There's an Echo in Here!

Ah, I knew there was something else I'd been meaning to write about.

Kim Brooks, whose reflections on the uselessness of high school English classes I discussed some time ago, returned to Salon last weekend with weeping and lamentation over ... erm, well, her own narrow-mindedness and intolerance on Facebook. The given title was "Is my Facebook page a liberal echo chamber?"

She'd found herself in what is probably a common situation for us older people who've been out of school for a few decades and didn't construct our school environment around the Internet from the start, because it didn't exist back then: she was re-establishing contact with people she knew in high school. She questioned the decision at first but then figured, What the hell, why not? I did pretty much the same thing when I began getting friend invitations on Facebook from high school acquaintances a few months after I joined.

She quickly learned why not.

President Obama had just given a televised speech on the economy, and this particular gentleman, someone I’d never known well but with whom I’d shared a neighborhood and a classroom for most of kindergarten through 12th grade, a fellow I remember as being pleasant, a bit on the quiet side, a member of the marching band, certainly not a bully or a jerk, had written, “Just turned off the t.v. More lies from B. Hussein Obama.” Within a few minutes, 10 people had “liked” this comment. Within a few more minutes, others had begun to add comments of their own, nearly all of which made reference to the president’s skin color, “questionable” national origin, or socialist death-panel agenda. I nearly fell out of my chair. My heart was racing. I squinted at the screen. I read the comments again and again. This was the real deal, not on Fox News but right here on MY computer, on MY Facebook page. I’d invited it in, that horrible place I’d left the day I graduated from high school. I looked down at my keyboard and saw that my hands were shaking. I decided to add a comment of my own: “Don’t like! Boy, am I glad I don’t live in Richmond anymore. You are un-friended!”

My own situation was different. I expected to see such things. But then I've been using the Internet for twenty-five years. I've spent a lot of time reading the subliterate ravings of people I hadn't gone to school with, but might have, and learning to deal with them, to call them out when they lie, to point out when they've passed along a well-discredited legend, to read with care what they replied, and to try to answer them without jerking my left-wing knee too much. I've also debated people who fall on the same place of the political spectrum as I do; there's no guarantee that we'll always agree with each other. This has been useful, if only to hone my own arguments, but also to make sure that I hear the views of people with different perspectives.

But I also had the advantage of spending thirty-seven years working with college students from all over the world (and contrary to popular stereotypes, not all college students are liberal hippies), but also with plenty of good old boys and gals from Southern Indiana (and contrary to popular stereotypes, not all good old Hoosiers are right-wing rednecks). Not only that but working on, and eventually running, the Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Speakers Bureau put me regularly in front of audiences that included everyone from raving homophobes to the children of gay or lesbian parents. Since we provide panels, not solitary speakers, I was sharing the stage with gay people who ranged from fellow Gay Liberationists to the (former) president of College Republicans. (He was kicked out of the organization and pulled from school by his parents when word got around that he was gay.) A lot of those people are in my Facebook friends list now. So my Facebook page, let alone my world, is not a liberal echo chamber.

I can't say the same for Our Ms. Brooks. Not only her Facebook page, but her life is evidently structured so as to protect her from people with differing values and opinions.

As an angsty teenager and college student, I used to mock people who lived in gated communities, who were so afraid of the unfamiliar world they had to erect a physical boundary to keep it at bay. But now I wonder, aren’t the boundaries we draw with Facebook just as secure as a man-made moat or an underpaid security guard manning a booth? Was the daily back-and-forth on my Facebook feed really a conversation, or was it no more than an echo chamber?

... In a world of friending and unfriending, the 99 percent versus the 53 percent, Obama as antichrist against Obama as savior, who, I wonder, has the tolerance anymore for such messy contradictions, such tainted, imperfect kinships? Who has the patience?

The most pertinent response to this, I think, would be "What do you mean 'we', white woman?" The only person in her article she really can point to who fits this picture is herself. Not that she's alone -- far from it. I've been unfriended for True Political Incorrectness by a few people on Facebook myself. The only person I've unfriended was a former co-worker who moved to another state and sent me a friend invitation before he found Jesus and began spamming his feed with Bible quotations, self-pitying inspirational soundbytes, and overtly racist anti-Obama material. He attacked me when I commented critically on his postings, so when I found that blocking his Bible feed wasn't enough to stem the flood of swill, I finally unfriended him.

As those who read this blog will know, though, I have plenty of contact with other right-wingers on Facebook, such as my two Right Wing Acquaintances. They've given me a lot of material, which saves me the trouble of browsing the Right's propaganda mills; RWA1 especially gives me what he considers the cream of the crop, the serious commentators, so he can't accuse me of cherrypicking ignorant yahoos. Then there's my Tabloid Friend, who's one of several Obama stalwarts in my Friends list. I've also got my high school friends, most of whom are simple Republican fundamentalists, though there's also the middle-of-the-road minister and his wife and a Randite high school teacher who recently moved from teaching Army brats in Europe to a different environment in Africa. I don't respond critically to everything they post, but when it seems proper, I do. Some have defriended me, others ignore me, and I'm having real (though virtual) conversations with some others. With War on Christmas Season less than a month away, I'm sure things are going to heat up again.

Who has the tolerance, who has the patience? Well, I do, for one. But so do the people who put up with me, online and face to face. Kim Brooks is overgeneralizing and oversimplifying from far too small a sample: a sample of one. What disturbs me is that she's not just a Salon pundit; she's also been a college writing instructor -- might still be, for all I know -- and not in the Ivy League, but in community colleges, which aren't exactly liberal hothouses either. She must have been a really involved, empathic teacher if she never noticed that her students didn't always agree with her politics.

One more thing, though: there's no reason why anyone's Facebook page has to be an arena for debate or the broadcast of opinions (whether your own or your friends'). That's one reason, apart from shyness, that I usually wait until people I knew in high school invite me on Facebook; and when I accept their invitations, I don't grill them on their political or religious positions to ensure they meet my high standards. They'll see some of my opinions expressed in my newsfeed soon enough, and they're welcome to react. I wait to see how they use Facebook, and if they only post photos of their grandchildren and Youtube videos of cute kittens or Top 40 hits from our youth, then butter won't melt in my mouth. If they start posting stuff about Illegal Immigrants Who Don't Pay Taxes, or the Kenyan Usurper banning Christmas Trees from the White House, though, they've entered the arena of debate.

So I don't object to Kim Brooks defriending anybody whose politics she dislikes, any more than she should object if they do the same to her. What I object to is her projecting her own hatred of difference onto everyone else, as though she weren't responsible for her own opinions and actions. (I suspect her freakout over commas is not entirely unrelated to this.) I realize that many people think of stating their opinions in public as an invitation to social bonding: You and I both agree that Meskins are dirty and should go back home, right? The homosexuals want to bring America to its knees, don't they? They need to learn that they won't always get the agreement they seek. I've gotten used to it; so can they. And now that I think about it, that's probably what Brooks was doing in this and her other essays for Salon: We're all intolerant, aren't we? All mothers are Jewish mothers, aren't they -- really? People who can't use commas correctly are low-class and stupid, aren't they? Well, since you ask ...

There's an Echo in Here!

Ah, I knew there was something else I'd been meaning to write about.

Kim Brooks, whose reflections on the uselessness of high school English classes I discussed some time ago, returned to Salon last weekend with weeping and lamentation over ... erm, well, her own narrow-mindedness and intolerance on Facebook. The given title was "Is my Facebook page a liberal echo chamber?"

She'd found herself in what is probably a common situation for us older people who've been out of school for a few decades and didn't construct our school environment around the Internet from the start, because it didn't exist back then: she was re-establishing contact with people she knew in high school. She questioned the decision at first but then figured, What the hell, why not? I did pretty much the same thing when I began getting friend invitations on Facebook from high school acquaintances a few months after I joined.

She quickly learned why not.

President Obama had just given a televised speech on the economy, and this particular gentleman, someone I’d never known well but with whom I’d shared a neighborhood and a classroom for most of kindergarten through 12th grade, a fellow I remember as being pleasant, a bit on the quiet side, a member of the marching band, certainly not a bully or a jerk, had written, “Just turned off the t.v. More lies from B. Hussein Obama.” Within a few minutes, 10 people had “liked” this comment. Within a few more minutes, others had begun to add comments of their own, nearly all of which made reference to the president’s skin color, “questionable” national origin, or socialist death-panel agenda. I nearly fell out of my chair. My heart was racing. I squinted at the screen. I read the comments again and again. This was the real deal, not on Fox News but right here on MY computer, on MY Facebook page. I’d invited it in, that horrible place I’d left the day I graduated from high school. I looked down at my keyboard and saw that my hands were shaking. I decided to add a comment of my own: “Don’t like! Boy, am I glad I don’t live in Richmond anymore. You are un-friended!”

My own situation was different. I expected to see such things. But then I've been using the Internet for twenty-five years. I've spent a lot of time reading the subliterate ravings of people I hadn't gone to school with, but might have, and learning to deal with them, to call them out when they lie, to point out when they've passed along a well-discredited legend, to read with care what they replied, and to try to answer them without jerking my left-wing knee too much. I've also debated people who fall on the same place of the political spectrum as I do; there's no guarantee that we'll always agree with each other. This has been useful, if only to hone my own arguments, but also to make sure that I hear the views of people with different perspectives.

But I also had the advantage of spending thirty-seven years working with college students from all over the world (and contrary to popular stereotypes, not all college students are liberal hippies), but also with plenty of good old boys and gals from Southern Indiana (and contrary to popular stereotypes, not all good old Hoosiers are right-wing rednecks). Not only that but working on, and eventually running, the Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Speakers Bureau put me regularly in front of audiences that included everyone from raving homophobes to the children of gay or lesbian parents. Since we provide panels, not solitary speakers, I was sharing the stage with gay people who ranged from fellow Gay Liberationists to the (former) president of College Republicans. (He was kicked out of the organization and pulled from school by his parents when word got around that he was gay.) A lot of those people are in my Facebook friends list now. So my Facebook page, let alone my world, is not a liberal echo chamber.

I can't say the same for Our Ms. Brooks. Not only her Facebook page, but her life is evidently structured so as to protect her from people with differing values and opinions.

As an angsty teenager and college student, I used to mock people who lived in gated communities, who were so afraid of the unfamiliar world they had to erect a physical boundary to keep it at bay. But now I wonder, aren’t the boundaries we draw with Facebook just as secure as a man-made moat or an underpaid security guard manning a booth? Was the daily back-and-forth on my Facebook feed really a conversation, or was it no more than an echo chamber?

... In a world of friending and unfriending, the 99 percent versus the 53 percent, Obama as antichrist against Obama as savior, who, I wonder, has the tolerance anymore for such messy contradictions, such tainted, imperfect kinships? Who has the patience?

The most pertinent response to this, I think, would be "What do you mean 'we', white woman?" The only person in her article she really can point to who fits this picture is herself. Not that she's alone -- far from it. I've been unfriended for True Political Incorrectness by a few people on Facebook myself. The only person I've unfriended was a former co-worker who moved to another state and sent me a friend invitation before he found Jesus and began spamming his feed with Bible quotations, self-pitying inspirational soundbytes, and overtly racist anti-Obama material. He attacked me when I commented critically on his postings, so when I found that blocking his Bible feed wasn't enough to stem the flood of swill, I finally unfriended him.

As those who read this blog will know, though, I have plenty of contact with other right-wingers on Facebook, such as my two Right Wing Acquaintances. They've given me a lot of material, which saves me the trouble of browsing the Right's propaganda mills; RWA1 especially gives me what he considers the cream of the crop, the serious commentators, so he can't accuse me of cherrypicking ignorant yahoos. Then there's my Tabloid Friend, who's one of several Obama stalwarts in my Friends list. I've also got my high school friends, most of whom are simple Republican fundamentalists, though there's also the middle-of-the-road minister and his wife and a Randite high school teacher who recently moved from teaching Army brats in Europe to a different environment in Africa. I don't respond critically to everything they post, but when it seems proper, I do. Some have defriended me, others ignore me, and I'm having real (though virtual) conversations with some others. With War on Christmas Season less than a month away, I'm sure things are going to heat up again.

Who has the tolerance, who has the patience? Well, I do, for one. But so do the people who put up with me, online and face to face. Kim Brooks is overgeneralizing and oversimplifying from far too small a sample: a sample of one. What disturbs me is that she's not just a Salon pundit; she's also been a college writing instructor -- might still be, for all I know -- and not in the Ivy League, but in community colleges, which aren't exactly liberal hothouses either. She must have been a really involved, empathic teacher if she never noticed that her students didn't always agree with her politics.

One more thing, though: there's no reason why anyone's Facebook page has to be an arena for debate or the broadcast of opinions (whether your own or your friends'). That's one reason, apart from shyness, that I usually wait until people I knew in high school invite me on Facebook; and when I accept their invitations, I don't grill them on their political or religious positions to ensure they meet my high standards. They'll see some of my opinions expressed in my newsfeed soon enough, and they're welcome to react. I wait to see how they use Facebook, and if they only post photos of their grandchildren and Youtube videos of cute kittens or Top 40 hits from our youth, then butter won't melt in my mouth. If they start posting stuff about Illegal Immigrants Who Don't Pay Taxes, or the Kenyan Usurper banning Christmas Trees from the White House, though, they've entered the arena of debate.

So I don't object to Kim Brooks defriending anybody whose politics she dislikes, any more than she should object if they do the same to her. What I object to is her projecting her own hatred of difference onto everyone else, as though she weren't responsible for her own opinions and actions. (I suspect her freakout over commas is not entirely unrelated to this.) I realize that many people think of stating their opinions in public as an invitation to social bonding: You and I both agree that Meskins are dirty and should go back home, right? The homosexuals want to bring America to its knees, don't they? They need to learn that they won't always get the agreement they seek. I've gotten used to it; so can they. And now that I think about it, that's probably what Brooks was doing in this and her other essays for Salon: We're all intolerant, aren't we? All mothers are Jewish mothers, aren't they -- really? People who can't use commas correctly are low-class and stupid, aren't they? Well, since you ask ...

The Present Is a Disputed Area

I've been putting off rereading Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time for the same reason anyone hesitates to return to a much-loved work from the past: for fear it wouldn't be as good as I remember. But if anything, it's better.

I first read it in the fall of 1976, a few months after it was published. A friend had taken me to hear Piercy reading her poems, and then to hear her talking to a class, so she'd already made a big impression on me. Then a few people were passing around a copy of Women on the Edge of Time, and I read it twice within a few days before giving it to the next person. It was a slightly unsettling experience, because I'd never before read a book that felt like it was pandering to my politics. Most science fiction, let alone mundane fiction whether gay or straight, required a lot of filtering as I read it, to compensate for sexism, racism, and homophobia. Reading Woman on the Edge of Time was like stepping on a step that wasn't there; the adjustments had already been made for me. I felt enormously grateful to Piercy for the gift of such a story.

The frame story of Woman on the Edge of Time is set in New York City around 1975. Consuelo ("Connie") Ramos is thirty-seven, a Mexican-American woman living on welfare. She was born in Texas, but gradually migrated north to Chicago, and later moved to New York. When the novel opens she has already been institutionalized once, for abusing her young daughter Angelina while in a long despairing drunk following the death of her lover Claud; previously she'd spent some time in jail as Claud's accomplice as a pickpocket. When her niece Dolly's violent pimp Geraldo follows Dolly to Connie's apartment, Connie attacks Geraldo in Dolly's defense, and is railroaded back into a mental institution. Connie meets and befriends several other patients, and with some of them is drafted into a psychosurgical experiment typical of the period: the doctors hope to control "antisocial" behavior through direct stimulation of the subjects' brains. This is one major stream of the story.

We also learn that Connie has been visited by Luciente, who claims to be a visitor from the future, part of a time-travel project in 2137. Gradually, through telepathic contact, Connie is able to visit Luciente's world. Piercy leaves open the question of whether Luciente is supposed to be real or Connie's hallucination, though within the story it's clear enough. The other major stream is Connie's, and the reader's, introduction to twenty-second century Mouth-of-Mattapoisett in Massachusetts, a community patterned after Wamponaug Indian culture, though with a mixture of high technology -- Piercy had a better sense of where computers would go than most sf writers in the 70s -- and close-to-the-earth poverty.

"Our technology did not develop in a straight line from yours," Luciente tells Connie. "We have limited resources. We plan cooperatively. We can afford to waste ... nothing" (125). And: "We don't have big cities -- they didn't work" [68]. Sometime in the twenty-first century there was a major revolution, and now the ultrarich elites control only the Moon, the space platforms, and Antarctica; a war of attrition is still being waged. (Page numbers are from the Fawcett mass-market paperback, still in print after all these years.)

We get glimpses of a few other communities: Cranberry, based on "Harlem-Black" culture, and Ned's Point, "the flavor of Eastern European Jewry" (153). We're told that the First Nations have their own territory, and Connie meets a young Latina from Texas who tells her that things are somewhat different there too: "What we've done with adobe over the past forty years -- how it glows. We eat plenty of meat too, not like here, where they think one skinny cow makes a fiesta!" (210). The communities aren't isolated from each other, though: there's a lot of trade and other interaction between them, especially for educational purposes. Young people travel to study with masters in their field, and may settle in the masters' communities, move to others, or return home.

I noticed very forcefully on this reading how radical was Piercy's approach to sex/gender and race. Babies are incubated in a "brooder," because as one woman character tells Connie,

It was part of women's long revolution. When we were breaking all the old hierarchies. Finally there was that one thing we had to give up too, the only power we ever had, in return for no more power for anyone. The original production: the power to give birth. Cause as long as we were biologically enchained, we'd never be equal. And males never would be humanized to be loving and tender. So we all became mothers. Every child has three. To break the nuclear bonding [105].

On race, another character explains,

I have a sweet friend living in Cranberry dark as I am and her tribe is Harlem-Black. I could move there anytime. But if you go over, you won't find everybody black-skinned like her and me, any more than they're all tall or all got big feet. ... At grandcil -- grand council -- decisions were made forty years back to breed a high proportion of dark people and to mix the genes well through the population. At the same time, we decided to hold on to separate cultural identities. But we broke the bond between genes and culture, broke it forever. We want there to be no chance of racism of again. But we don't want the melting pot where everybody ends up with thin gruel. We want diversity, for strangeness breeds richness [103-104].

These are still threatening ideas, not only in mainstream American society but also in multiculturalist circles -- to say nothing of other cultures.

Even more threatening, I think, would be Piercy's handling of gender. Piercy invented neuter pronouns, "person" and "per", for her future, and broke the bond between reproductive organs and gendered expression. (In Mattapoisett, people usually refer to males and females, instead of men and women, except when they're talking about historical conditions and struggles.) This leads to a lot of confusion for Connie, who sometimes can easily discern the sex of the people she meets in Mattapoisett, but more often can't. So we get scenes like this one:

"When I was born, I was named Peony by my mothers --"
"Peony sounds like a girl's name" [says Connie].
"I don't understand. It was the name chosen for me" [77].

And this one:

Finally she heard a high-pitched warning siren and a fast-moving vehicle flashing red lights came shrieking toward them about a foot off the ground. It came to an abrupt halt right outside the tent and settled with a hiss. White Oak [the pilot] hopped out and a person -- the voice [Connie had heard over an audio communicator] had been male, she thought -- about five feet nine, compactly built, slid out of the other side and strode with quick, slithery grace toward the tent. Bolivar, she supposed, had kinky hair worn in braids fully as elaborate as Erzulia's, but his skin was fair and heavily freckled with the sun. He worse a knee-length ... she could not call it anything but a dress, with stripes on the bias [160].

Many readers today, I think, would try to read characters like these as "transgendered," but that's a concept that would have no meaning in a society where gender isn't an important category. I see "transgender" and "genderqueer" as largely conservative if not reactionary trends, attempts to hold on to standard gender patterns -- partly, I suppose, as a result of the influence this book has had on me. (To clarify, however quixotically: this doesn't mean that I think people shouldn't be free to express and label gender, to dress and decorate themselves, and to modify their bodies, as they wish. Of course they should: that's an old Gay Liberation tenet that I still hold to. But I still think that many trans people are very conservative in their view of gender and sex. Someday I'll do a post on that.) A reviewer on Amazon referred to the future Mattapoisett as "a female dominated society," which supports my feeling that many people perceive sexual equality as female domination.

Beyond these matters, Woman on the Edge of Time is a very rich book. Piercy put a great deal of work into her future societies (there's also a chilling dystopian chapter that gives a glimpse into the culture of the "richies," which seems even less distant now than it did thirty-five years ago), but she also describes contemporary American society with a careful and critical eye. Piercy has been a political activist for many years, first in the New Left and then in Second Wave feminism, and in environmental and international solidarity movements since then. She gives a little of this background to Connie, who recalls,

Years ago I was living in Chicago. I got involved that way. Meetings, meetings, meetings! My life was so busy, my head was boiling! I felt such hope. It was after my husband Martín ... He got killed. I was young and naive and it was supposed to be a War on Poverty. ... But it was just the same political machine and us stupid poor people, us ... idiots who thought we were running things for a change. We ended up back where we were. They gave some paying jobs to so-called neighborhood leaders. All those meetings. I ended up with nothing but feeling sore and ripped off [154].

"Paying jobs to neighborhood leaders" ... that rings a bell somehow. Later, I think they came to call themselves "community organizers."

Piercy's depiction of the brain salad surgeons and their self-justifying prattle helped my harden my own distrust of psychiatry. Another reviewer of this novel on Amazon wrote, "I'm certain that back in the 70s, and even today, there are places like this, although I doubt that implanting devices into mental patients' heads (surely a plot device) has ever taken place." His doubt is seriously misplaced; psychosurgery and attempts to control "deviant" behavior by stimulating the brain electrically had a brief vogue in the Sixties and Seventies. It went somewhat undercover, partly because its most distinguished exponent left the US for Spain, but recently he came back, and he's tanned, rested and ready. The writer Arthur Koestler wrote a novel in 1972, The Call Girls, using the same procedure as a plot device, which I think far inferior to Piercy's; but then it's written from the perspective of the doctors, not the patients. The general mentality has always been with us, of course.

I should add, and stress, that the politics of the book didn't get in the way -- at least for me. If you disagree with them, they probably will. Science fiction and especially utopian fiction are literature of ideas more than action, and tend to be didactic. But Piercy is also good at depicting characters in difficult situations. Her characters are unusual for science fiction: women, people of color, poor people, mental patients. (If you find Woman on the Edge of Time excessively preachy, compare it to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which is at least as driven by sexual politics -- male-supremacist sexual politics -- and is every bit as preachy about the conditions of [male] mental patients. Their plight is, among other things, a metaphor for the suffering of men in a "matriarchal" society, a popular theme in masculist literature of the period.)

Granted, Mattapoisett has the same weakness that most utopian societies do: it has no subconscious. The guide figure can explain everything to the visitor, and there's no underside; everything is as the guide describes it. For a comparison, imagine a normal, politically sound American of our day explaining the wonders of our society -- our racial and sexual equality, our wonderful economic system, our first-rate health care system, our peaceful coexistence with our neighbors -- to a visitor from a century past. (Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed, published in 1974, is as close as I can think of to an exception, but then it's subtitled "An Ambiguous Utopia.") This is a normal problem in the Utopian genre, though.

What impressed me most on this rereading of Woman on the Edge of Time was how little it had dated, both in its future and in its present; to me Piercy's politics seem more relevant than ever. And above all, it's a great read.

The Present Is a Disputed Area

I've been putting off rereading Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time for the same reason anyone hesitates to return to a much-loved work from the past: for fear it wouldn't be as good as I remember. But if anything, it's better.

I first read it in the fall of 1976, a few months after it was published. A friend had taken me to hear Piercy reading her poems, and then to hear her talking to a class, so she'd already made a big impression on me. Then a few people were passing around a copy of Women on the Edge of Time, and I read it twice within a few days before giving it to the next person. It was a slightly unsettling experience, because I'd never before read a book that felt like it was pandering to my politics. Most science fiction, let alone mundane fiction whether gay or straight, required a lot of filtering as I read it, to compensate for sexism, racism, and homophobia. Reading Woman on the Edge of Time was like stepping on a step that wasn't there; the adjustments had already been made for me. I felt enormously grateful to Piercy for the gift of such a story.

The frame story of Woman on the Edge of Time is set in New York City around 1975. Consuelo ("Connie") Ramos is thirty-seven, a Mexican-American woman living on welfare. She was born in Texas, but gradually migrated north to Chicago, and later moved to New York. When the novel opens she has already been institutionalized once, for abusing her young daughter Angelina while in a long despairing drunk following the death of her lover Claud; previously she'd spent some time in jail as Claud's accomplice as a pickpocket. When her niece Dolly's violent pimp Geraldo follows Dolly to Connie's apartment, Connie attacks Geraldo in Dolly's defense, and is railroaded back into a mental institution. Connie meets and befriends several other patients, and with some of them is drafted into a psychosurgical experiment typical of the period: the doctors hope to control "antisocial" behavior through direct stimulation of the subjects' brains. This is one major stream of the story.

We also learn that Connie has been visited by Luciente, who claims to be a visitor from the future, part of a time-travel project in 2137. Gradually, through telepathic contact, Connie is able to visit Luciente's world. Piercy leaves open the question of whether Luciente is supposed to be real or Connie's hallucination, though within the story it's clear enough. The other major stream is Connie's, and the reader's, introduction to twenty-second century Mouth-of-Mattapoisett in Massachusetts, a community patterned after Wamponaug Indian culture, though with a mixture of high technology -- Piercy had a better sense of where computers would go than most sf writers in the 70s -- and close-to-the-earth poverty.

"Our technology did not develop in a straight line from yours," Luciente tells Connie. "We have limited resources. We plan cooperatively. We can afford to waste ... nothing" (125). And: "We don't have big cities -- they didn't work" [68]. Sometime in the twenty-first century there was a major revolution, and now the ultrarich elites control only the Moon, the space platforms, and Antarctica; a war of attrition is still being waged. (Page numbers are from the Fawcett mass-market paperback, still in print after all these years.)

We get glimpses of a few other communities: Cranberry, based on "Harlem-Black" culture, and Ned's Point, "the flavor of Eastern European Jewry" (153). We're told that the First Nations have their own territory, and Connie meets a young Latina from Texas who tells her that things are somewhat different there too: "What we've done with adobe over the past forty years -- how it glows. We eat plenty of meat too, not like here, where they think one skinny cow makes a fiesta!" (210). The communities aren't isolated from each other, though: there's a lot of trade and other interaction between them, especially for educational purposes. Young people travel to study with masters in their field, and may settle in the masters' communities, move to others, or return home.

I noticed very forcefully on this reading how radical was Piercy's approach to sex/gender and race. Babies are incubated in a "brooder," because as one woman character tells Connie,

It was part of women's long revolution. When we were breaking all the old hierarchies. Finally there was that one thing we had to give up too, the only power we ever had, in return for no more power for anyone. The original production: the power to give birth. Cause as long as we were biologically enchained, we'd never be equal. And males never would be humanized to be loving and tender. So we all became mothers. Every child has three. To break the nuclear bonding [105].

On race, another character explains,

I have a sweet friend living in Cranberry dark as I am and her tribe is Harlem-Black. I could move there anytime. But if you go over, you won't find everybody black-skinned like her and me, any more than they're all tall or all got big feet. ... At grandcil -- grand council -- decisions were made forty years back to breed a high proportion of dark people and to mix the genes well through the population. At the same time, we decided to hold on to separate cultural identities. But we broke the bond between genes and culture, broke it forever. We want there to be no chance of racism of again. But we don't want the melting pot where everybody ends up with thin gruel. We want diversity, for strangeness breeds richness [103-104].

These are still threatening ideas, not only in mainstream American society but also in multiculturalist circles -- to say nothing of other cultures.

Even more threatening, I think, would be Piercy's handling of gender. Piercy invented neuter pronouns, "person" and "per", for her future, and broke the bond between reproductive organs and gendered expression. (In Mattapoisett, people usually refer to males and females, instead of men and women, except when they're talking about historical conditions and struggles.) This leads to a lot of confusion for Connie, who sometimes can easily discern the sex of the people she meets in Mattapoisett, but more often can't. So we get scenes like this one:

"When I was born, I was named Peony by my mothers --"
"Peony sounds like a girl's name" [says Connie].
"I don't understand. It was the name chosen for me" [77].

And this one:

Finally she heard a high-pitched warning siren and a fast-moving vehicle flashing red lights came shrieking toward them about a foot off the ground. It came to an abrupt halt right outside the tent and settled with a hiss. White Oak [the pilot] hopped out and a person -- the voice [Connie had heard over an audio communicator] had been male, she thought -- about five feet nine, compactly built, slid out of the other side and strode with quick, slithery grace toward the tent. Bolivar, she supposed, had kinky hair worn in braids fully as elaborate as Erzulia's, but his skin was fair and heavily freckled with the sun. He worse a knee-length ... she could not call it anything but a dress, with stripes on the bias [160].

Many readers today, I think, would try to read characters like these as "transgendered," but that's a concept that would have no meaning in a society where gender isn't an important category. I see "transgender" and "genderqueer" as largely conservative if not reactionary trends, attempts to hold on to standard gender patterns -- partly, I suppose, as a result of the influence this book has had on me. (To clarify, however quixotically: this doesn't mean that I think people shouldn't be free to express and label gender, to dress and decorate themselves, and to modify their bodies, as they wish. Of course they should: that's an old Gay Liberation tenet that I still hold to. But I still think that many trans people are very conservative in their view of gender and sex. Someday I'll do a post on that.) A reviewer on Amazon referred to the future Mattapoisett as "a female dominated society," which supports my feeling that many people perceive sexual equality as female domination.

Beyond these matters, Woman on the Edge of Time is a very rich book. Piercy put a great deal of work into her future societies (there's also a chilling dystopian chapter that gives a glimpse into the culture of the "richies," which seems even less distant now than it did thirty-five years ago), but she also describes contemporary American society with a careful and critical eye. Piercy has been a political activist for many years, first in the New Left and then in Second Wave feminism, and in environmental and international solidarity movements since then. She gives a little of this background to Connie, who recalls,

Years ago I was living in Chicago. I got involved that way. Meetings, meetings, meetings! My life was so busy, my head was boiling! I felt such hope. It was after my husband Martín ... He got killed. I was young and naive and it was supposed to be a War on Poverty. ... But it was just the same political machine and us stupid poor people, us ... idiots who thought we were running things for a change. We ended up back where we were. They gave some paying jobs to so-called neighborhood leaders. All those meetings. I ended up with nothing but feeling sore and ripped off [154].

"Paying jobs to neighborhood leaders" ... that rings a bell somehow. Later, I think they came to call themselves "community organizers."

Piercy's depiction of the brain salad surgeons and their self-justifying prattle helped my harden my own distrust of psychiatry. Another reviewer of this novel on Amazon wrote, "I'm certain that back in the 70s, and even today, there are places like this, although I doubt that implanting devices into mental patients' heads (surely a plot device) has ever taken place." His doubt is seriously misplaced; psychosurgery and attempts to control "deviant" behavior by stimulating the brain electrically had a brief vogue in the Sixties and Seventies. It went somewhat undercover, partly because its most distinguished exponent left the US for Spain, but recently he came back, and he's tanned, rested and ready. The writer Arthur Koestler wrote a novel in 1972, The Call Girls, using the same procedure as a plot device, which I think far inferior to Piercy's; but then it's written from the perspective of the doctors, not the patients. The general mentality has always been with us, of course.

I should add, and stress, that the politics of the book didn't get in the way -- at least for me. If you disagree with them, they probably will. Science fiction and especially utopian fiction are literature of ideas more than action, and tend to be didactic. But Piercy is also good at depicting characters in difficult situations. Her characters are unusual for science fiction: women, people of color, poor people, mental patients. (If you find Woman on the Edge of Time excessively preachy, compare it to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which is at least as driven by sexual politics -- male-supremacist sexual politics -- and is every bit as preachy about the conditions of [male] mental patients. Their plight is, among other things, a metaphor for the suffering of men in a "matriarchal" society, a popular theme in masculist literature of the period.)

Granted, Mattapoisett has the same weakness that most utopian societies do: it has no subconscious. The guide figure can explain everything to the visitor, and there's no underside; everything is as the guide describes it. For a comparison, imagine a normal, politically sound American of our day explaining the wonders of our society -- our racial and sexual equality, our wonderful economic system, our first-rate health care system, our peaceful coexistence with our neighbors -- to a visitor from a century past. (Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed, published in 1974, is as close as I can think of to an exception, but then it's subtitled "An Ambiguous Utopia.") This is a normal problem in the Utopian genre, though.

What impressed me most on this rereading of Woman on the Edge of Time was how little it had dated, both in its future and in its present; to me Piercy's politics seem more relevant than ever. And above all, it's a great read.

Human Rights and the Olympics

A student I work with told me the other day that he was giving a speech on human rights and the Olympics for a class, focusing on China’s maltreatment of Tibet. That jarred something in my memory, and I asked him what he thought about poor and homeless and politically suspect people being cleared from the streets of cities where the Olympics have taken place in the past. Or about big areas being razed so that new stadiums and playing fields and Olympic Villages can be built. In the end I went to the library to find Dave Zirin’s Welcome to the Terrordome (Haymarket Books, 2007), which I read last summer, for its meaty chapter on the politics of the Olympic Games.

Sports, you may remember, are not a great interest of mine. But ever since Noam Chomsky freaked out some of his fans in the 1980s by speaking critically about the distractive function of commercial sports, I’ve been paying a little more attention. (Those remarks won Chomsky a shocked mention in the Village Voice’s sports page – it’s one thing to criticize American imperialism and Big Business making obscene profits in other realms, but Sport is holy even to many progressives.) Montreal is still paying for the 1976 games it hosted, over thirty years later, and Greece went into deep deficit to pay for the 2004 Athens games.

Then there’s

the web of temporary martial law that accompanies every Olympics. Already in Britain, and in Beijing as they prepare for the 2008 Games, we are seeing a familiar script replayed every two years, with only the language changing. Political leaders start by saying that a city must be made “presentable for an international audience.” Then the police and security forces get the green light to round up “undesirables” with extreme prejudice [133].

As examples Zirin cites “the jailing of thousands of young Black men in the infamous ‘Olympic Gang Sweeps’” in Los Angeles in 1984, using a 1916 law enacted to suppress the Wobblies; the Atlanta Games of 1996, where “officials razed African-American-occupied public housing to make way for Olympic facilities”; Athens in 2004, where psychiatric hospitals were stuffed with the homeless, and “Greece actually overrode its own constitution by ‘allowing’ thousands of armed-to-the-teeth paramilitary troops from the United States, Britain, and Israel into their country” (134). He then devotes several pages to the repression in Mexico in 1968, when hundreds of students and workers were gunned down by security police shortly before the games. “In China,” he adds, “where human rights and trade union organizing are a daily battle in normal times, the government will at the very least use the Olympics to crush even mild dissent” (138).

And I’m sure I don’t need to mention the 1936 games in Hitler’s Germany? Avery Brundage, then

the president of the U.S. Olympic Committee … personally set out to quash a rising din of protest. He met with Hitler in Berlin, where they shared smiles and handshakes for the camera. Brundage returned to the States with tales of a new Germany that treated Jews and other national minorities with exceptional care. He dismissed the anti-Hitler rumblings as the work of a communist conspiracy. … As late as 1941, he was praising the Reich at a Madison Square Garden America First rally [127].

His fondness for Hitler didn’t keep Brundage from becoming the President of the IOC, a post he held until 1972. It’s worth reading Zirin’s entire chapter on the Olympics, and indeed the whole book.

It’s an odd paradox. The Olympics bring repression with them, but they’re a useful platform for drawing attention to repression. Governments woo the Olympics in order to distract world attention from their misconduct with Riefenstahlian spectacle, yet that very visibility makes them vulnerable to exposure. Will anyone be very surprised that George Bush and Kim Jong-Il are on the same side in this controversy? There was violence as the torch passed through Seoul, but no disturbances are likely to mar its passage through Pyongyang. Despite Avery Brundage’s declaration that “The cardinal rule of the Olympics is no politics,” the Olympics are political through and through. I’m glad that people are using the Olympics to make noise about China’s abuses, though these abuses aren’t confined to Tibet. Given the history of the Olympics, though, I wonder whether resistance to the games themselves isn’t a better idea.

Human Rights and the Olympics

A student I work with told me the other day that he was giving a speech on human rights and the Olympics for a class, focusing on China’s maltreatment of Tibet. That jarred something in my memory, and I asked him what he thought about poor and homeless and politically suspect people being cleared from the streets of cities where the Olympics have taken place in the past. Or about big areas being razed so that new stadiums and playing fields and Olympic Villages can be built. In the end I went to the library to find Dave Zirin’s Welcome to the Terrordome (Haymarket Books, 2007), which I read last summer, for its meaty chapter on the politics of the Olympic Games.

Sports, you may remember, are not a great interest of mine. But ever since Noam Chomsky freaked out some of his fans in the 1980s by speaking critically about the distractive function of commercial sports, I’ve been paying a little more attention. (Those remarks won Chomsky a shocked mention in the Village Voice’s sports page – it’s one thing to criticize American imperialism and Big Business making obscene profits in other realms, but Sport is holy even to many progressives.) Montreal is still paying for the 1976 games it hosted, over thirty years later, and Greece went into deep deficit to pay for the 2004 Athens games.

Then there’s

the web of temporary martial law that accompanies every Olympics. Already in Britain, and in Beijing as they prepare for the 2008 Games, we are seeing a familiar script replayed every two years, with only the language changing. Political leaders start by saying that a city must be made “presentable for an international audience.” Then the police and security forces get the green light to round up “undesirables” with extreme prejudice [133].

As examples Zirin cites “the jailing of thousands of young Black men in the infamous ‘Olympic Gang Sweeps’” in Los Angeles in 1984, using a 1916 law enacted to suppress the Wobblies; the Atlanta Games of 1996, where “officials razed African-American-occupied public housing to make way for Olympic facilities”; Athens in 2004, where psychiatric hospitals were stuffed with the homeless, and “Greece actually overrode its own constitution by ‘allowing’ thousands of armed-to-the-teeth paramilitary troops from the United States, Britain, and Israel into their country” (134). He then devotes several pages to the repression in Mexico in 1968, when hundreds of students and workers were gunned down by security police shortly before the games. “In China,” he adds, “where human rights and trade union organizing are a daily battle in normal times, the government will at the very least use the Olympics to crush even mild dissent” (138).

And I’m sure I don’t need to mention the 1936 games in Hitler’s Germany? Avery Brundage, then

the president of the U.S. Olympic Committee … personally set out to quash a rising din of protest. He met with Hitler in Berlin, where they shared smiles and handshakes for the camera. Brundage returned to the States with tales of a new Germany that treated Jews and other national minorities with exceptional care. He dismissed the anti-Hitler rumblings as the work of a communist conspiracy. … As late as 1941, he was praising the Reich at a Madison Square Garden America First rally [127].

His fondness for Hitler didn’t keep Brundage from becoming the President of the IOC, a post he held until 1972. It’s worth reading Zirin’s entire chapter on the Olympics, and indeed the whole book.

It’s an odd paradox. The Olympics bring repression with them, but they’re a useful platform for drawing attention to repression. Governments woo the Olympics in order to distract world attention from their misconduct with Riefenstahlian spectacle, yet that very visibility makes them vulnerable to exposure. Will anyone be very surprised that George Bush and Kim Jong-Il are on the same side in this controversy? There was violence as the torch passed through Seoul, but no disturbances are likely to mar its passage through Pyongyang. Despite Avery Brundage’s declaration that “The cardinal rule of the Olympics is no politics,” the Olympics are political through and through. I’m glad that people are using the Olympics to make noise about China’s abuses, though these abuses aren’t confined to Tibet. Given the history of the Olympics, though, I wonder whether resistance to the games themselves isn’t a better idea.

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.