh, I don't know that fathers are terribly important in raising a child. And look, if my daughter wants to give some blowjobs on the bus or whatever, then that's her journey, I guess. I am mostly into keeping a healthy diet, personally." That is the person she's debating. That's not a person, Caitlin!

Maria: Yup.

David: I guess she'd change blowjobs-on-the-bus to "servicing boys." Which is 100,000% grosser. Such a simultaneously technocratic and telling word choice.

Maria: She has boys; it's like why doesn't she talk about teaching them to make friends with girls and respect them and talk to them like they are peers?

David: For someone who is impressively exacting with her language and general public performance, it's amazing how lazy she gets when that part of the boy/girl binary comes up. Her men are just these helpless appetite-driven erection-beasts, waiting to be directed, influenced. Which, you know, guilty as charged, but also you are raising sons and that's what you think they're destined to be?

Maria: Her own role in raising boys doesn't just get short shrift, it is weirdly, entirely absent.

David: There's a bit that Heather Havrilesky quotes in her BookForum review of Flanagan's book, where CF mentions it like some sort of slam dunk.

David: "Well, I have boys." QED like a motherfucker.

Maria: That review was great, I thought. But I don't exactly disagree with the helpless boner thing, actually.

David: It'd make me more angry if it wasn't half true. And I suppose her bit about the male of the species responding to direction—that is, her argument that we're more inclined to be good when it's clear that we must be—is good, too, insofar as it's mostly accurate. But men do not exist outside the culture, either.

Maria: In my posse of moms, they are so keen to try to influence their sons to be kind, to think about the consequences of their actions. For a good reason, which is that you will be a happier person and your life will be better if you control your appetites. A unisex message. And you can have real love and friendship if you honor the differences honestly, patiently. And you don't just grab.

David: Boys learn that by participating in the culture the same as girls do. There are people who take, in kindergarten and in finance and wherever else. You learn in life to identify those people and avoid them, is the hope. I always blame the cheapening tendencies of the everything-is-the-market worldview for all this. Mostly because I am a parody of myself.

Maria: Haha, though "the market" is just another way of saying, "never learned not to grab, despite multiple attempts to hammer this lesson into your thick skull from kindergarten through age fifty-seven."

David: Yes, it is. But the kind of sour paranoia and other-denying acquisitiveness—the sense that getting equals taking—in our popular culture all seems to me to spring from the same thing. That being the ubiquito-market's constant, demeaning competition, which is the opposite of a basic, respect-based solidarity grounded in the recognition of our shared and intrinsic human worth. There's a place to compete, it can be fun and useful, but there's something terribly bleak about hearing "I'm not here to make friends," over and over, when that is mostly what we are HERE, as in on earth, to do.

David: And believing that is the sort of thing that both comes from and reinforces a fear of the rest of the world, which you can't control. No wonder Flanagan wants to Rapunzel girls into their bedrooms. Look at what she thinks the world is like.

Maria: If you haven't figured out this self-evident truth, though, you are thrown back on the sugar-coating of the Us and Them materialist purgatory that is Barbie: A Perfect Christmas.

David: And you're terrified of everyone.

Maria: Especially middle-school boys!

Maria: Wagging their insistent erections everywhere.

David: Porn! It's everywhere, they're sending it to your homes, baked into loaves of bread. Feminists! Telling you it's wrong to get mixed up in your daughters' lives. Dog the Bounty Hunter! In general. That last one is mostly me, but I'd want to lock all that out, too.

Maria: And you might not be able to! If you turn on Facebook, fetishists leap right out onto your canopy bed! With erections!

David: Always with the erections.

Maria: That need servicing, and pronto!

David: "Servicing." Like you're getting your tires rotated.

Maria: In her New Yorker piece about visiting Hawaii Flanagan goes on this thing about "an empty tube of 'personal feminine lubricant'" floating over to them in the pool.

David: What a beautiful image for her world.

Maria: The planet Flanagan is a sordid, scary and, thankfully, distant planet.

David: She is only trying to enjoy this luxury vacation in some posh locale—where the food, frankly, is not as good as she'd expected or whatever—but somehow, always, there is some Astroglide bobbing in her direction. Is no place safe?

Maria: NO! But really yes!

Maria: Also: I have girls!

David: QED, motherfucker.



Maria Bustillos is the author of Dorkismo and Act Like a Gentleman, Think Like a Woman.

David Roth writes "The Mercy Rule" column at Vice, co-writes the Wall Street Journal's Daily Fix, and is one of the founders of The Classical. He also has his own little website. And he tweets inanities!

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/the-battle-for-planet-flanagan/feed 46 Feminism Complex http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/feminism-complex http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/feminism-complex#comments Thu, 08 Dec 2011 13:50:58 +0000 Alex Balk http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/feminism-complex I am going to have to reread Jenny Turner's "As Many Pairs of Shoes as She Likes" at least seven more times before I can even engage with it simply on the level of comprehension, but even the first pass has left me exhausted. Every paragraph explodes with an almost impossible number of issues with which to contend. Perhaps (and probably so) you are brighter than I can get the whole thing in one go, but if not you'll want to get started now, right here.

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]]> I am going to have to reread Jenny Turner's "As Many Pairs of Shoes as She Likes" at least seven more times before I can even engage with it simply on the level of comprehension, but even the first pass has left me exhausted. Every paragraph explodes with an almost impossible number of issues with which to contend. Perhaps (and probably so) you are brighter than I can get the whole thing in one go, but if not you'll want to get started now, right here.

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/feminism-complex/feed 13 'Homeland' And 'Enlightened': Women On The Verge Of Nervous Breakthroughs http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/homeland-and-enlightened-women-on-the-verge-of-nervous-breakthroughs http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/homeland-and-enlightened-women-on-the-verge-of-nervous-breakthroughs#comments Fri, 02 Dec 2011 13:30:40 +0000 Michelle Dean http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/homeland-and-enlightened-women-on-the-verge-of-nervous-breakthroughs Mention Lindsay Lohan to me and you’ll be treated to an excoriation of the joy with which this culture greets your average female public breakdown. As such, I've surprised myself this fall with my absorption in the personal and professional unravellings of two female television characters: Carrie Mathison of "Homeland" (Claire Danes) and Amy Jellicoe of "Enlightened" (Laura Dern). If you've also been watching those shows, you might question my yoking them together. Carrie and Amy could not occupy (heh) two more different dramatic universes. “Homeland” is a taut, quickly paced thriller about terrorism whose signature gesture is to end each episode on the edge of a cliff; while “Enlightened” is a more meditative, patient, voiced-over and incredibly intelligent dramatization of a sort of Eat, Pray, Love moment in the life of one not-particularly-remarkable woman in California.

All the same, I think of both their lead characters, Carrie and Amy, as a pair. Both are struggling with the place of work in their lives; neither is particularly adept at maintaining healthy romantic relationships. Both are also suffering from mental illness, although Carrie's is identifiable as bipolar disorder, whereas Amy seems to suffer from a more diffuse sort of ailment on the anxiety/depression spectrum. In their twin sufferings they have become talismans for me in a way that no more overtly politicized depiction of ladies on television has ever quite done—not Peggy of "Mad Men" nor, and this pains me to admit it, even Buffy. They're articulating something new about vulnerability in women that I haven't seen said before, at least not in precisely this way, on television. And I, for one, am hooked.

I use the word "vulnerability" advisedly here. I'm old enough to recall the fall of the Berlin Wall as an interruption of a rerun of “Growing Pains” (or was it "Who's the Boss?"). Those of you who share that description probably also remember that charming interlude in our TV-watching lives where we were invited to contemplate “Ally McBeal” as at once an icon and Grim Reaper of female liberation. Time got in on that game with typical subtlety and thoughtfulness by running a cover image of the disembodied heads of Susan B. Anthony, Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem floating in a black void alongside Ally's and the question, "Is Feminism Dead?"

The particulars of the accompanying essay, penned by (oh brother) Ginia Bellafante, are not worth rehashing. For one thing, it's about a show that is now largely and rightfully forgotten. (Though I do sometimes wonder whatever happened to that piano lady.) For another, the essay itself is pretty bad. (In Bellafante's eyes, Katie Roiphe’s greatest sin up to then was appearing in a Coach ad.) And these arguments always take the same utterly depressing tack: step out of line, make a mistake, enjoy cute babies, feel badly, cry at work, be, in other words, wounded and imperfect, and your failings are judged not just as your own, but as those of the entire sisterhood, q.e.d.

Most shows about women have, perhaps unintentionally, made themselves susceptible to this boring, repetitive debate because they simply cannot stop announcing at every available opportunity that they are Television Shows About Women, Goddamnit. (Let's call them TSAWGs.) Whether you want to blame TSAWG creators or network-driven marketing campaigns is immaterial—the fact is that we are meant to see Ally and Buffy and, even to a certain extent, Peggy as leading archetypal female lives, so when they are weak and/or strong and/or prone to cute outfits, we are invited to see "women" as being the same way. This sets a trap for the critic who, while believing in equality, wants her art to be something other than a position paper, as I can say from experience. For your reviews, you then have to work out how to simultaneously applaud any dramatic interest in women’s lives—it being rare enough to begin with—while registering any reservations you may have that such a pat thing as "women's lives" exists. Look. Of course I’ve known Allys and Buffys and Peggys, but I’ve known a hundred other kinds of women too, not all of them middle class and/or white. (I know!) The idea that we share, as women, necessarily common interiorities—rather than common treatment from the world outside our tiny, skull-sized kingdoms—well, it is, and always has been, to put it politely, utter bunk. Flightiness and envy and shame—male, female, whatever, we all have to deal with those emotions. (Go into any bar and you'll find as much emotional need at a table of male investment bankers as you will at the girls' night out a few feet away; there's not as much distance between "you go, girl" and Hugo-Bossed chest-beating as most would like to think.)

Anyway, my point is this: it's important that neither "Homeland" nor "Enlightened" have arrived at the parade bearing that About Women banner. Their female leads don't have to hold up any feminist or post-feminist placards. (Are we at post-post-feminist, pop-culturally speaking, yet? I keep losing track.) Without that freight, the shows can stumble on to obvious-and-yet-not-obvious insights that TSAWGs have traditionally resisted depicting, and to boot get to do so without having to claim for their (also white and middle class) heroines anything other than their own individuality.

Take, for example, the most egregious mistake the otherwise competent and ambitious CIA agent Carrie has made in this inaugural season of "Homeland": when she crosses the line and sleeps with Brody, the ex-POW target she's investigating. The choice is (at least initially) presented to us as one outside of traditional TSAWG protocol when Our Heroine sleeps with Our (Anti)hero. What Carrie does is heedless and impulsive, to be sure, but her choice to do it isn't about lunar cycles or Women In Love or even, in a gesture favoured by analogous TSAWGs like "Alias" and "Damages," an attempt to avenge some perfect idealized man assassinated in a bathtub at the outset of the series. It simply comes out of nowhere, as much bad-idea sex does. (Or so I've, uh, heard.)

Carrie later tells Brody that she originally slept with him to trick him into confessing that he'd been "turned" as a POW in Iraq. But a more recent admission to her mentor Saul, of her fear that she will always be "alone," suggests a more traditional explanation. Perhaps the answer is both, which would be something quite a bit more like real life, wouldn’t it, than an either/or diagnosis. Admittedly, it's often hard to say, in "Homeland," which ambiguities are intentional. The creators are veterans of "24," not a show that evinced a sophisticated understanding of human psychology and thus it's likely that ulterior motives are here as plot devices rather than as tools to deepen character. Whatever the case, Angela Chase Danes manages to take the chaotic writing and unify Carrie into a difficult, loud, excessively blunt mess of a person. It’s not so much that she makes Carrie sympathetic as she makes her recognizable.

In that sense Amy, as played by Laura Dern, is Carrie's polar opposite, far easier to like in her own cringeworthy way. Admittedly, the topology of Mike White's "Enlightened" is more familiarly TSAWG-ish. Amy's vulnerability stems from what seems like the usual suspects of TSAWG breakdowns: a difficult mother, a miscarriage, the (at least partially) consequent breakdown of a marriage, a workplace affair. The potential for the feminine cliché seemed, as I watched those first few episodes, very high. But then I changed my mind. [In "Enlightened," these problems are not presented to us as "female"—though Amy does occasionally harbor certain ambitions for sisterhood at Abbadonn, the company where she works—but rather as existential. This shift of frame is subtle but important. Amy gets to lay claim to questions about meaning and loss and love in terms that are so abstract as to be universal and yet that don't simply capitulate to the (old/white/male) terms of traditional philosophy.

For those of you not yet watching, such an ethos may make "Enlightened" sound fatally pretentious and vague. And it could be—but it isn't. Somehow White's writing manages to straddle the ridiculous and the touching in utterly unmanipulative ways. Here is the scene I'd use to make my pitch to you to start watching: In the fourth episode, Amy goes on a rafting trip with her ex-husband, one that she clearly hopes will renew the bond they once felt. It ends instead with him getting high and confused and fulfilling every cliché of the deadbeat ex-husband you can imagine. He loves Amy, it's clear, but the situation is nonetheless hopeless. And Amy, well, her reaction is neither to run out and buy tissues nor to declare herself “done with men.” Instead, she just ruminates:

You can try to escape the story of your life but you can’t, it happened, the baby died, the dog died, the heart broke, I knew you when you were young, I know your heart broke, too. I will know you when we are both old and maybe wise, I hope wise. I know you now. Your story. Mine isn’t the one I would have chosen in the beginning but I’ll take it. It is my story. It’s only mine. And it’s not over. There’s time. There is time. There is so much time…

Amy delivers this speech while standing in a rose garden on a wide and sunny day. There is no walk home in the rain, with the strums of a strong woman's ballad playing underneath. Nor some vow of renewal and a triumphant martini with three girlfriends, (as we traveling foursomes of women are wont to enjoy). Shedding these cliches, Amy’s Zenlike rejection of hysterical, cuticle-and-life-destroying anxiety about whether she should marry or settle or have kids or freeze her eggs or opt out or keep working or stop being such a goddamned rare spotted owl—well, for the love of Christ, it’s so downright refreshing, even revolutionary, to see these questions thought about in less all/nothing, either/or, fearmongering terms.

Should this trend catch on, of course, some people inevitably may be disappointed—the producers of reductive and silly magazine covers, for example, who won't be able to wring the same sensationalism from "What Me, Marry?" and "Marry Him!"—but I think we could probably learn to carry on anyway.


Related: Laura Dern Is Our Only Hope For Bringing David Lynch Back


Michelle Dean writes in a lot of places, now. Follow her onTwitter

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]]> Mention Lindsay Lohan to me and you’ll be treated to an excoriation of the joy with which this culture greets your average female public breakdown. As such, I've surprised myself this fall with my absorption in the personal and professional unravellings of two female television characters: Carrie Mathison of "Homeland" (Claire Danes) and Amy Jellicoe of "Enlightened" (Laura Dern). If you've also been watching those shows, you might question my yoking them together. Carrie and Amy could not occupy (heh) two more different dramatic universes. “Homeland” is a taut, quickly paced thriller about terrorism whose signature gesture is to end each episode on the edge of a cliff; while “Enlightened” is a more meditative, patient, voiced-over and incredibly intelligent dramatization of a sort of Eat, Pray, Love moment in the life of one not-particularly-remarkable woman in California.

All the same, I think of both their lead characters, Carrie and Amy, as a pair. Both are struggling with the place of work in their lives; neither is particularly adept at maintaining healthy romantic relationships. Both are also suffering from mental illness, although Carrie's is identifiable as bipolar disorder, whereas Amy seems to suffer from a more diffuse sort of ailment on the anxiety/depression spectrum. In their twin sufferings they have become talismans for me in a way that no more overtly politicized depiction of ladies on television has ever quite done—not Peggy of "Mad Men" nor, and this pains me to admit it, even Buffy. They're articulating something new about vulnerability in women that I haven't seen said before, at least not in precisely this way, on television. And I, for one, am hooked.

I use the word "vulnerability" advisedly here. I'm old enough to recall the fall of the Berlin Wall as an interruption of a rerun of “Growing Pains” (or was it "Who's the Boss?"). Those of you who share that description probably also remember that charming interlude in our TV-watching lives where we were invited to contemplate “Ally McBeal” as at once an icon and Grim Reaper of female liberation. Time got in on that game with typical subtlety and thoughtfulness by running a cover image of the disembodied heads of Susan B. Anthony, Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem floating in a black void alongside Ally's and the question, "Is Feminism Dead?"

The particulars of the accompanying essay, penned by (oh brother) Ginia Bellafante, are not worth rehashing. For one thing, it's about a show that is now largely and rightfully forgotten. (Though I do sometimes wonder whatever happened to that piano lady.) For another, the essay itself is pretty bad. (In Bellafante's eyes, Katie Roiphe’s greatest sin up to then was appearing in a Coach ad.) And these arguments always take the same utterly depressing tack: step out of line, make a mistake, enjoy cute babies, feel badly, cry at work, be, in other words, wounded and imperfect, and your failings are judged not just as your own, but as those of the entire sisterhood, q.e.d.

Most shows about women have, perhaps unintentionally, made themselves susceptible to this boring, repetitive debate because they simply cannot stop announcing at every available opportunity that they are Television Shows About Women, Goddamnit. (Let's call them TSAWGs.) Whether you want to blame TSAWG creators or network-driven marketing campaigns is immaterial—the fact is that we are meant to see Ally and Buffy and, even to a certain extent, Peggy as leading archetypal female lives, so when they are weak and/or strong and/or prone to cute outfits, we are invited to see "women" as being the same way. This sets a trap for the critic who, while believing in equality, wants her art to be something other than a position paper, as I can say from experience. For your reviews, you then have to work out how to simultaneously applaud any dramatic interest in women’s lives—it being rare enough to begin with—while registering any reservations you may have that such a pat thing as "women's lives" exists. Look. Of course I’ve known Allys and Buffys and Peggys, but I’ve known a hundred other kinds of women too, not all of them middle class and/or white. (I know!) The idea that we share, as women, necessarily common interiorities—rather than common treatment from the world outside our tiny, skull-sized kingdoms—well, it is, and always has been, to put it politely, utter bunk. Flightiness and envy and shame—male, female, whatever, we all have to deal with those emotions. (Go into any bar and you'll find as much emotional need at a table of male investment bankers as you will at the girls' night out a few feet away; there's not as much distance between "you go, girl" and Hugo-Bossed chest-beating as most would like to think.)

Anyway, my point is this: it's important that neither "Homeland" nor "Enlightened" have arrived at the parade bearing that About Women banner. Their female leads don't have to hold up any feminist or post-feminist placards. (Are we at post-post-feminist, pop-culturally speaking, yet? I keep losing track.) Without that freight, the shows can stumble on to obvious-and-yet-not-obvious insights that TSAWGs have traditionally resisted depicting, and to boot get to do so without having to claim for their (also white and middle class) heroines anything other than their own individuality.

Take, for example, the most egregious mistake the otherwise competent and ambitious CIA agent Carrie has made in this inaugural season of "Homeland": when she crosses the line and sleeps with Brody, the ex-POW target she's investigating. The choice is (at least initially) presented to us as one outside of traditional TSAWG protocol when Our Heroine sleeps with Our (Anti)hero. What Carrie does is heedless and impulsive, to be sure, but her choice to do it isn't about lunar cycles or Women In Love or even, in a gesture favoured by analogous TSAWGs like "Alias" and "Damages," an attempt to avenge some perfect idealized man assassinated in a bathtub at the outset of the series. It simply comes out of nowhere, as much bad-idea sex does. (Or so I've, uh, heard.)

Carrie later tells Brody that she originally slept with him to trick him into confessing that he'd been "turned" as a POW in Iraq. But a more recent admission to her mentor Saul, of her fear that she will always be "alone," suggests a more traditional explanation. Perhaps the answer is both, which would be something quite a bit more like real life, wouldn’t it, than an either/or diagnosis. Admittedly, it's often hard to say, in "Homeland," which ambiguities are intentional. The creators are veterans of "24," not a show that evinced a sophisticated understanding of human psychology and thus it's likely that ulterior motives are here as plot devices rather than as tools to deepen character. Whatever the case, Angela Chase Danes manages to take the chaotic writing and unify Carrie into a difficult, loud, excessively blunt mess of a person. It’s not so much that she makes Carrie sympathetic as she makes her recognizable.

In that sense Amy, as played by Laura Dern, is Carrie's polar opposite, far easier to like in her own cringeworthy way. Admittedly, the topology of Mike White's "Enlightened" is more familiarly TSAWG-ish. Amy's vulnerability stems from what seems like the usual suspects of TSAWG breakdowns: a difficult mother, a miscarriage, the (at least partially) consequent breakdown of a marriage, a workplace affair. The potential for the feminine cliché seemed, as I watched those first few episodes, very high. But then I changed my mind. [In "Enlightened," these problems are not presented to us as "female"—though Amy does occasionally harbor certain ambitions for sisterhood at Abbadonn, the company where she works—but rather as existential. This shift of frame is subtle but important. Amy gets to lay claim to questions about meaning and loss and love in terms that are so abstract as to be universal and yet that don't simply capitulate to the (old/white/male) terms of traditional philosophy.

For those of you not yet watching, such an ethos may make "Enlightened" sound fatally pretentious and vague. And it could be—but it isn't. Somehow White's writing manages to straddle the ridiculous and the touching in utterly unmanipulative ways. Here is the scene I'd use to make my pitch to you to start watching: In the fourth episode, Amy goes on a rafting trip with her ex-husband, one that she clearly hopes will renew the bond they once felt. It ends instead with him getting high and confused and fulfilling every cliché of the deadbeat ex-husband you can imagine. He loves Amy, it's clear, but the situation is nonetheless hopeless. And Amy, well, her reaction is neither to run out and buy tissues nor to declare herself “done with men.” Instead, she just ruminates:

You can try to escape the story of your life but you can’t, it happened, the baby died, the dog died, the heart broke, I knew you when you were young, I know your heart broke, too. I will know you when we are both old and maybe wise, I hope wise. I know you now. Your story. Mine isn’t the one I would have chosen in the beginning but I’ll take it. It is my story. It’s only mine. And it’s not over. There’s time. There is time. There is so much time…

Amy delivers this speech while standing in a rose garden on a wide and sunny day. There is no walk home in the rain, with the strums of a strong woman's ballad playing underneath. Nor some vow of renewal and a triumphant martini with three girlfriends, (as we traveling foursomes of women are wont to enjoy). Shedding these cliches, Amy’s Zenlike rejection of hysterical, cuticle-and-life-destroying anxiety about whether she should marry or settle or have kids or freeze her eggs or opt out or keep working or stop being such a goddamned rare spotted owl—well, for the love of Christ, it’s so downright refreshing, even revolutionary, to see these questions thought about in less all/nothing, either/or, fearmongering terms.

Should this trend catch on, of course, some people inevitably may be disappointed—the producers of reductive and silly magazine covers, for example, who won't be able to wring the same sensationalism from "What Me, Marry?" and "Marry Him!"—but I think we could probably learn to carry on anyway.


Related: Laura Dern Is Our Only Hope For Bringing David Lynch Back


Michelle Dean writes in a lot of places, now. Follow her onTwitter

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2011/12/homeland-and-enlightened-women-on-the-verge-of-nervous-breakthroughs/feed 15 "This fall, nobody’s more in touch with their inner Lisbeth Salander than the women of Brooklyn" http://www.theawl.com/2011/11/this-fall-nobody%e2%80%99s-more-in-touch-with-their-inner-lisbeth-salander-than-the-women-of-brooklyn http://www.theawl.com/2011/11/this-fall-nobody%e2%80%99s-more-in-touch-with-their-inner-lisbeth-salander-than-the-women-of-brooklyn#comments Tue, 01 Nov 2011 09:50:40 +0000 Choire Sicha http://www.theawl.com/2011/11/this-fall-nobody%e2%80%99s-more-in-touch-with-their-inner-lisbeth-salander-than-the-women-of-brooklyn "This fall, nobody’s more in touch with their inner Lisbeth Salander than the women of Brooklyn, terrorized by more than 20 sex attacks in Park Slope, Windsor Terrace and Kensington over the past eight months.... And now, in an appropriately Swedish turn, regular women can channel their outer Lisbeth, too. H&M’s 30-piece Dragon Tattoo line was created by Trish Summerville, the Fincher film’s costume designer, and distills the essence of her character into slightly less S&M-y threads."
—Take back the night, it belongs to H&M. (via)

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]]> "This fall, nobody’s more in touch with their inner Lisbeth Salander than the women of Brooklyn, terrorized by more than 20 sex attacks in Park Slope, Windsor Terrace and Kensington over the past eight months.... And now, in an appropriately Swedish turn, regular women can channel their outer Lisbeth, too. H&M’s 30-piece Dragon Tattoo line was created by Trish Summerville, the Fincher film’s costume designer, and distills the essence of her character into slightly less S&M-y threads."
—Take back the night, it belongs to H&M. (via)

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2011/11/this-fall-nobody%e2%80%99s-more-in-touch-with-their-inner-lisbeth-salander-than-the-women-of-brooklyn/feed 11 Please Welcome Lauren Lauren http://www.theawl.com/2011/08/please-welcome-lauren-lauren http://www.theawl.com/2011/08/please-welcome-lauren-lauren#comments Tue, 09 Aug 2011 10:30:34 +0000 Choire Sicha http://www.theawl.com/2011/08/please-welcome-lauren-lauren That thing we used to laugh about has finally come to pass, with the nuptials of Lauren Bush (the daughter of Neil Bush, who is brother to Jeb and George W.) and David Lauren (son of Ralph Lauren, formerly Ralph Lifshitz): "The bride will take the name "Lauren Bush Lauren."

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]]> That thing we used to laugh about has finally come to pass, with the nuptials of Lauren Bush (the daughter of Neil Bush, who is brother to Jeb and George W.) and David Lauren (son of Ralph Lauren, formerly Ralph Lifshitz): "The bride will take the name "Lauren Bush Lauren."

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2011/08/please-welcome-lauren-lauren/feed 14 In Praise of SlutWalk http://www.theawl.com/2011/07/in-praise-of-slutwalk http://www.theawl.com/2011/07/in-praise-of-slutwalk#comments Wed, 20 Jul 2011 13:42:22 +0000 Choire Sicha http://www.theawl.com/2011/07/in-praise-of-slutwalk Ladies, do we have a problem? We kind of... do. Rebecca Traister weighs in on SlutWalk.
I wanted to love SlutWalks, the viral protest movement that began this spring after a Toronto police officer told a group of college women that if they hoped to escape sexual assault, they should avoid dressing like “sluts.” In angry response, young women (and men) have marched in more than 70 cities around the world, often dressed in bras, halter tops and garter belts.

But at a moment when questions of sex and power, blame and credibility, and gender and justice are so ubiquitous and so urgent, I have mostly felt irritation that stripping down to skivvies and calling ourselves sluts is passing for keen retort.

You're allowed to feel/think however you like about these demonstrations! But the last thing I want from the New York Times magazine is this kind of criticism—the "I support this thing but it makes me uncomfortable and here's why but well I guess it's necessary except, eesh" thing. And also? Are there really marches composed of mainly women, often dressed in underwear?

And... so what if they were? Traister's real concern is this:

To object to these ugly characterizations is right and righteous. But to do so while dressed in what look like sexy stewardess Halloween costumes seems less like victory than capitulation (linguistic and sartorial) to what society already expects of its young women. Scantily clad marching seems weirdly blind to the race, class and body-image issues that usually (rightly) obsess young feminists and seems inhospitable to scads of women who, for various reasons, might not feel it logical or comfortable to express their revulsion at victim-blaming by donning bustiers. So while the mission of SlutWalks is crucial, the package is confusing and leaves young feminists open to the very kinds of attacks they are battling.
Wait, but yes? Because the point is... people treat people who "look like sluts" badly! The point is to confront hostility at difference, not to use this occasion to enforce hostility at difference.

Anyway! This lady showed up in Seattle in tassels and a graduation cap! Some people wore some pretty crazy things!

And then...


Slutwalk Seattle

Slutwalk Manchester.

Slutwalk London


Slutwalk Ottawa

But I'd say this photo, by David Jackmanson, taken in Australia, is plenty rebuttal to those cringing.

Just a couple more things?

The web headline "Clumsy Young Feminists" is... really not working for me. And then?

[Lara] Logan was herself trashed as an attention monger and for dressing in a manner that invited assault. A young woman who pressed rape charges against two New York City police officers could not be believed, in part, because she was drunk. When an 11-year-old Texas girl was allegedly gang-raped by 19 men, The New York Times ran a story quoting neighbors saying that she habitually wore makeup and dressed in clothes more appropriate for a 20-year-old. The maid who accused Dominique Strauss-Kahn of rape has been discredited for being a liar, and The New York Post claimed she was a prostitute. The young French woman who is pressing charges of attempted rape against Strauss-Kahn — an event she has recounted in a novel — has been painted as an unreliable narrator, young, overdramatic and unstable.

None of us can know the veracity of any of these women’s claims.

I'm pretty sure we have videotape of the Lara Logan assault? And I'm pretty sure we don't want to get into the "veracity" of the 11-year-old's claim? But in case you really do, it's recorded on a cell phone video.

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]]> Ladies, do we have a problem? We kind of... do. Rebecca Traister weighs in on SlutWalk.
I wanted to love SlutWalks, the viral protest movement that began this spring after a Toronto police officer told a group of college women that if they hoped to escape sexual assault, they should avoid dressing like “sluts.” In angry response, young women (and men) have marched in more than 70 cities around the world, often dressed in bras, halter tops and garter belts.

But at a moment when questions of sex and power, blame and credibility, and gender and justice are so ubiquitous and so urgent, I have mostly felt irritation that stripping down to skivvies and calling ourselves sluts is passing for keen retort.

You're allowed to feel/think however you like about these demonstrations! But the last thing I want from the New York Times magazine is this kind of criticism—the "I support this thing but it makes me uncomfortable and here's why but well I guess it's necessary except, eesh" thing. And also? Are there really marches composed of mainly women, often dressed in underwear?

And... so what if they were? Traister's real concern is this:

To object to these ugly characterizations is right and righteous. But to do so while dressed in what look like sexy stewardess Halloween costumes seems less like victory than capitulation (linguistic and sartorial) to what society already expects of its young women. Scantily clad marching seems weirdly blind to the race, class and body-image issues that usually (rightly) obsess young feminists and seems inhospitable to scads of women who, for various reasons, might not feel it logical or comfortable to express their revulsion at victim-blaming by donning bustiers. So while the mission of SlutWalks is crucial, the package is confusing and leaves young feminists open to the very kinds of attacks they are battling.
Wait, but yes? Because the point is... people treat people who "look like sluts" badly! The point is to confront hostility at difference, not to use this occasion to enforce hostility at difference.

Anyway! This lady showed up in Seattle in tassels and a graduation cap! Some people wore some pretty crazy things!

And then...


Slutwalk Seattle

Slutwalk Manchester.

Slutwalk London


Slutwalk Ottawa

But I'd say this photo, by David Jackmanson, taken in Australia, is plenty rebuttal to those cringing.

Just a couple more things?

The web headline "Clumsy Young Feminists" is... really not working for me. And then?

[Lara] Logan was herself trashed as an attention monger and for dressing in a manner that invited assault. A young woman who pressed rape charges against two New York City police officers could not be believed, in part, because she was drunk. When an 11-year-old Texas girl was allegedly gang-raped by 19 men, The New York Times ran a story quoting neighbors saying that she habitually wore makeup and dressed in clothes more appropriate for a 20-year-old. The maid who accused Dominique Strauss-Kahn of rape has been discredited for being a liar, and The New York Post claimed she was a prostitute. The young French woman who is pressing charges of attempted rape against Strauss-Kahn — an event she has recounted in a novel — has been painted as an unreliable narrator, young, overdramatic and unstable.

None of us can know the veracity of any of these women’s claims.

I'm pretty sure we have videotape of the Lara Logan assault? And I'm pretty sure we don't want to get into the "veracity" of the 11-year-old's claim? But in case you really do, it's recorded on a cell phone video.

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2011/07/in-praise-of-slutwalk/feed 58 Film Reviews as Advocacy: the 'Times' on 'Bad Teacher' http://www.theawl.com/2011/06/film-reviews-as-advocacy-the-times-on-bad-teacher http://www.theawl.com/2011/06/film-reviews-as-advocacy-the-times-on-bad-teacher#comments Fri, 24 Jun 2011 10:40:06 +0000 Choire Sicha http://www.theawl.com/2011/06/film-reviews-as-advocacy-the-times-on-bad-teacher "The story spends the requisite time on Elizabeth’s man-baiting and chomping ways, but it’s her relations with these women that help make Bad Teacher into something more than the latest in big-screen giggles and flatulence.... A funny woman with too many unfunny movies on her résumé, Ms. Diaz was born too late for the kind of rich Hollywood career she deserves.... It’s painful, though, watching her slum through What Happens in Vegas, playing off an unworthy foil like Ashton Kutcher, another reason it’s a relief to see her surrounded by the talent packed into Bad Teacher.
—This Manohla Dargis review is a great case of criticism as advocacy journalism! It might as well be addressed to "Dear Hollywood." This is a good thing! Also I am going to see the holy heck out of this movie.

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]]> "The story spends the requisite time on Elizabeth’s man-baiting and chomping ways, but it’s her relations with these women that help make Bad Teacher into something more than the latest in big-screen giggles and flatulence.... A funny woman with too many unfunny movies on her résumé, Ms. Diaz was born too late for the kind of rich Hollywood career she deserves.... It’s painful, though, watching her slum through What Happens in Vegas, playing off an unworthy foil like Ashton Kutcher, another reason it’s a relief to see her surrounded by the talent packed into Bad Teacher.
—This Manohla Dargis review is a great case of criticism as advocacy journalism! It might as well be addressed to "Dear Hollywood." This is a good thing! Also I am going to see the holy heck out of this movie.

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2011/06/film-reviews-as-advocacy-the-times-on-bad-teacher/feed 23 The New Decemberists Album: It Contains 100% Less Raping http://www.theawl.com/2011/03/somehow-theres-absolutely-no-raping-on-the-decemberists-new-album http://www.theawl.com/2011/03/somehow-theres-absolutely-no-raping-on-the-decemberists-new-album#comments Thu, 03 Mar 2011 13:00:10 +0000 L.V. Anderson http://www.theawl.com/2011/03/somehow-theres-absolutely-no-raping-on-the-decemberists-new-album The Decemberists' new album, The King Is Dead, takes the band in a new direction: tamer, more pastoral lyrics and a pared-down, bluegrass-tinged sensibility (with guest vocals from the always-excellent Gillian Welch). Critics have taken note, and the reviews have been mostly positive—people seem relieved by the band's turn away from the melodramatic subject matter and overwrought musical stylings that have characterized their last couple albums. But the most notable difference from the band’s older music—and one I've yet to see a critic mention—is that there's not a single rape or abduction to be found on the entire album.

I started listening to The Decemberists eight years ago, when my sister, C., came home from college one winter break with their first two full-length albums, Castaways and Cutouts and Her Majesty The Decemberists in her car stereo. C. felt partially responsible for my musical education, and she played the albums for me over and over for weeks as we drove around our mid-Atlantic suburb.

There were some things I liked a lot about The Decemberists. Their lyrics were literary, cosmopolitan and full of big words, all of which appealed to my inner aspiring snob. They had a song called "Odalisque"! And another called "Song to Myla Goldberg"! I didn't know what an odalisque was, or a Myla Goldberg, but I wanted to be the kind of person who knew these things. They had a way with driving chord progressions, unconventional instrumentations (accordion, organ, glockenspiel) and unexpected harmonies that were fun to try to sing along to. Their one strummy love song, "Red Right Ankle," seemed to speak directly to my lonely, stupid, young heart and the type of passionate affairs it hoped someday to have. But there were also things I wasn't so sure about.

For one thing, their lead singer, Colin Meloy, sounded like a British goat. No, wait; that's not quite right, and I want to get this right: Think of Morrissey's morose drone, and combine that with the nasal mewl of Blink-182's two lead singers. And NOW imagine that sound coming from a goat. Voilà!

The main thing that weirded me out about The Decemberists, however, was not Colin Meloy's voice but the fact that his lyrics could be dark. And not dark in an Elliott Smith or Fiona Apple way—the way a solipsistic, depressive teen could curl up in bed and sob about the UNFAIRNESS of it all while listening to—but frighteningly dark. There was one song in particular I couldn't bear to listen to: "A Cautionary Song" on Castaways and Cutouts, a three-minute sea shanty about a single mother who prostitutes herself to a gang of hostile sailors in order to make enough money to feed her young children.

"I hate this song," I whined to C. as we drove to the mall to exchange sweaters our parents had given us for Christmas. (She wouldn't let me skip the track—driver outranks shotgun when it comes to music privileges, obviously.)

"It's supposed to be ironic," she said, rolling her eyes at me.

She was right: It was supposed to be ironic. In fact, irony was the entire point. The Decemberists' juxtaposition of old-fashioned language with disturbing themes is what has endeared them to so many listeners since their formation in 2000. They've enjoyed critical and increasing popular success over the years, to the extent that The King Is Dead debuted at the top of the Billboard Top 200 in January. (A recent New Yorker Talk of the Town story depicts the band as deliberately nonchalant in learning the news of their album's success.)

You can count me among the many fans who have turned The Decemberists from an anonymous prog-rock group from Portland into something close to a household name. Not wanting to be insufficiently appreciative of irony, I pushed past my initial squeamishness that winter break and soon came to genuinely love The Decemberists. I bought every one of their subsequent albums. I listened to their uptempo songs as I went running in the morning and their downtempo songs as I drifted off to sleep at night. I talked about them with boys I had crushes on and saw our mutual interest in the band as a sign of how RIGHT we were for each other.

I got so close to The Decemberists' music that I stopped even noticing the violent misogyny that had initially given me pause. But that misogyny wasn't an isolated incident; on the contrary, it's a major theme of the band's work. During the eight years since Castaways and Cutouts came out, The Decemberists have repeatedly abducted, raped and killed women, and their well-educated, liberal fans and critics have lapped it up.

Let's take a closer look at "A Cautionary Song," which, though only three minutes and nine seconds in length, feels like it will never end when you are listening to it. The song is, on the surface, a grotesque children's story: an exaggerated version of what you might tell a particularly bratty kid if you wanted to scare the shit out of him. It begins with a sing-songy taunt—"There's a place your mother goes when everybody else is soundly sleeping"—and then goes on to describe the indignities your mother is subjected to. Here's a sampling of lyrics, written (as are all The Decemberists' songs) by Colin Meloy:

With dirty hands and trousers torn they grapple 'til she's safe within their keeping.
A gag is placed between her lips to keep her sorry tongue from any speaking, or screaming,
And they row her out to packets where the sailors' sorry racket calls for maidenhead.
And she's scarce above the gunwales when her clothes fall to a bundle and she's laid in bed on the upper deck.

I see the irony now—but it's not a particularly profound irony. The song's tone is certainly sardonic enough, and the combination of old-fashioned poetics with a violent subject matter is joltingly incongruous. But beneath Meloy's dense, wry language, "A Cautionary Song" is little more than a three-minute yo-mama joke, with the extra thump of an unexpected punch line: "So be kind to your mother, though she may seem an awful bother, and the next time she tries to feed you collard greens, remember what she does when you're asleep." (Ba-dum-bum!)

This punch line is actually kind of funny, if you have a dark sense of humor. But somehow… not really funny enough to warrant setting a poem about a systematic gang rape to jaunty accordion music. To me, anyway.

And Colin Meloy claims to understand that. He declined via a publicist to be interviewed for this article, but he spoke about his use of rape imagery in a 2006 interview for Venus Zine with Ann Friedman, Feministing.com blogger (and Awl contributor). When Friedman asked whether he considered how his lyrics come across to female listeners, Meloy responded, "These are touchy subjects. … It’s something I consider very strongly as a songwriter. There’s a lot of touchy subjects we deal with—not only rape and violence, but racism, anti-Semitism. I know it’s so loaded, being a male and singing about these things. I don’t do it aloofly, but there’s a reason why I’m pushed to write about these sorts of things. The tone of these songs is supposed to be really dark."

He then added: "When you’re writing in the voice of a character, it doesn’t seem genuine to rope yourself off. … In some sense, not only am I trying to adopt an appropriately dark tone, but also staying true to the genre."

Yet the record belies Meloy's claims of addressing the subject with "an appropriately dark tone." If you have a few minutes, watch this clip of Meloy performing "A Cautionary Song" in Portland in 2008:

When he gets to the "sailor's sorry racket calls for maidenhead" part (about 0:55), he cocks his hand behind his ear and leans expectantly towards the crowd. They whoop, laugh and applaud.

"Will somebody just yell 'maidenhead'?" he asks the crowd, laughing.

"MAIDENHEAD!" they dutifully roar.

Can we imagine, for a moment, what this song would be like if Meloy hadn't couched it in elaborate language and a pseudo-historical setting? Suppose "A Cautionary Song" were set in a modern-day housing project or a trailer park instead of a 19th-century port city; suppose Meloy asked the crowd to yell "PUSSY!" instead of "MAIDENHEAD!" Do you think The Decemberists would be able to get a crowd of pretentious white indie kids in Portland to cheer and clap for that song?

I doubt it (although, who knows? kids these days, etc.), and so does Meloy. In a 2003 interview, Meloy said of his rape-themed songs, "I think when you put them in the context of something in the 19th century, you're still addressing it, but it takes on a different feel. There's a whole different world that it's creating." Meloy seems to acknowledge that the joke of "A Cautionary Song" wouldn't work with modern-day language and modern-day characters, even if the brutality and punch line stayed the same. If you took away the anachronism and the quaint language, there wouldn't be much left except for—well, rape.

I am sorry to report that your mother is not the only victim of misogyny in The Decemberists' libretto. In the band's first five albums, several female characters meet unfortunate fates, including (in chronological order):

  • dying in childbirth and then haunting a catacomb for the next fifteen years along with the premature infant's ghost ("Leslie Anne Levine," Castaways and Cutouts)
  • being enslaved, raped, and beaten, and possibly dismembered, depending on how you read the lyrics ("Odalisque," Castaways and Cutouts)
  • being beaten and raped in the middle of nowhere following a miscarriage ("The Bachelor and the Bride," Her Majesty The Decemberists)
  • being coerced into sex by a man of means and then, after his disapproving parents find out, being coerced into a suicide pact with him ("We Both Go Down Together," Picaresque)
  • being seduced by a rake with a gambling problem, being saddled with his debts after he leaves, and dying of consumption ("The Mariner's Revenge Song," Picaresque)
  • being abducted on the beach at pistol- and saber-point, and then being raped and killed ("The Island," The Crane Wife)
  • being kidnapped, tortured, and—wait for it—raped by a sociopathic child-killer ("Margaret in Captivity," Hazards of Love)



There are a lot of "being"s in that list, because women in Decemberists ballads rarely play an active role in their own stories. They're usually tabulae rasae; we get no sense of their personal experience or their individuality. They often show up out of nowhere for the express purpose of dying in order to advance the plot of the song. Not one of these stories is told from the woman's point of view; many of them are sung from the point of view of the woman's rapist or murderer. ("Leslie Anne Levine" is sung from the point of view of the premature infant's ghost.) (Really.)

It's not that terrible things don't also happen to men in Decemberists songs; to the contrary, the shit hits the fan for many of Meloy's male characters, too: wretched chimney sweeps, suicidal coal salesmen, sailors who get swallowed by whales, dead Confederate soldiers. (Meloy's big on the undead.) The difference is that the men in Decemberists songs are usually accorded first-person perspectives, feelings, motivations, internal lives—the whole real-person treatment. Meloy's men are victims, yes, but they're not just victims. They do things rather than simply having things done to them.

To his credit, Meloy doesn't judge his ill-fated female characters. There's never a sense that they have it coming to them or that they deserve their gruesome fates. (But, really, isn't not being judged by her creator the least a character can ask when she's being raped, beaten or drowned?) But that's because he doesn't judge any of his characters. Meloy is maddeningly detached from the narratives he spins and the characters he creates, but he doesn't use his distance from his characters to say anything about them or their actions. His sadistic psychos just are sadistic psychos. His damsels in distress just are damsels in distress. Meloy isn't saying anything about rape—he's just saying "rape."

The problem is that Meloy seems to think that his use of misogynistic themes is artistically and even morally justified. When asked about his interest in rape, kidnapping and murder in a 2009 AV Club interview, Meloy said:

I do think I have a particular interest in those tragedies for some reason. But I also felt vindicated and not so much like a sicko when I dug into a lot of the bigwigs of the British folk revival. People like Anne Briggs and Nic Jones and Sandy Denny and June Tabor, Maddy Prior. When you dig into their material, you see that there’s kind of a common fascination—a lot of the folk revivalists in England particularly are really into the darker material. And oddly enough, I think there’s something to be said to a lot of the women singers who are focused on the darker-bodied material. A lot of scary misogyny was present in a lot of early folk songs. And I think there’s an empowering sense, this idea of revisiting these songs in a contemporary context is a way of not only highlighting what it was to be a woman in the 16th, 17th century, but also how those sorts of scary, violent events were omnipresent in these folksongs as well.

So Meloy seems to have two main justifications for singing about raping and killing women, as far as I can tell:

  • Women folk revivalists sang about rape as a way of empowering themselves, which makes it okay for The Decemberists to do it for the sake of "staying true to the genre."
  • Singing about violence against women reminds people how shitty life was for women before the mid-20th century.



Okay, first thing: Whom exactly is Meloy empowering by singing about rape and murder? I feel like this should go without saying, but empowerment via reclamation of historically hurtful themes isn’t really a transitive thing. Could female British folk-revival singers empower themselves by singing about rape? Sure! Can Colin Meloy empower women by singing about rape? No! Well, he can try, but it'll go over about as well as if I tried to empower African-Americans by tossing around the n-word.

What's more, there's a difference between singing old misogynistic folk songs for the sake of historical remembrance and writing original misogynistic folk songs. The British folk revival "bigwigs" that Meloy mentioned in his AV Club interview don't seem to have sung very many songs about rape, but that ones that they did sing—like Anne Briggs's "Young Tambling" and Maddy Prior's "Lass of Loch Royal"—were English and Scottish ballads that have been sung for centuries. To an extent, folk music is about preserving cultural traditions and historical texts, which is what Briggs and Prior did in recording these songs. Meloy's songs are pseudo-historical, faux folk songs: original compositions that imitate the themes and subject matters of old ballads without any additional reflection on these themes.

Not to beat the sexism/racism equivalence into the ground, but Meloy's argument that his use of misogynistic imagery is a way of "highlighting what it was to be a woman in the 16th, 17th century" holds up about as well as the claim that it wouldn't be offensive for a white artist to write a brand-new minstrel show and perform it in blackface, because it reminds people how blatantly racist white Americans used to be. Reproducing old forms of oppression without commentary doesn't challenge those forms of oppression; it perpetuates them. Writing original songs about violence against women for the sake of "staying true to the genre" of folk music isn't brave or interesting; it's gratuitous.

Gratuitous misogyny is nothing new in pop culture, or even in pop music—please see the many books and academic articles that have been written on the subject of misogyny in hip-hop culture. The Decemberists' use of misogynistic images isn't any worse than that of Ludacris or Dr. Dre, but it isn't any better, either. So why has Meloy been largely spared the same hand-wringing and moralizing that have dogged hip-hop for literally decades?¹ Oh, right: He's white; he has a bachelor's degree in creative writing; he employs an expansive vocabulary and has a penchant for historicism and literary devices. The Decemberists' music is hyper-literary, guys. It's prog rock, so.

I should make it clear that I don't think Colin Meloy is a misogynist. He may well be quite the opposite. But his justifications for telling stories about violence against women disregard the fact that his music functions primarily as entertainment. Regardless of Meloy's artistic intentions, The Decemberists' music creates a space where people who are normally constrained by political correctness—well-educated, politically liberal, upper-middle-class, mostly white people—can enjoy uncomplicated misogynistic fantasies. The Decemberists capitalize on people's unspoken chauvinism, their inner animalism, and they send the message that it's unproblematic—even empowering!—to enjoy misogyny, so long as you couch it in florid language and pseudo-historical settings.

And as long as you don't really mean it. In that 2006 Venus Zine interview, Meloy said, "I’m not a misogynist. I’m not a rapist. I’m not an anti-Semite. People should be able to see there’s a sense of irony there."

Funny thing about irony: It works best, I find, when there's a message behind it. It's hard to say the opposite of what you mean when you don't mean anything at all.



¹ The one exception seems to be Conservapedia ("The Trustworthy Encyclopedia"), which describes The Decemberists as an "immoral, liberal, Indie-rock band from Portland, Oregon. … known for glorifying rape, suicide …, and various other sinful acts in their music."



L.V. Anderson lives in Brooklyn.

Concert photos of Meloy by Oslo In The Summertime.

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]]> The Decemberists' new album, The King Is Dead, takes the band in a new direction: tamer, more pastoral lyrics and a pared-down, bluegrass-tinged sensibility (with guest vocals from the always-excellent Gillian Welch). Critics have taken note, and the reviews have been mostly positive—people seem relieved by the band's turn away from the melodramatic subject matter and overwrought musical stylings that have characterized their last couple albums. But the most notable difference from the band’s older music—and one I've yet to see a critic mention—is that there's not a single rape or abduction to be found on the entire album.

I started listening to The Decemberists eight years ago, when my sister, C., came home from college one winter break with their first two full-length albums, Castaways and Cutouts and Her Majesty The Decemberists in her car stereo. C. felt partially responsible for my musical education, and she played the albums for me over and over for weeks as we drove around our mid-Atlantic suburb.

There were some things I liked a lot about The Decemberists. Their lyrics were literary, cosmopolitan and full of big words, all of which appealed to my inner aspiring snob. They had a song called "Odalisque"! And another called "Song to Myla Goldberg"! I didn't know what an odalisque was, or a Myla Goldberg, but I wanted to be the kind of person who knew these things. They had a way with driving chord progressions, unconventional instrumentations (accordion, organ, glockenspiel) and unexpected harmonies that were fun to try to sing along to. Their one strummy love song, "Red Right Ankle," seemed to speak directly to my lonely, stupid, young heart and the type of passionate affairs it hoped someday to have. But there were also things I wasn't so sure about.

For one thing, their lead singer, Colin Meloy, sounded like a British goat. No, wait; that's not quite right, and I want to get this right: Think of Morrissey's morose drone, and combine that with the nasal mewl of Blink-182's two lead singers. And NOW imagine that sound coming from a goat. Voilà!

The main thing that weirded me out about The Decemberists, however, was not Colin Meloy's voice but the fact that his lyrics could be dark. And not dark in an Elliott Smith or Fiona Apple way—the way a solipsistic, depressive teen could curl up in bed and sob about the UNFAIRNESS of it all while listening to—but frighteningly dark. There was one song in particular I couldn't bear to listen to: "A Cautionary Song" on Castaways and Cutouts, a three-minute sea shanty about a single mother who prostitutes herself to a gang of hostile sailors in order to make enough money to feed her young children.

"I hate this song," I whined to C. as we drove to the mall to exchange sweaters our parents had given us for Christmas. (She wouldn't let me skip the track—driver outranks shotgun when it comes to music privileges, obviously.)

"It's supposed to be ironic," she said, rolling her eyes at me.

She was right: It was supposed to be ironic. In fact, irony was the entire point. The Decemberists' juxtaposition of old-fashioned language with disturbing themes is what has endeared them to so many listeners since their formation in 2000. They've enjoyed critical and increasing popular success over the years, to the extent that The King Is Dead debuted at the top of the Billboard Top 200 in January. (A recent New Yorker Talk of the Town story depicts the band as deliberately nonchalant in learning the news of their album's success.)

You can count me among the many fans who have turned The Decemberists from an anonymous prog-rock group from Portland into something close to a household name. Not wanting to be insufficiently appreciative of irony, I pushed past my initial squeamishness that winter break and soon came to genuinely love The Decemberists. I bought every one of their subsequent albums. I listened to their uptempo songs as I went running in the morning and their downtempo songs as I drifted off to sleep at night. I talked about them with boys I had crushes on and saw our mutual interest in the band as a sign of how RIGHT we were for each other.

I got so close to The Decemberists' music that I stopped even noticing the violent misogyny that had initially given me pause. But that misogyny wasn't an isolated incident; on the contrary, it's a major theme of the band's work. During the eight years since Castaways and Cutouts came out, The Decemberists have repeatedly abducted, raped and killed women, and their well-educated, liberal fans and critics have lapped it up.

Let's take a closer look at "A Cautionary Song," which, though only three minutes and nine seconds in length, feels like it will never end when you are listening to it. The song is, on the surface, a grotesque children's story: an exaggerated version of what you might tell a particularly bratty kid if you wanted to scare the shit out of him. It begins with a sing-songy taunt—"There's a place your mother goes when everybody else is soundly sleeping"—and then goes on to describe the indignities your mother is subjected to. Here's a sampling of lyrics, written (as are all The Decemberists' songs) by Colin Meloy:

With dirty hands and trousers torn they grapple 'til she's safe within their keeping.
A gag is placed between her lips to keep her sorry tongue from any speaking, or screaming,
And they row her out to packets where the sailors' sorry racket calls for maidenhead.
And she's scarce above the gunwales when her clothes fall to a bundle and she's laid in bed on the upper deck.

I see the irony now—but it's not a particularly profound irony. The song's tone is certainly sardonic enough, and the combination of old-fashioned poetics with a violent subject matter is joltingly incongruous. But beneath Meloy's dense, wry language, "A Cautionary Song" is little more than a three-minute yo-mama joke, with the extra thump of an unexpected punch line: "So be kind to your mother, though she may seem an awful bother, and the next time she tries to feed you collard greens, remember what she does when you're asleep." (Ba-dum-bum!)

This punch line is actually kind of funny, if you have a dark sense of humor. But somehow… not really funny enough to warrant setting a poem about a systematic gang rape to jaunty accordion music. To me, anyway.

And Colin Meloy claims to understand that. He declined via a publicist to be interviewed for this article, but he spoke about his use of rape imagery in a 2006 interview for Venus Zine with Ann Friedman, Feministing.com blogger (and Awl contributor). When Friedman asked whether he considered how his lyrics come across to female listeners, Meloy responded, "These are touchy subjects. … It’s something I consider very strongly as a songwriter. There’s a lot of touchy subjects we deal with—not only rape and violence, but racism, anti-Semitism. I know it’s so loaded, being a male and singing about these things. I don’t do it aloofly, but there’s a reason why I’m pushed to write about these sorts of things. The tone of these songs is supposed to be really dark."

He then added: "When you’re writing in the voice of a character, it doesn’t seem genuine to rope yourself off. … In some sense, not only am I trying to adopt an appropriately dark tone, but also staying true to the genre."

Yet the record belies Meloy's claims of addressing the subject with "an appropriately dark tone." If you have a few minutes, watch this clip of Meloy performing "A Cautionary Song" in Portland in 2008:

When he gets to the "sailor's sorry racket calls for maidenhead" part (about 0:55), he cocks his hand behind his ear and leans expectantly towards the crowd. They whoop, laugh and applaud.

"Will somebody just yell 'maidenhead'?" he asks the crowd, laughing.

"MAIDENHEAD!" they dutifully roar.

Can we imagine, for a moment, what this song would be like if Meloy hadn't couched it in elaborate language and a pseudo-historical setting? Suppose "A Cautionary Song" were set in a modern-day housing project or a trailer park instead of a 19th-century port city; suppose Meloy asked the crowd to yell "PUSSY!" instead of "MAIDENHEAD!" Do you think The Decemberists would be able to get a crowd of pretentious white indie kids in Portland to cheer and clap for that song?

I doubt it (although, who knows? kids these days, etc.), and so does Meloy. In a 2003 interview, Meloy said of his rape-themed songs, "I think when you put them in the context of something in the 19th century, you're still addressing it, but it takes on a different feel. There's a whole different world that it's creating." Meloy seems to acknowledge that the joke of "A Cautionary Song" wouldn't work with modern-day language and modern-day characters, even if the brutality and punch line stayed the same. If you took away the anachronism and the quaint language, there wouldn't be much left except for—well, rape.

I am sorry to report that your mother is not the only victim of misogyny in The Decemberists' libretto. In the band's first five albums, several female characters meet unfortunate fates, including (in chronological order):

  • dying in childbirth and then haunting a catacomb for the next fifteen years along with the premature infant's ghost ("Leslie Anne Levine," Castaways and Cutouts)
  • being enslaved, raped, and beaten, and possibly dismembered, depending on how you read the lyrics ("Odalisque," Castaways and Cutouts)
  • being beaten and raped in the middle of nowhere following a miscarriage ("The Bachelor and the Bride," Her Majesty The Decemberists)
  • being coerced into sex by a man of means and then, after his disapproving parents find out, being coerced into a suicide pact with him ("We Both Go Down Together," Picaresque)
  • being seduced by a rake with a gambling problem, being saddled with his debts after he leaves, and dying of consumption ("The Mariner's Revenge Song," Picaresque)
  • being abducted on the beach at pistol- and saber-point, and then being raped and killed ("The Island," The Crane Wife)
  • being kidnapped, tortured, and—wait for it—raped by a sociopathic child-killer ("Margaret in Captivity," Hazards of Love)



There are a lot of "being"s in that list, because women in Decemberists ballads rarely play an active role in their own stories. They're usually tabulae rasae; we get no sense of their personal experience or their individuality. They often show up out of nowhere for the express purpose of dying in order to advance the plot of the song. Not one of these stories is told from the woman's point of view; many of them are sung from the point of view of the woman's rapist or murderer. ("Leslie Anne Levine" is sung from the point of view of the premature infant's ghost.) (Really.)

It's not that terrible things don't also happen to men in Decemberists songs; to the contrary, the shit hits the fan for many of Meloy's male characters, too: wretched chimney sweeps, suicidal coal salesmen, sailors who get swallowed by whales, dead Confederate soldiers. (Meloy's big on the undead.) The difference is that the men in Decemberists songs are usually accorded first-person perspectives, feelings, motivations, internal lives—the whole real-person treatment. Meloy's men are victims, yes, but they're not just victims. They do things rather than simply having things done to them.

To his credit, Meloy doesn't judge his ill-fated female characters. There's never a sense that they have it coming to them or that they deserve their gruesome fates. (But, really, isn't not being judged by her creator the least a character can ask when she's being raped, beaten or drowned?) But that's because he doesn't judge any of his characters. Meloy is maddeningly detached from the narratives he spins and the characters he creates, but he doesn't use his distance from his characters to say anything about them or their actions. His sadistic psychos just are sadistic psychos. His damsels in distress just are damsels in distress. Meloy isn't saying anything about rape—he's just saying "rape."

The problem is that Meloy seems to think that his use of misogynistic themes is artistically and even morally justified. When asked about his interest in rape, kidnapping and murder in a 2009 AV Club interview, Meloy said:

I do think I have a particular interest in those tragedies for some reason. But I also felt vindicated and not so much like a sicko when I dug into a lot of the bigwigs of the British folk revival. People like Anne Briggs and Nic Jones and Sandy Denny and June Tabor, Maddy Prior. When you dig into their material, you see that there’s kind of a common fascination—a lot of the folk revivalists in England particularly are really into the darker material. And oddly enough, I think there’s something to be said to a lot of the women singers who are focused on the darker-bodied material. A lot of scary misogyny was present in a lot of early folk songs. And I think there’s an empowering sense, this idea of revisiting these songs in a contemporary context is a way of not only highlighting what it was to be a woman in the 16th, 17th century, but also how those sorts of scary, violent events were omnipresent in these folksongs as well.

So Meloy seems to have two main justifications for singing about raping and killing women, as far as I can tell:

  • Women folk revivalists sang about rape as a way of empowering themselves, which makes it okay for The Decemberists to do it for the sake of "staying true to the genre."
  • Singing about violence against women reminds people how shitty life was for women before the mid-20th century.



Okay, first thing: Whom exactly is Meloy empowering by singing about rape and murder? I feel like this should go without saying, but empowerment via reclamation of historically hurtful themes isn’t really a transitive thing. Could female British folk-revival singers empower themselves by singing about rape? Sure! Can Colin Meloy empower women by singing about rape? No! Well, he can try, but it'll go over about as well as if I tried to empower African-Americans by tossing around the n-word.

What's more, there's a difference between singing old misogynistic folk songs for the sake of historical remembrance and writing original misogynistic folk songs. The British folk revival "bigwigs" that Meloy mentioned in his AV Club interview don't seem to have sung very many songs about rape, but that ones that they did sing—like Anne Briggs's "Young Tambling" and Maddy Prior's "Lass of Loch Royal"—were English and Scottish ballads that have been sung for centuries. To an extent, folk music is about preserving cultural traditions and historical texts, which is what Briggs and Prior did in recording these songs. Meloy's songs are pseudo-historical, faux folk songs: original compositions that imitate the themes and subject matters of old ballads without any additional reflection on these themes.

Not to beat the sexism/racism equivalence into the ground, but Meloy's argument that his use of misogynistic imagery is a way of "highlighting what it was to be a woman in the 16th, 17th century" holds up about as well as the claim that it wouldn't be offensive for a white artist to write a brand-new minstrel show and perform it in blackface, because it reminds people how blatantly racist white Americans used to be. Reproducing old forms of oppression without commentary doesn't challenge those forms of oppression; it perpetuates them. Writing original songs about violence against women for the sake of "staying true to the genre" of folk music isn't brave or interesting; it's gratuitous.

Gratuitous misogyny is nothing new in pop culture, or even in pop music—please see the many books and academic articles that have been written on the subject of misogyny in hip-hop culture. The Decemberists' use of misogynistic images isn't any worse than that of Ludacris or Dr. Dre, but it isn't any better, either. So why has Meloy been largely spared the same hand-wringing and moralizing that have dogged hip-hop for literally decades?¹ Oh, right: He's white; he has a bachelor's degree in creative writing; he employs an expansive vocabulary and has a penchant for historicism and literary devices. The Decemberists' music is hyper-literary, guys. It's prog rock, so.

I should make it clear that I don't think Colin Meloy is a misogynist. He may well be quite the opposite. But his justifications for telling stories about violence against women disregard the fact that his music functions primarily as entertainment. Regardless of Meloy's artistic intentions, The Decemberists' music creates a space where people who are normally constrained by political correctness—well-educated, politically liberal, upper-middle-class, mostly white people—can enjoy uncomplicated misogynistic fantasies. The Decemberists capitalize on people's unspoken chauvinism, their inner animalism, and they send the message that it's unproblematic—even empowering!—to enjoy misogyny, so long as you couch it in florid language and pseudo-historical settings.

And as long as you don't really mean it. In that 2006 Venus Zine interview, Meloy said, "I’m not a misogynist. I’m not a rapist. I’m not an anti-Semite. People should be able to see there’s a sense of irony there."

Funny thing about irony: It works best, I find, when there's a message behind it. It's hard to say the opposite of what you mean when you don't mean anything at all.



¹ The one exception seems to be Conservapedia ("The Trustworthy Encyclopedia"), which describes The Decemberists as an "immoral, liberal, Indie-rock band from Portland, Oregon. … known for glorifying rape, suicide …, and various other sinful acts in their music."



L.V. Anderson lives in Brooklyn.

Concert photos of Meloy by Oslo In The Summertime.

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2011/03/somehow-theres-absolutely-no-raping-on-the-decemberists-new-album/feed 39 The Fantasy of Girl World: Lady Nerds and Utopias http://www.theawl.com/2010/10/the-fantasy-of-girl-world-lady-nerds-and-utopias http://www.theawl.com/2010/10/the-fantasy-of-girl-world-lady-nerds-and-utopias#comments Mon, 25 Oct 2010 13:30:45 +0000 Sady Doyle http://www.theawl.com/2010/10/the-fantasy-of-girl-world-lady-nerds-and-utopias
Here's a story for you. It's an old story, and it goes like this: There's a place where we're in charge. You've never seen it. You can't visit. It doesn't exist—it's in the future, or it's in the past, or it's just sideways, outside our borders, somewhere no one has been. But us, the girls, we run everything there. There aren't any men. Or: There were men, but we kicked them out. Or even: There are men, but they answer to us. This place is always threatened. This place is always on the verge of being invaded. This place is always just about to change. By the end of the story, the world of men will have reached us, and things will be different. But right now, here, at the beginning, there's just us.

It's not news that sci-fi and fantasy are about wish fulfillment. Nerd-dom—which we'll define, generously but maybe not widely enough, as the ability to escape into one's own obsessive interests, to claim realms of expertise and map them with care and detail and a certain degree of detachment from the reality that no one else cares as much as you do and everyone would like you to care a little bit less—has long been one of the culture's most valuable escape hatches for the brainy, the young and the frustrated. Speculative fiction is aimed at nerds, and nerds want to find a place they belong. On the Enterprise, no one cares that you're into space travel. It's also not revolutionary to note that speculative fiction is basically sociology's dream journal; when people tell stories about places and societies that might be, they tell us what they think societies are. What changes, what doesn't and what should. But when girls get involved, stuff gets weird.

When we see the word “nerd,” we don't think of women. We almost can't. All of that geeky energy, that willingness to dive totally into your own anti-social obsessions, is diametrically opposed to our idea of what girls are for. There's science involved, for one thing. And for another, girls aren't sorted into cool or uncool; they're sorted into likable and unlikable. The idea that a girl might follow the lonesome path of the nerd—not trying to fit in, not trying to be accepted, not trying to do anything but fight on the Internet about which "Doctor Who" was better—just contradicts what we all know, which is that for men, life is a sales job, and for women, it's customer service. And yet! The girl nerds, they exist! And they tell their own stories. Stories about escape, about what changes, what doesn't, and what should. And when it comes to lady nerds, those voluntary or involuntary gender rebels, those girls whose brains just don't fit the template, they tell stories about the specific discomforts and desires of that situation. One of the oldest stories is the one where dudes don't run things. Or, you know, exist.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman put the idea forth as early as 1915, in Herland, a novel about three dudely explorers who enter the not-at-all-subtly named Land Without Hims. Their first discovery consists of the fact that the women have short hair. Also, they wear pants. They soon find that not all of the women are hot, or young, which disturbs them greatly. By this point, the reader has made a discovery of her own, which is that these men are not very bright.

They do, however, demonstrate admirable patience when it comes to letting the women of Herland endlessly explain their society. If the revelation that women can put pants on is a shock, just imagine how startling it is to learn that, in Herland, boners are obsolete. Women reproduce parthogenetically—which is to say, with no need for a visit from Mr. Sperm. Here, a sample from the conversation:

"It would be so wonderful — would it not? To compare the history of two thousand years, to see what the differences are — between us, who are only mothers, and you, who are mothers and fathers, too. Of course we see, with our birds, that the father is as useful as the mother, almost. But among insects we find him of less importance, sometimes very little. Is it not so with you?"

"Oh, yes, birds and bugs," Terry said, "but not among animals — have you no animals?"

"We have cats," she said.

Yes. That is actually in there. They never have sex—their lack of sex drive is a major plot point – and they all love cats. WELCOME TO THE FEMINIST UTOPIA.

Goofy as this seems, Gilman was ahead of her time. Andrea Dworkin, notoriously, suggested that what women needed was “land and guns.” (Or non-violent resistance, but that gets less press.) Mary Daly wrote, in Gyn/Ecology, that “many feminists are actively interested in exploring the possibilities of parthenogenesis.” (They were?) Both pointed out the obvious fact that they didn't need to stop having sex in order to stop having sex with men. The desire for a world where women were in charge was so powerful that some weren't content to leave it for fiction, or even for the future; they projected it backward, into the past.

Consider Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon. Published in 1982, it's faithfully feminist, and stunningly weird. Influenced by Marija Gimbutas-y mythology (once, there was a peaceful agrarian society of Goddess worshippers; then, monotheism wiped it out, co-opted its iconography and invented sexism), separatism (let's all go to an island and get in touch with our girl power), and apparently Dune (psychic, politically ambitious nuns engaged in selective breeding to bring forth a male Messiah), it hangs them all on the legend of King Arthur, explaining that he was a male Messiah brought forth by psychic, politically ambitious Goddess worshippers who lived on Girl Power Island, AKA Avalon, that he and his sister Morgaine (as in “le Fay”) were mystically duped into having sex for selective breeding purposes, that they both reacted poorly, and that he subsequently went all Paul Atreides and rejected the Goddess worshippers, thus ensuring that Christianity and sexism would reign until the women's spirituality movement emerged and ladies started writing books like The Mists of Avalon. Morgaine, an Avalon supporter, is the protagonist. She is not pleased.

The book says that the problem with Christianity is that it won't tolerate other religions. It implies, however, that the problem with Christianity is that it's a stupid jerk religion for assholes. The ladies in Avalon get psychic powers and meaningful jobs and top-notch liberal arts educations, whereas we manage to make it about three whole chapters into the book before a Christian dude beats his wife and things get all “be silent, you accursed scold” this and “have you put some spell upon my manhood, you accursed bitch” that and “you see what comes of your willfulness, my lady” the other. To argue that the book ultimately teaches religious tolerance is like arguing that old movie serials ultimately taught the importance of cooperation between virtuous maidens and dudes with capes and handlebar moustaches who enjoyed tying maidens to train tracks. Of course, medieval Christianity was deeply misogynist and intolerant, and so was medieval Britain. The crucial addition is a magic island full of twentieth-century Women's Studies majors who can tell everyone else what they're doing wrong and allow readers to feel superior in between the many sex scenes.

The fantasy of Girl World often feels like the feminist imagination taken to its most self-indulgent, hypocritical extremes. We stand for tolerance and egalitarianism, whereas the people who disagree with us are IGNORANT WIFE-BEATING MONSTERS. Women, if left on their own, would eliminate war, poverty, heartbreak and pets that are not cats. But, here's a question for you: Why shouldn't it look like this? What's wrong with a wish-fulfillment fantasy that tells women they could do well with power and without oppression? What's wrong with girls geeking out over the idea that they're special?

Of course, stories can be dangerous; one of the most popular science fiction novels of the twentieth century is by a woman, after all, and it would be a completely harmless tale about a dystopian future and a death ray and a team of heroic scientists, except that it's Atlas Shrugged. Taking writers' work at face value can be dangerous too; Marion Zimmer Bradley spent the end of her life in court, accused of knowingly covering for her ex-husband's pedophilia, which should serve to point out that no side of any debate has a monopoly on hypocrisy. And it's easy to point out the flaws of the books themselves, political or otherwise.

But then, men have always told stories about female worlds too, from Hercules and Hippolyte to Queen of Outer Space to that one "Futurama" episode with Femputer, and these stories have usually ended with the women either voluntarily dismantling their society for boyfriends or being killed. The women who read these books want a break from reality like everybody else, and it's no surprise that their fantasies look just as unfair and silly as men's. Unfair, silly fantasies are one of the ways we're all equal, it turns out. Speculative fiction is sociology's dream journal; nerds want a place to belong; on the Enterprise, nobody cares if you're into space travel. All women want from these stories is a place where nobody cares if they're girls.

* * *

"The Smartest Thing She Ever Said" is a Tumblr based digital storytelling art project featuring four teams of two-one artist and one story editor-between now and the end of the year. For three weeks each, the teams were asked to interpret the phrase, "The Smartest Thing She's Ever Said." The current team features photographer Amanda Merton and writer Alice Gregory with support from project curator Alexis Hyde. ArtSheSaid.com and its artists are entirely supported by Ann Taylor in collaboration with Flavorpill.



Sady Doyle is the proprietor of Tiger Beatdown. This is part one in a series of three.

Photo from Flickr by Dirk Loop.

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]]>
Here's a story for you. It's an old story, and it goes like this: There's a place where we're in charge. You've never seen it. You can't visit. It doesn't exist—it's in the future, or it's in the past, or it's just sideways, outside our borders, somewhere no one has been. But us, the girls, we run everything there. There aren't any men. Or: There were men, but we kicked them out. Or even: There are men, but they answer to us. This place is always threatened. This place is always on the verge of being invaded. This place is always just about to change. By the end of the story, the world of men will have reached us, and things will be different. But right now, here, at the beginning, there's just us.

It's not news that sci-fi and fantasy are about wish fulfillment. Nerd-dom—which we'll define, generously but maybe not widely enough, as the ability to escape into one's own obsessive interests, to claim realms of expertise and map them with care and detail and a certain degree of detachment from the reality that no one else cares as much as you do and everyone would like you to care a little bit less—has long been one of the culture's most valuable escape hatches for the brainy, the young and the frustrated. Speculative fiction is aimed at nerds, and nerds want to find a place they belong. On the Enterprise, no one cares that you're into space travel. It's also not revolutionary to note that speculative fiction is basically sociology's dream journal; when people tell stories about places and societies that might be, they tell us what they think societies are. What changes, what doesn't and what should. But when girls get involved, stuff gets weird.

When we see the word “nerd,” we don't think of women. We almost can't. All of that geeky energy, that willingness to dive totally into your own anti-social obsessions, is diametrically opposed to our idea of what girls are for. There's science involved, for one thing. And for another, girls aren't sorted into cool or uncool; they're sorted into likable and unlikable. The idea that a girl might follow the lonesome path of the nerd—not trying to fit in, not trying to be accepted, not trying to do anything but fight on the Internet about which "Doctor Who" was better—just contradicts what we all know, which is that for men, life is a sales job, and for women, it's customer service. And yet! The girl nerds, they exist! And they tell their own stories. Stories about escape, about what changes, what doesn't, and what should. And when it comes to lady nerds, those voluntary or involuntary gender rebels, those girls whose brains just don't fit the template, they tell stories about the specific discomforts and desires of that situation. One of the oldest stories is the one where dudes don't run things. Or, you know, exist.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman put the idea forth as early as 1915, in Herland, a novel about three dudely explorers who enter the not-at-all-subtly named Land Without Hims. Their first discovery consists of the fact that the women have short hair. Also, they wear pants. They soon find that not all of the women are hot, or young, which disturbs them greatly. By this point, the reader has made a discovery of her own, which is that these men are not very bright.

They do, however, demonstrate admirable patience when it comes to letting the women of Herland endlessly explain their society. If the revelation that women can put pants on is a shock, just imagine how startling it is to learn that, in Herland, boners are obsolete. Women reproduce parthogenetically—which is to say, with no need for a visit from Mr. Sperm. Here, a sample from the conversation:

"It would be so wonderful — would it not? To compare the history of two thousand years, to see what the differences are — between us, who are only mothers, and you, who are mothers and fathers, too. Of course we see, with our birds, that the father is as useful as the mother, almost. But among insects we find him of less importance, sometimes very little. Is it not so with you?"

"Oh, yes, birds and bugs," Terry said, "but not among animals — have you no animals?"

"We have cats," she said.

Yes. That is actually in there. They never have sex—their lack of sex drive is a major plot point – and they all love cats. WELCOME TO THE FEMINIST UTOPIA.

Goofy as this seems, Gilman was ahead of her time. Andrea Dworkin, notoriously, suggested that what women needed was “land and guns.” (Or non-violent resistance, but that gets less press.) Mary Daly wrote, in Gyn/Ecology, that “many feminists are actively interested in exploring the possibilities of parthenogenesis.” (They were?) Both pointed out the obvious fact that they didn't need to stop having sex in order to stop having sex with men. The desire for a world where women were in charge was so powerful that some weren't content to leave it for fiction, or even for the future; they projected it backward, into the past.

Consider Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon. Published in 1982, it's faithfully feminist, and stunningly weird. Influenced by Marija Gimbutas-y mythology (once, there was a peaceful agrarian society of Goddess worshippers; then, monotheism wiped it out, co-opted its iconography and invented sexism), separatism (let's all go to an island and get in touch with our girl power), and apparently Dune (psychic, politically ambitious nuns engaged in selective breeding to bring forth a male Messiah), it hangs them all on the legend of King Arthur, explaining that he was a male Messiah brought forth by psychic, politically ambitious Goddess worshippers who lived on Girl Power Island, AKA Avalon, that he and his sister Morgaine (as in “le Fay”) were mystically duped into having sex for selective breeding purposes, that they both reacted poorly, and that he subsequently went all Paul Atreides and rejected the Goddess worshippers, thus ensuring that Christianity and sexism would reign until the women's spirituality movement emerged and ladies started writing books like The Mists of Avalon. Morgaine, an Avalon supporter, is the protagonist. She is not pleased.

The book says that the problem with Christianity is that it won't tolerate other religions. It implies, however, that the problem with Christianity is that it's a stupid jerk religion for assholes. The ladies in Avalon get psychic powers and meaningful jobs and top-notch liberal arts educations, whereas we manage to make it about three whole chapters into the book before a Christian dude beats his wife and things get all “be silent, you accursed scold” this and “have you put some spell upon my manhood, you accursed bitch” that and “you see what comes of your willfulness, my lady” the other. To argue that the book ultimately teaches religious tolerance is like arguing that old movie serials ultimately taught the importance of cooperation between virtuous maidens and dudes with capes and handlebar moustaches who enjoyed tying maidens to train tracks. Of course, medieval Christianity was deeply misogynist and intolerant, and so was medieval Britain. The crucial addition is a magic island full of twentieth-century Women's Studies majors who can tell everyone else what they're doing wrong and allow readers to feel superior in between the many sex scenes.

The fantasy of Girl World often feels like the feminist imagination taken to its most self-indulgent, hypocritical extremes. We stand for tolerance and egalitarianism, whereas the people who disagree with us are IGNORANT WIFE-BEATING MONSTERS. Women, if left on their own, would eliminate war, poverty, heartbreak and pets that are not cats. But, here's a question for you: Why shouldn't it look like this? What's wrong with a wish-fulfillment fantasy that tells women they could do well with power and without oppression? What's wrong with girls geeking out over the idea that they're special?

Of course, stories can be dangerous; one of the most popular science fiction novels of the twentieth century is by a woman, after all, and it would be a completely harmless tale about a dystopian future and a death ray and a team of heroic scientists, except that it's Atlas Shrugged. Taking writers' work at face value can be dangerous too; Marion Zimmer Bradley spent the end of her life in court, accused of knowingly covering for her ex-husband's pedophilia, which should serve to point out that no side of any debate has a monopoly on hypocrisy. And it's easy to point out the flaws of the books themselves, political or otherwise.

But then, men have always told stories about female worlds too, from Hercules and Hippolyte to Queen of Outer Space to that one "Futurama" episode with Femputer, and these stories have usually ended with the women either voluntarily dismantling their society for boyfriends or being killed. The women who read these books want a break from reality like everybody else, and it's no surprise that their fantasies look just as unfair and silly as men's. Unfair, silly fantasies are one of the ways we're all equal, it turns out. Speculative fiction is sociology's dream journal; nerds want a place to belong; on the Enterprise, nobody cares if you're into space travel. All women want from these stories is a place where nobody cares if they're girls.

* * *

"The Smartest Thing She Ever Said" is a Tumblr based digital storytelling art project featuring four teams of two-one artist and one story editor-between now and the end of the year. For three weeks each, the teams were asked to interpret the phrase, "The Smartest Thing She's Ever Said." The current team features photographer Amanda Merton and writer Alice Gregory with support from project curator Alexis Hyde. ArtSheSaid.com and its artists are entirely supported by Ann Taylor in collaboration with Flavorpill.



Sady Doyle is the proprietor of Tiger Beatdown. This is part one in a series of three.

Photo from Flickr by Dirk Loop.

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]]> http://www.theawl.com/2010/10/the-fantasy-of-girl-world-lady-nerds-and-utopias/feed 34 Pixar Fires Its First Woman Director http://www.theawl.com/2010/10/pixar-fires-its-first-woman-director http://www.theawl.com/2010/10/pixar-fires-its-first-woman-director#comments Wed, 20 Oct 2010 14:39:19 +0000 Choire Sicha http://www.theawl.com/2010/10/pixar-fires-its-first-woman-director "First Woman to Direct a Pixar Film Is Instead First to Be Replaced."

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]]> "First Woman to Direct a Pixar Film Is Instead First to Be Replaced."

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