And Howe!

I just finished reading Florence Howe's new memoir, A Life in Motion (Feminist Press, 2011), which left me feeling inspired and exhausted. Inspired because she's done so much, though she's not as famous as many of the Second Wave feminists: she was a pioneer of Women's Studies, and a founder of the Feminist Press. That may not sound like all that much, but it kept her quite busy, which is why I feel exhausted after reading the book. A Life in Motion is almost literally what she's led since the late 1960s, traveling around the country and the world to do research, to network, to coordinate the research of others, to raise money for the Press -- she's a regular feminist dervish, and seems to have slowed down only a little at the age of 82.

I first became aware of the Feminist Press when the local women's bookstore stocked its early reprints of neglected, nearly forgotten works by women: Life in the Iron Mills, by Rebecca Harding Davis; The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman; and Daughter of Earth, by Agnes Smedley. They're well-known and readily available now, but before about 1970 they were nearly impossible to find. Howe tells of searching for copies of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God "in secondhand bookstores ... [which her students] had to return to me before they could have a grade in my course" (133). The press survived arson, sabotage by a commercial publisher, funding difficulties, disorganization, and a couple of moves before setting in at their present base, the City University of New York. They've published a remarkable range of material, and I noted several interesting titles as I read A Life in Motion.

Among their biggest projects were anthologies of works by Indian, African, and Chinese women. On her first visit to India in 1977, she visited

two women's colleges, both relatively impoverished. I began a new quest, asking students what they were reading in literature courses. I was both surprised and disturbed by their responses. They read British male writers. When I asked about Indian writers, they said sometimes they were assigned Tagore and sometimes their most daring teachers gave them American writers, predictably Hemingway or Faulkner.

In Delhi, the university was on strike, along with forty-seven other universities, but I met with feminist faculty and graduate students. Two of the people present were Madhu Kishwar and Ruth Paul, both teachers of English literature. I wanted to talk with them about writers and the curriculum they taught. I had by then talked with faculty in other English departments, all of whom had assured me that there had been no women writers ever and, even if there were any, they would not be worth reading. Madhuri and Ruth were not interested in that issue, even though they were soon to found Manushi, the first feminist journal in India [316-7].

Not too surprisingly, Susie Tharu and K. Lalita and their colleagues found more than enough work by women writers to fill two big volumes of Women Writing in India. When work began on women writers in Africa,

... many of the scholars we met with insisted that African libraries and archives had been "wiped clean" by Western scholars either for their own personal files or for library collections in places like London, New York, Washington, and Chicago. We wouldn't find enough material to fill a large volume, they told us. I laughed when I heard these stories, and sometimes I said outright that since men had been the primary scholars of African history and literature, most of them would not have touched materials relevant to women. And I was usually correct [427].

The same attitude is still with us in the West. Women do write, but their work isn't given the same respect or attention that men's work gets. Recently the Guardian had an article about "the incredible shrinking presence of women in SF", which began by asking, "Is science fiction sexist?" Much of it is, of course, but the problem isn't so much the abstraction SF as it is the very concrete readers, publishers, and fans. Some notable comments: "When I scanned the names, I just saw people. Never imagined that this could be an issue..."; "I don't get it. So... there are plenty of female SF authors, but since none of them are any good the readers must be sexist because when they buy books they don't use gender quotas and positive discrimination to decide what to read?" and my favorite, "[Margaret Atwood and Doris Lessing] didn't write SF, they wrote, unwittingly, historical pastiches of SF." Historical pastiches of science fiction and fantasy by men dominate the SF and fantasy sections of the bookstore and library; for a start, think of the many Tolkien imitators out there; then think about steampunk; then think about cyberpunk, which is basically noir in SF drag. These male writers nevertheless sell well and get critical and fan attention.

I can't find now the place where an African scholar told Howe that women's studies is "Western." I think the proper response to such claims is, "Oh, you don't have women in Africa?" Or China, or India ...?

Then there's the matter of class. Howe was born to Jewish parents who could be categorized as working-class or working-poor, and it surely didn't help that she was born on the cusp of the Great Depression. Her father was a taxi driver, and her mother returned to wage work when the factories opened to women during World War II. Howe was always bright, and did well in school despite some discouragement from her mother. She attended Hunter College, and to her surprise some of her professors encouraged her to think of graduate school; she never finished her Ph.D., and her teaching career, in small, non-elite schools, was constantly diverted by her husbands' pursuit of their own careers. (She married four times.) Like a good 1950s wife, she moved with them.

In college she rebelled against racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism, helping to found the first interracial sorority at Hunter. In the early 1960s she went to Mississippi for Freedom Summer, where she learned a different approach to teaching that she took back east with her.

So, should Florence Howe be considered working-class (because of her background) or middle-class (because of her profession)? As she tells it, she's never really gotten over the insecurity she felt about her origins, and has been surprised when people take for the educated, cultured person she's worked so hard to appear. Even as an academic, she's worked mostly at levels below the elite universities, and struggled to ensure that women's studies as a discipline and the Feminist Press wouldn't ignore working-class women, women of color, immigrant women, women in other countries and cultures.

This weekend, in a post on Feminist SF conversations worth reading," Nicola Griffith linked to and quoted Cheryl Morgan, who wrote of Second Wave feminism that although "[i]n theory it was about equal rights for women in all areas of life[, i]n practice it was sometimes more about equal rights for middle class white women, and occasionally about the rights of middle class white lesbian separatists." I was annoyed by that weasel-word "sometimes." This is a complaint that has often been made about American feminism of the Sixties and Seventies, not without some accuracy. For obvious reasons, American mass/corporate media preferred to focus on middle class white feminists: they were from the same class that manned the American mass/corporate media, they were colorful and articulate and media-savvy. (The Miss America protest of 1968, for example, was planned with TV and the newspapers in mind, and many feminists consciously developed ways to play the media.) Given the way that even dissidents tend to believe the corporate media's claim to be reporting the news, it's hardly surprising that many Americans assumed that what they saw on TV was Feminism. Nor is it surprising that educated foreigners, including feminists like those Howe talked to in India, China, and Africa, mistook corporate media's depiction of American feminism for its reality -- they had personal and professional reasons of their own for doing so.

But while American feminism "sometimes" was indeed "about middle class white women," it was also "sometimes" (in fact, quite often) about women who were not white or middle class. I suspect that Florence Howe was one of the women that Cheryl Morgan had in the back of her mind in framing that accusation; most people who encountered Howe must have mistaken her for a white middle class woman, instead of the working class Jew she actually was. And the Feminist Press was only one press publishing the writings of women who were not white or middle class, alongside the writings of women who were.

A Life in Motion is, among other things, a valuable corrective to the record on the history of Second Wave feminism, which a surprising range of people have preferred to view as nothing but a bunch of spoiled co-eds invoking white middle-class privilege. Interestingly, Cheryl Morgan also wrote in the post linked above that Third Wave feminism "grew out of a cross-fertilization between feminism and the civil rights movement. Basically feminists realized that discrimination against women was just a small part of a much wider social problem." Well, no; Morgan's chronology is a bit off. As Howe reminds those who needed to be reminded, many Second Wave feminists (including but not only Howe) came to feminism by way of the Civil Rights Movement. (And from what I've seen, Third Wave feminism is "sometimes" a bunch of spoiled college girls complaining that their hippie feminist moms have ruined feminism for them. But only sometimes.)

There's so much more to A Life in Motion than I've mentioned here -- Howe's accounts of her marriages, of her difficult relationships with her parents, of her family of choice, of her women friends (I was especially moved by her account of Tillie Olsen, another working-class Jewish feminist of note), and more. It's a dauntingly large book, nearly 600 pages long, but those who want to know where feminism came from and where it's going ought to read it.

And Howe!

I just finished reading Florence Howe's new memoir, A Life in Motion (Feminist Press, 2011), which left me feeling inspired and exhausted. Inspired because she's done so much, though she's not as famous as many of the Second Wave feminists: she was a pioneer of Women's Studies, and a founder of the Feminist Press. That may not sound like all that much, but it kept her quite busy, which is why I feel exhausted after reading the book. A Life in Motion is almost literally what she's led since the late 1960s, traveling around the country and the world to do research, to network, to coordinate the research of others, to raise money for the Press -- she's a regular feminist dervish, and seems to have slowed down only a little at the age of 82.

I first became aware of the Feminist Press when the local women's bookstore stocked its early reprints of neglected, nearly forgotten works by women: Life in the Iron Mills, by Rebecca Harding Davis; The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman; and Daughter of Earth, by Agnes Smedley. They're well-known and readily available now, but before about 1970 they were nearly impossible to find. Howe tells of searching for copies of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God "in secondhand bookstores ... [which her students] had to return to me before they could have a grade in my course" (133). The press survived arson, sabotage by a commercial publisher, funding difficulties, disorganization, and a couple of moves before setting in at their present base, the City University of New York. They've published a remarkable range of material, and I noted several interesting titles as I read A Life in Motion.

Among their biggest projects were anthologies of works by Indian, African, and Chinese women. On her first visit to India in 1977, she visited

two women's colleges, both relatively impoverished. I began a new quest, asking students what they were reading in literature courses. I was both surprised and disturbed by their responses. They read British male writers. When I asked about Indian writers, they said sometimes they were assigned Tagore and sometimes their most daring teachers gave them American writers, predictably Hemingway or Faulkner.

In Delhi, the university was on strike, along with forty-seven other universities, but I met with feminist faculty and graduate students. Two of the people present were Madhu Kishwar and Ruth Paul, both teachers of English literature. I wanted to talk with them about writers and the curriculum they taught. I had by then talked with faculty in other English departments, all of whom had assured me that there had been no women writers ever and, even if there were any, they would not be worth reading. Madhuri and Ruth were not interested in that issue, even though they were soon to found Manushi, the first feminist journal in India [316-7].

Not too surprisingly, Susie Tharu and K. Lalita and their colleagues found more than enough work by women writers to fill two big volumes of Women Writing in India. When work began on women writers in Africa,

... many of the scholars we met with insisted that African libraries and archives had been "wiped clean" by Western scholars either for their own personal files or for library collections in places like London, New York, Washington, and Chicago. We wouldn't find enough material to fill a large volume, they told us. I laughed when I heard these stories, and sometimes I said outright that since men had been the primary scholars of African history and literature, most of them would not have touched materials relevant to women. And I was usually correct [427].

The same attitude is still with us in the West. Women do write, but their work isn't given the same respect or attention that men's work gets. Recently the Guardian had an article about "the incredible shrinking presence of women in SF", which began by asking, "Is science fiction sexist?" Much of it is, of course, but the problem isn't so much the abstraction SF as it is the very concrete readers, publishers, and fans. Some notable comments: "When I scanned the names, I just saw people. Never imagined that this could be an issue..."; "I don't get it. So... there are plenty of female SF authors, but since none of them are any good the readers must be sexist because when they buy books they don't use gender quotas and positive discrimination to decide what to read?" and my favorite, "[Margaret Atwood and Doris Lessing] didn't write SF, they wrote, unwittingly, historical pastiches of SF." Historical pastiches of science fiction and fantasy by men dominate the SF and fantasy sections of the bookstore and library; for a start, think of the many Tolkien imitators out there; then think about steampunk; then think about cyberpunk, which is basically noir in SF drag. These male writers nevertheless sell well and get critical and fan attention.

I can't find now the place where an African scholar told Howe that women's studies is "Western." I think the proper response to such claims is, "Oh, you don't have women in Africa?" Or China, or India ...?

Then there's the matter of class. Howe was born to Jewish parents who could be categorized as working-class or working-poor, and it surely didn't help that she was born on the cusp of the Great Depression. Her father was a taxi driver, and her mother returned to wage work when the factories opened to women during World War II. Howe was always bright, and did well in school despite some discouragement from her mother. She attended Hunter College, and to her surprise some of her professors encouraged her to think of graduate school; she never finished her Ph.D., and her teaching career, in small, non-elite schools, was constantly diverted by her husbands' pursuit of their own careers. (She married four times.) Like a good 1950s wife, she moved with them.

In college she rebelled against racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism, helping to found the first interracial sorority at Hunter. In the early 1960s she went to Mississippi for Freedom Summer, where she learned a different approach to teaching that she took back east with her.

So, should Florence Howe be considered working-class (because of her background) or middle-class (because of her profession)? As she tells it, she's never really gotten over the insecurity she felt about her origins, and has been surprised when people take for the educated, cultured person she's worked so hard to appear. Even as an academic, she's worked mostly at levels below the elite universities, and struggled to ensure that women's studies as a discipline and the Feminist Press wouldn't ignore working-class women, women of color, immigrant women, women in other countries and cultures.

This weekend, in a post on Feminist SF conversations worth reading," Nicola Griffith linked to and quoted Cheryl Morgan, who wrote of Second Wave feminism that although "[i]n theory it was about equal rights for women in all areas of life[, i]n practice it was sometimes more about equal rights for middle class white women, and occasionally about the rights of middle class white lesbian separatists." I was annoyed by that weasel-word "sometimes." This is a complaint that has often been made about American feminism of the Sixties and Seventies, not without some accuracy. For obvious reasons, American mass/corporate media preferred to focus on middle class white feminists: they were from the same class that manned the American mass/corporate media, they were colorful and articulate and media-savvy. (The Miss America protest of 1968, for example, was planned with TV and the newspapers in mind, and many feminists consciously developed ways to play the media.) Given the way that even dissidents tend to believe the corporate media's claim to be reporting the news, it's hardly surprising that many Americans assumed that what they saw on TV was Feminism. Nor is it surprising that educated foreigners, including feminists like those Howe talked to in India, China, and Africa, mistook corporate media's depiction of American feminism for its reality -- they had personal and professional reasons of their own for doing so.

But while American feminism "sometimes" was indeed "about middle class white women," it was also "sometimes" (in fact, quite often) about women who were not white or middle class. I suspect that Florence Howe was one of the women that Cheryl Morgan had in the back of her mind in framing that accusation; most people who encountered Howe must have mistaken her for a white middle class woman, instead of the working class Jew she actually was. And the Feminist Press was only one press publishing the writings of women who were not white or middle class, alongside the writings of women who were.

A Life in Motion is, among other things, a valuable corrective to the record on the history of Second Wave feminism, which a surprising range of people have preferred to view as nothing but a bunch of spoiled co-eds invoking white middle-class privilege. Interestingly, Cheryl Morgan also wrote in the post linked above that Third Wave feminism "grew out of a cross-fertilization between feminism and the civil rights movement. Basically feminists realized that discrimination against women was just a small part of a much wider social problem." Well, no; Morgan's chronology is a bit off. As Howe reminds those who needed to be reminded, many Second Wave feminists (including but not only Howe) came to feminism by way of the Civil Rights Movement. (And from what I've seen, Third Wave feminism is "sometimes" a bunch of spoiled college girls complaining that their hippie feminist moms have ruined feminism for them. But only sometimes.)

There's so much more to A Life in Motion than I've mentioned here -- Howe's accounts of her marriages, of her difficult relationships with her parents, of her family of choice, of her women friends (I was especially moved by her account of Tillie Olsen, another working-class Jewish feminist of note), and more. It's a dauntingly large book, nearly 600 pages long, but those who want to know where feminism came from and where it's going ought to read it.

Housekeeping

I've been waiting for a two-males version of this song for a long time. (Our community radio station often plays whole sets of heteros doing it. Give it a rest, it's been done!) And this is a good one, though as Avedon says, they fall down on the harmonies, and as I'm saying, there's a bit too much camera movement; were they hoping to distract the frothers from Teh Gey flirtation going on? It's great to have a sympathetic sissy character on TV, though I'm put off personally by the way Chris Colfer's upper lip won't uncover his front teeth. I'm not sure why it bothers me, but it does. I'll live, though. We old queens are surprisingly tough, as the grizzly bear discovered.

Ahem. I recently made some changes in the "What I Read Online" sidebar, which is not really a blogroll (I suppose I need one) and isn't even strictly accurate, since I hardly ever read some of the sites listed anymore; I most often use it myself, especially when I'm not using my own computer, so I can jump right to sites I'm likely to need. I should update it more often, but I'm lazy.

With that in mind, I'm adding Finally, A Feminism 101 Blog (h/t to a Random Link at Corrente Wire), because it looks like something I'll find useful for links. (This post pointed me to Derailing For Dummies, which also looks useful.) I wish I'd had this post on rape culture to hand when I wrote these posts, for example. I'll probably turn to this FAQ on "slut-shaming" the next time I have to deal with someone who complains about immodest females. Feminism 101 might come in handy when certain subjects come up on blogs by liberal males, who just can't see why some women don't think it's "extremely funny" to suggest that a man seeks the US Presidency because his DNA drives him to do it, in hopes of connecting with some hot female DNA once he's arrived.

But here's what Obama's DNA did not foresee: HE CAN'T. As the first Democratic president since Bill Clinton was impeached, HE ABSOLUTELY MUST NOT.

I think most men can appreciate that being in this situation must be its own unique form of torture. So when I see Obama letting torturers walk, I enjoy the fact that at least he's suffering himself. I'm not kidding or making light of it when I say that if I myself had to choose between the two situations, I might rather be waterboarded.

Isn't that just a scream? A manly scream, of course, we're all heterosexual males around here. Oddly, or probably not so oddly, the same blogger doesn't seem to think it's funny that Julian Assange's DNA, which presumably has the same motives, has been hoist on its own petard. But biological determinism is like any other religion -- you don't get to apply it selectively. If Schwarz were correct about the evolutionary history behind all this (though he isn't, it's just a popular fantasy among heterosexual males, perhaps especially Betas), then it's hard to see how males have survived this long: their DNA points them into rather disastrous dead-ends. If their DNA drives all males to seek power and notoriety to make them more attractive to women -- and why did Hillary seek the Presidency, I wonder? -- then we have to laugh at Julian Assange's DNA no less than Barack Obama's. Comments are closed on those posts now, or I'd be looking for some relevant links at Feminism 101. But something tells me there will be need again in the not-so-distant future.

P.S. Ellen Willis: “Humorless is what you are if you do not find the following subjects funny: rape, big breasts, sex with little girls. It carries no imputation of humorlessness if you do not find the following subjects funny: castration, impotence, vaginas with teeth.” Can't repeat that one enough.

Housekeeping

I've been waiting for a two-males version of this song for a long time. (Our community radio station often plays whole sets of heteros doing it. Give it a rest, it's been done!) And this is a good one, though as Avedon says, they fall down on the harmonies, and as I'm saying, there's a bit too much camera movement; were they hoping to distract the frothers from Teh Gey flirtation going on? It's great to have a sympathetic sissy character on TV, though I'm put off personally by the way Chris Colfer's upper lip won't uncover his front teeth. I'm not sure why it bothers me, but it does. I'll live, though. We old queens are surprisingly tough, as the grizzly bear discovered.

Ahem. I recently made some changes in the "What I Read Online" sidebar, which is not really a blogroll (I suppose I need one) and isn't even strictly accurate, since I hardly ever read some of the sites listed anymore; I most often use it myself, especially when I'm not using my own computer, so I can jump right to sites I'm likely to need. I should update it more often, but I'm lazy.

With that in mind, I'm adding Finally, A Feminism 101 Blog (h/t to a Random Link at Corrente Wire), because it looks like something I'll find useful for links. (This post pointed me to Derailing For Dummies, which also looks useful.) I wish I'd had this post on rape culture to hand when I wrote these posts, for example. I'll probably turn to this FAQ on "slut-shaming" the next time I have to deal with someone who complains about immodest females. Feminism 101 might come in handy when certain subjects come up on blogs by liberal males, who just can't see why some women don't think it's "extremely funny" to suggest that a man seeks the US Presidency because his DNA drives him to do it, in hopes of connecting with some hot female DNA once he's arrived.

But here's what Obama's DNA did not foresee: HE CAN'T. As the first Democratic president since Bill Clinton was impeached, HE ABSOLUTELY MUST NOT.

I think most men can appreciate that being in this situation must be its own unique form of torture. So when I see Obama letting torturers walk, I enjoy the fact that at least he's suffering himself. I'm not kidding or making light of it when I say that if I myself had to choose between the two situations, I might rather be waterboarded.

Isn't that just a scream? A manly scream, of course, we're all heterosexual males around here. Oddly, or probably not so oddly, the same blogger doesn't seem to think it's funny that Julian Assange's DNA, which presumably has the same motives, has been hoist on its own petard. But biological determinism is like any other religion -- you don't get to apply it selectively. If Schwarz were correct about the evolutionary history behind all this (though he isn't, it's just a popular fantasy among heterosexual males, perhaps especially Betas), then it's hard to see how males have survived this long: their DNA points them into rather disastrous dead-ends. If their DNA drives all males to seek power and notoriety to make them more attractive to women -- and why did Hillary seek the Presidency, I wonder? -- then we have to laugh at Julian Assange's DNA no less than Barack Obama's. Comments are closed on those posts now, or I'd be looking for some relevant links at Feminism 101. But something tells me there will be need again in the not-so-distant future.

P.S. Ellen Willis: “Humorless is what you are if you do not find the following subjects funny: rape, big breasts, sex with little girls. It carries no imputation of humorlessness if you do not find the following subjects funny: castration, impotence, vaginas with teeth.” Can't repeat that one enough.

To Serve Man -- It's a Cookbook!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To Serve Man -- It's a Cookbook!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Are the Pollitt Fallen

Oh, dear; this is very sad. And painful to watch.

Katha Pollitt's latest column in The Nation is one more painful exhibit of the damage that the Obama administration, following hard on eight years of Bush-Cheney, has done to liberal brain cells. Could it get much worse? I fear it will.

During the Clinton years, Pollitt delivered a series of attacks on the man's policies, especially where women's issues were concerned, while most mainstream feminists were still fawning on him, hoping for access, invitations to the White House, recognition and respect. (A lot of those columns can be found in Subject to Debate [The Modern Library, 2001].) Not all were fooled -- I still treasure this ringing denunciation of Clinton and Gore and Leiberman by Barbara Ehrenreich, for example -- but Pollitt was one of those who most steadfastly resisted the Clinton allure.

Still, Pollitt was one who took Bush's accession really hard; I remember how dispirited, even despairing, her columns from early 2001 were. She recovered, though, and was doing all right until Barack Obama came along, causing an embarrassing relapse as she tried to persuade herself and others that this guy was different, and that "An Obama victory could have big positive repercussions for progressive politics." (Ehrenreich also fell for the Obama shuck.) Pollitt even sank to dissing Cindy McCain's looks, a sexist move she'd properly have savaged anyone else for doing. She rallied briefly, criticizing Obama's support for "faith-based" initiatives, which suggests that anti-religion had come to trump even feminism for her. But before long she was flailing desperately away at a Naomi Klein column that once would have been easy meat for her, trying to defend Obama but bereft of anything to defend him with. Except Hilda Solis, who's looking lonelier and lonelier these days in that hornet's nest of DLCers we call the White House.

But today, ah, today, she declared her support for the Senate "health reform" bill in terms of political and even moral exhaustion. We feminists caved in and let you Democrats turn the bill into "a major blow against abortion rights." So don't accuse us of political purity! (That's what Pollitt accuses others of, we who sit in our cabins on Mount Disdain and sneer cruelly at the true believers.) We are team players! It's those Republicans who are the purists! And they don't play fair! So now, "The way I see it, the Democratic Party and the Obama administration owe supporters of women's rights a huge payback for cooperating on its signature issue." She provides a wish list. Item: "Full funding for Title X. ..." Item: "Full speed ahead on the Paycheck Fairness Act. ..." Item: "Confront maternal mortality. ..." Item: Ratify "the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women." Item: "Fully fund the Violence Against Women Act ..." Finally, she gets so het up she lets loose a dainty semi-expletive: "Speaking of violence against women, Dems, would you look in the effing mirror?" Whoa there, little lady! Don't let your emotions get the better of you. Better sit down. Would you like a glass of water?

I am not saying this to derogate Pollitt's concerns; I agree with her priorities and demands completely. I'm simply unable to believe that she thinks anyone in the Democrat Party is going to listen to her. This is not the first time that writers at The Nation have issued fatwas to the Democrats, or to Obama himself (Pollitt signed her name to that one too, as did Ehrenreich). You can see how much they've achieved. They don't seem to have noticed that not only is the rest of the left laughing at them, so are the Democrats and particularly the White House.

It's not for me to say what Pollitt should do. This is not an open letter from a formerly devoted reader, begging her to listen to the voices of the people who lifted her to an editorship at The Nation and urging her to return to the core values that made her one of the reasons I kept my subscription going longer than I should have. Nor is it a long-distance poultice, telling her that I feel her pain. I really don't know what it is, except maybe my own cry of pain at seeing a very intelligent woman stuck in an abusive relationship with a rotten politician. Only she can extricate herself from it, though.

How Are the Pollitt Fallen

Oh, dear; this is very sad. And painful to watch.

Katha Pollitt's latest column in The Nation is one more painful exhibit of the damage that the Obama administration, following hard on eight years of Bush-Cheney, has done to liberal brain cells. Could it get much worse? I fear it will.

During the Clinton years, Pollitt delivered a series of attacks on the man's policies, especially where women's issues were concerned, while most mainstream feminists were still fawning on him, hoping for access, invitations to the White House, recognition and respect. (A lot of those columns can be found in Subject to Debate [The Modern Library, 2001].) Not all were fooled -- I still treasure this ringing denunciation of Clinton and Gore and Leiberman by Barbara Ehrenreich, for example -- but Pollitt was one of those who most steadfastly resisted the Clinton allure.

Still, Pollitt was one who took Bush's accession really hard; I remember how dispirited, even despairing, her columns from early 2001 were. She recovered, though, and was doing all right until Barack Obama came along, causing an embarrassing relapse as she tried to persuade herself and others that this guy was different, and that "An Obama victory could have big positive repercussions for progressive politics." (Ehrenreich also fell for the Obama shuck.) Pollitt even sank to dissing Cindy McCain's looks, a sexist move she'd properly have savaged anyone else for doing. She rallied briefly, criticizing Obama's support for "faith-based" initiatives, which suggests that anti-religion had come to trump even feminism for her. But before long she was flailing desperately away at a Naomi Klein column that once would have been easy meat for her, trying to defend Obama but bereft of anything to defend him with. Except Hilda Solis, who's looking lonelier and lonelier these days in that hornet's nest of DLCers we call the White House.

But today, ah, today, she declared her support for the Senate "health reform" bill in terms of political and even moral exhaustion. We feminists caved in and let you Democrats turn the bill into "a major blow against abortion rights." So don't accuse us of political purity! (That's what Pollitt accuses others of, we who sit in our cabins on Mount Disdain and sneer cruelly at the true believers.) We are team players! It's those Republicans who are the purists! And they don't play fair! So now, "The way I see it, the Democratic Party and the Obama administration owe supporters of women's rights a huge payback for cooperating on its signature issue." She provides a wish list. Item: "Full funding for Title X. ..." Item: "Full speed ahead on the Paycheck Fairness Act. ..." Item: "Confront maternal mortality. ..." Item: Ratify "the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women." Item: "Fully fund the Violence Against Women Act ..." Finally, she gets so het up she lets loose a dainty semi-expletive: "Speaking of violence against women, Dems, would you look in the effing mirror?" Whoa there, little lady! Don't let your emotions get the better of you. Better sit down. Would you like a glass of water?

I am not saying this to derogate Pollitt's concerns; I agree with her priorities and demands completely. I'm simply unable to believe that she thinks anyone in the Democrat Party is going to listen to her. This is not the first time that writers at The Nation have issued fatwas to the Democrats, or to Obama himself (Pollitt signed her name to that one too, as did Ehrenreich). You can see how much they've achieved. They don't seem to have noticed that not only is the rest of the left laughing at them, so are the Democrats and particularly the White House.

It's not for me to say what Pollitt should do. This is not an open letter from a formerly devoted reader, begging her to listen to the voices of the people who lifted her to an editorship at The Nation and urging her to return to the core values that made her one of the reasons I kept my subscription going longer than I should have. Nor is it a long-distance poultice, telling her that I feel her pain. I really don't know what it is, except maybe my own cry of pain at seeing a very intelligent woman stuck in an abusive relationship with a rotten politician. Only she can extricate herself from it, though.

Things Have Come To A Pretty Pass When Feminism Is Allowed To Invade The Sphere Of Private Life

I haven’t been able to get validated to post comments at TPM Cafe, where there was a discussion going on about Learning to Drive, Katha Pollitt’s new book of autobiographical essays. But that’s okay -- I have my own little soapbox here.

I’ve been reading Pollitt’s essays in The Nation for decades now, and I own all three collections, plus a copy of her book of poems, Antarctic Traveller, that had previously belonged to poet Timothy Liu. Her take on complex issues has always been useful to me, particularly women’s concerns, literature and the arts, and American electoral politics – it was her arguments that persuaded me to vote for Nader in 1996. (I’m sure she’d be relieved to know that she is not responsible for my Nader vote in 2000.) I’m grateful to her for making me aware of Pierre Bourdieu’s work. For a long time she and film critic Stuart Klawans were the main reasons I kept renewing my subscription to The Nation. She tends to fall down when she addresses the sciences (Ruth Hubbard, whom she dismisses here as merely a feminist, happens to be a scientist as well, as Pollitt must know), and she shares with many people on the left whom I otherwise respect a weird kneejerk hostility to “postmodernism” and "multiculturalism." Those aren't cusswords, but you wouldn't know that from the way Pollitt uses them.

But for some reason I wasn’t eager to read Learning to Drive. I’m not sure why. Not because I don’t want to read personal essays; I’ve read personal feminist (and non-feminist) writing for decades too, with great pleasure and benefit. I want to hear other people’s stories to get perspective on my own. Kate Millett, Dorothy Allison, and Nancy Mairs are among my heroes for their courageous examination of their lives.

It’s Millett’s precedent that makes me wonder, both about some of the attacks on Pollitt and about some of her responses to them. In Flying and Sita especially, Millett broke with the academic manner of her classic Sexual Politics and wrote with bruising personal honesty about her life. And she was attacked for it, especially for her willingness to write about abjection, misery in love gone wrong.

I finally found a copy of Learning to Drive at the library, so I read it, and found it very much in the tradition of Flying, if somewhat less daring. But that’s okay too, because each person must decide for herself (or himself, even) how much to reveal.

So I’m a bit surprised that no one in this discussion (or elsewhere, that I’ve seen) mentioned Millett. Pollitt writes:

Has feminism really become such a brittle, defensive, live-for-your-resume, never-let-them-see-you-cry kind of thing? If that's true, and I hope it isn't, the backlashers have truly won. They’ve gotten women to censor themselves to save society the trouble. Feminism, after all, was supposed to enlarge our sense of women's humanity, in all its messiness and contradiction and individual truth; it was supposed to connect women to each other, and to men, in more honest ways. It wasn't supposed to be yet another standard of perfection, a mask. Because look where that leads: In one way or another, every woman will inevitably fall short of the feminist-stalwart ideal, as every man falls short of the winner-take-all competitive capitalist ideal that is masculinity. If a writer censors herself to keep up the good name of womanhood, it is most unlikely people with a low opinion of women will be impressed. All that will happen is that other women think that they are alone in what are, in fact, common experiences. This is the roundabout the women's movement was supposed to help us get out of!

Well, yeah. But Millett was also attacked for showing her weakness back in the 1970s, and by other feminists, not just by Boy Culture media hacks. So it’s not like the battle was ever really won, as far as I can tell. In Pollitt’s case, though, as in Millett’s, I suspect more is going on than the writing itself. Millett had become a star for Sexual Politics and her involvement in the then-nascent women’s movement. When she publicly acknowledged her bisexuality, the straight media disingenuously doubted her qualification to speak for other women, or to participate in the movement at all. Erotic love between women was an embattled issue then, as it remains – I get the impression that heterosexual feminists still aren’t really comfortable with lesbianism as a women’s issue. Going after Millett’s books was part of an ongoing campaign by male supremacists to discredit feminism, and dwelling on her love for women was a useful way to divide the movement.

Pollitt isn’t as famous as Millett was in 1970. But her column has made her fairly visible, especially since her brave essay criticizing the jingoistic flag-waving that followed 9/11. She’s been attacked by Camille Paglia, but that time she simply borrowed a note from fellow Nation writer Alexander Cockburn and quoted Paglia’s rant under the “Frother Seal of Approval” header. So now she got a pan in The New York Times Book Review? That’s practically a recommendation, as she knows full well. Instead she returned fire by attacking the reviewer:

Still, it is a strange experience to be accused of telling too much by the author of an 'erotic memoir' about sadomasochistic anal sex, in which she describes, among many other graphic details, saving her used condoms in a box. I'm no Freudian, but the concept of projection does come to mind….

This, as I see it, is the pass to which we have come. Women can write about shooting heroin and being sex workers and spending years zoned out on prozac and having nervous breakdowns and hating other women and lord knows what else and that's okay by feminism, as indeed it should be.

Is it just me, or is there a ghostly “Not that there’s anything wrong with that!” hovering behind those words? Granted, the Times reviewer was in no position to cast the first stone at Pollitt, but there’s sadomasochism and sadomasochism, and gosh, I’m no Freudian, but I thought Pollitt’s essays on her relationship with the Last Marxist were pretty masochistic. You don’t need whips and chains for s/m, you just need two (or more) people working through certain scenarios of abjection and control with each other. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! I’ve been, and known other people, in relationships enough like the one Pollitt describes that I’m certainly not casting the first stone either. But Learning To Drive, like so many accounts of real-life adventures in romance, mainly confirmed my relief that I've been single for the past two decades.

Reading the TPM Cafe discussion also made me glad that I live in the hinterlands, not the Big City. I've realized lately that the writers who go at each other in print often know each other in person, and their spats and squabbles underlie their writings for publication in ways I can't always detect. I know these people only by their words, and by and large I'm content to keep it that way, but as the Times review and Pollitt's response to it show, not knowing your opponent is not always enough to maintain a critical distance.

Things Have Come To A Pretty Pass When Feminism Is Allowed To Invade The Sphere Of Private Life

I haven’t been able to get validated to post comments at TPM Cafe, where there was a discussion going on about Learning to Drive, Katha Pollitt’s new book of autobiographical essays. But that’s okay -- I have my own little soapbox here.

I’ve been reading Pollitt’s essays in The Nation for decades now, and I own all three collections, plus a copy of her book of poems, Antarctic Traveller, that had previously belonged to poet Timothy Liu. Her take on complex issues has always been useful to me, particularly women’s concerns, literature and the arts, and American electoral politics – it was her arguments that persuaded me to vote for Nader in 1996. (I’m sure she’d be relieved to know that she is not responsible for my Nader vote in 2000.) I’m grateful to her for making me aware of Pierre Bourdieu’s work. For a long time she and film critic Stuart Klawans were the main reasons I kept renewing my subscription to The Nation. She tends to fall down when she addresses the sciences (Ruth Hubbard, whom she dismisses here as merely a feminist, happens to be a scientist as well, as Pollitt must know), and she shares with many people on the left whom I otherwise respect a weird kneejerk hostility to “postmodernism” and "multiculturalism." Those aren't cusswords, but you wouldn't know that from the way Pollitt uses them.

But for some reason I wasn’t eager to read Learning to Drive. I’m not sure why. Not because I don’t want to read personal essays; I’ve read personal feminist (and non-feminist) writing for decades too, with great pleasure and benefit. I want to hear other people’s stories to get perspective on my own. Kate Millett, Dorothy Allison, and Nancy Mairs are among my heroes for their courageous examination of their lives.

It’s Millett’s precedent that makes me wonder, both about some of the attacks on Pollitt and about some of her responses to them. In Flying and Sita especially, Millett broke with the academic manner of her classic Sexual Politics and wrote with bruising personal honesty about her life. And she was attacked for it, especially for her willingness to write about abjection, misery in love gone wrong.

I finally found a copy of Learning to Drive at the library, so I read it, and found it very much in the tradition of Flying, if somewhat less daring. But that’s okay too, because each person must decide for herself (or himself, even) how much to reveal.

So I’m a bit surprised that no one in this discussion (or elsewhere, that I’ve seen) mentioned Millett. Pollitt writes:

Has feminism really become such a brittle, defensive, live-for-your-resume, never-let-them-see-you-cry kind of thing? If that's true, and I hope it isn't, the backlashers have truly won. They’ve gotten women to censor themselves to save society the trouble. Feminism, after all, was supposed to enlarge our sense of women's humanity, in all its messiness and contradiction and individual truth; it was supposed to connect women to each other, and to men, in more honest ways. It wasn't supposed to be yet another standard of perfection, a mask. Because look where that leads: In one way or another, every woman will inevitably fall short of the feminist-stalwart ideal, as every man falls short of the winner-take-all competitive capitalist ideal that is masculinity. If a writer censors herself to keep up the good name of womanhood, it is most unlikely people with a low opinion of women will be impressed. All that will happen is that other women think that they are alone in what are, in fact, common experiences. This is the roundabout the women's movement was supposed to help us get out of!

Well, yeah. But Millett was also attacked for showing her weakness back in the 1970s, and by other feminists, not just by Boy Culture media hacks. So it’s not like the battle was ever really won, as far as I can tell. In Pollitt’s case, though, as in Millett’s, I suspect more is going on than the writing itself. Millett had become a star for Sexual Politics and her involvement in the then-nascent women’s movement. When she publicly acknowledged her bisexuality, the straight media disingenuously doubted her qualification to speak for other women, or to participate in the movement at all. Erotic love between women was an embattled issue then, as it remains – I get the impression that heterosexual feminists still aren’t really comfortable with lesbianism as a women’s issue. Going after Millett’s books was part of an ongoing campaign by male supremacists to discredit feminism, and dwelling on her love for women was a useful way to divide the movement.

Pollitt isn’t as famous as Millett was in 1970. But her column has made her fairly visible, especially since her brave essay criticizing the jingoistic flag-waving that followed 9/11. She’s been attacked by Camille Paglia, but that time she simply borrowed a note from fellow Nation writer Alexander Cockburn and quoted Paglia’s rant under the “Frother Seal of Approval” header. So now she got a pan in The New York Times Book Review? That’s practically a recommendation, as she knows full well. Instead she returned fire by attacking the reviewer:

Still, it is a strange experience to be accused of telling too much by the author of an 'erotic memoir' about sadomasochistic anal sex, in which she describes, among many other graphic details, saving her used condoms in a box. I'm no Freudian, but the concept of projection does come to mind….

This, as I see it, is the pass to which we have come. Women can write about shooting heroin and being sex workers and spending years zoned out on prozac and having nervous breakdowns and hating other women and lord knows what else and that's okay by feminism, as indeed it should be.

Is it just me, or is there a ghostly “Not that there’s anything wrong with that!” hovering behind those words? Granted, the Times reviewer was in no position to cast the first stone at Pollitt, but there’s sadomasochism and sadomasochism, and gosh, I’m no Freudian, but I thought Pollitt’s essays on her relationship with the Last Marxist were pretty masochistic. You don’t need whips and chains for s/m, you just need two (or more) people working through certain scenarios of abjection and control with each other. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! I’ve been, and known other people, in relationships enough like the one Pollitt describes that I’m certainly not casting the first stone either. But Learning To Drive, like so many accounts of real-life adventures in romance, mainly confirmed my relief that I've been single for the past two decades.

Reading the TPM Cafe discussion also made me glad that I live in the hinterlands, not the Big City. I've realized lately that the writers who go at each other in print often know each other in person, and their spats and squabbles underlie their writings for publication in ways I can't always detect. I know these people only by their words, and by and large I'm content to keep it that way, but as the Times review and Pollitt's response to it show, not knowing your opponent is not always enough to maintain a critical distance.