Five Things I Love And Hate About New Years

I love New Years.  I love all of them – Jewish, pagan (which would be Halloween), Julian, Chinese, gay (now known as Pride Sunday – the newspaper I work on, UltraViolet, changes volumes in June) … haven’t been to a Nawrouz (Persian New Year) or Diwali (Indian New Year) celebration as yet but hope to soon.  I love it because let’s face it, New Year = Hope, and I’m an optimist.

Rebecca Solnit, in her otherwise amazing piece in The Nation, claims, “Optimism says that everything will be fine…,” but she’s wrong.  Optimism says, “Everything can be fine.”  As I was discussing with friends last night, all activists are optimists (even the ones that are ceaselessly negative in meetings).  That’s what enables us to keep going, despite the appearance of getting nowhere.  Optimism says, “We can do it.”  New Years is the Time of the Optimist. 

Here are a few of the things I love:

• Wrap-up shows.  Even though they’re mostly all the same, I love seeing the highlight reels, seeing what made people’s lists.  Love hearing the best speeches and jeering at the worst.
• Best of lists, especially books.  This year’s top entries were For Harriet’s 10 Books Released by Black Women in 2013 You Should Read and Jessica Valenti’s “My Top Ten Favorite Feminist Articles of 2013”.
• Smart people waxing reflective.  See above-mentioned Rebecca Solnit and my girls on yesterday’s KPFA Women’s Magazine.
• Law & Order marathons.
• Hearing all the best music of the year at once.

Here’s what I don’t love:

• False cheer
• The emphasis on dating and being kissed at midnight
• Resolutions – especially since so many of them will have to do with dieting, like being thin or depriving yourself is what makes you a good person
• Fixations on elections and what the year will bring for politicians
• Hearing all the worst music of the year at once

Here are a few of my best ofs:   

Books:

• WE ARE ALL COMPLETELY BESIDE OURSELVES by Karen Joy Fowler  - can’t say enough good things about this one (thanks, Julie).  Run don’t walk to your nearest indy bookstore.
• QUIET: THE POWER OF INTROVERTS IN A WORLD THAT CAN’T STOP TALKING by Susan Cain - okay, it’s mainstream and promotes a false dichotomy between “extrovert” and “introvert”.  I learned a lot about myself and others.
• SHAKE OFF by Mischa Hiller (thanks Radhika) – thriller by a Palestinian author with a Palestinian protagonist.  Great characters, fast-moving plot.  Just bought SABRA ZOO (his next), but making myself read some serious fiction first
• THE SECRETS OF MARY BOWSER by Lois Leveen - not perfect, but engrossing story of a freed slave who returns to Richmond (my hometown) to spy for the North.  Great woman protagonist; good antidote to “12 Years a Slave” (the movie, not the book) with its lack of depiction of agency by the slaves.

Articles & blogs

Why Are There Still So Few Women in Science? (Eileen Pollack) 

Happy to see feminists challenging some harmful dynamics within our movements, without lapsing into solipsism:

• On cynicism, calling out, and creating movements thatdon’t leave our people behind (Verónica Bayetti Flores) 
• Calling IN: A Less Disposable Way of Holding Each OtherAccountable (Ngọc Loan Trần)  
• What picketing taughtme about feminism (Julia Carrie Wong) 

After seeing Henry A. Giroux on Bill Moyers, I became a devotee of Giroux and his Public Intellectual Project.  This article rocked my world: The Spectacle of Illiteracy and the Crisis of Democracy 

Actions

• Anti-Gentrification Activism in San Francisco – it’s been a long time coming, but the last year has seen an explosion of activism to halt displacement and reclaim the city for the people who made it. Hopefully not too late! 
• San Francisco Google bus blockade (subset of above)  - great new tactic, lots of positive energy, hopefully folks won’t overuse it.
• Anonymous queer art countering Islamophobia on San Francisco public transit 
• Rising of the Fast Food Workers 
• Free Bradley (Chelsea) Manning Contingent and other actions at SF Pride:  Nothing like telling people they can’t do something to get people’s creative juices going.
• Boycott SodaStream Super Bowl Video Contesxt – in response to SodaStream’s Super Bowl commercial promoting its settlement-made product, US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation sought spoof ads from far and wide.  Check them out.

Wishing everyone a joyous, contemplative, creative and revolutionary New Year

The Anti-Feminist Mystique?

I think I must be the worst feminist journalist/blogger in the world, or at least the country.

It’s tempting to pretend that I was just too cool to write about 50^th anniversary of The Feminine Mystique’s publication, but the truth is I had no idea.  I somehow managed to get left off the list for review copies of the reissued volume, no one invited me to be on a panel on its impact, and goddess knows my friends weren’t talking about it.

courtesy: www.tressugar.com

In fact, the date might have slipped by me altogether if I hadn’t bought a Kindle last week and celebrated by spending even more money on a subscription to the New York Times.  So yesterday, on my way to work, I read an article by Janet Maslin reflecting on the book’s impact, and it had links to a piece that had appeared a couple days earlier and that referred to another piece – you get the picture.

Everyone, it seems, was celebrating this momentous day except for contemporary feminist activists.  Amitai Etzioni diaried (is that a word? Why not if “diarist” is?) about it on The Daily Kos.  Historian Peter Dreier wrote about it on The Huffington Post and Truth Out.  New York Times Op-Ed Columnist Gail Collins, who wrote the introduction to the 50^th Anniversary edition, hosted a video round table and gave an interview to The Atlantic.  (The Atlantic, incidentally, has had no less than six articles about the book in the last few months, most by men and fairly uncharitable).  Third-wave feminist Kathleen Parker wrote a snotty “Who needs it?” column in The Washington Post.

So what’s left to say?  Not too much except that:

(1) A surprising number of the major pieces were written by men, and many of the ones by women – especially the hostile ones  – mainly quote men;

(2) Nearly all the comments on the aforementioned video debate – which is highly entertaining and I recommend it – are by irate men who clearly have not read the book but think they know what it says;

(3) It’s amazing how much outrage the book still provokes – again, mostly by people who never read it, as Stephanie Coontz documented in her book A Strange Stirring; and

(4) People are, as always, quick to condemn prominent feminists where they would be more forgiving of almost any other icon who was but a product of her time.

I only saw Friedan in the flesh once.  She came to speak at my college.  All the feminists on campus were there.  A Black woman – that’s how they identified then -- got up and asked a question, I don’t remember exactly what it was but basically she was taking Friedan to task for ignoring the specific oppressions of women of color and poor women.  Friedan reacted like a skunk whose tail had been stepped on.   

“Don’t make me the enemy,” she screamed. 

 The woman she was screaming at, a friend of mine, ran out of the room in tears, followed by other Black women who gathered around her.  I and some of their other white friends followed.

“That’s why we’re not in the movement,” I heard one Black woman say to the woman who’d been the target of Friedan’s venom.

I was so humiliated.  I couldn’t believe she’d done that – this woman that we all looked up to.  It was just a terrible day all the way around.  It was doubly shocking because obviously that wasn’t the first time Friedan had been challenged on racism.  It’s kind of like how angry Bill Clinton used to get when feminists criticized his policies or his mediocre record on appointing women to high positions.  You always think that years of being publicly criticized would make people grow a tougher skin – or maybe even be able to listen and hear what people are saying.

Given that experience, it’s surprising that I feel like defending Friedan now.  Or maybe it’s not.  Maybe I’m remembering times when I didn’t behave well in public.  Or maybe I’m thinking ahead to a time when something I did or said that seemed groundbreaking is going to seem antiquated and even counterrevolutionary.

Either way, it’s hard not to scream when I read something like Ashley Fetters’ “4 Big Problems with The Feminine Mystique,” in The Atlantic.  Fetters begins with “It’s racist. And it’s classist.” (quoting the estimable bell hooks for the specifics) but quickly moves on to quote biographer Daniel Horowitz to support the claim that, “It’s founded on a lie.” The lie in question is Friedan’s choice to deny her past as a union organizer and “radical leftist” (Horowtiz’s phrase).  So are we supposed to disrespect Friedan because she was concerned about working class women, or because she wasn’t?  Or are we just supposed to disrespect her -- because?

(Because I know how very interested you are in the minutiae of my life, let me just mention that this is the first blog post I've been able to do completely from home, having finally gotten my place wired on Saturday.  It's fabulous.)

Gillian Flynn and the Myth of the Murderous Moms

Recently a coworker who knows I like mysteries handed me his copy of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl.

I was ambivalent about it because, one, I had read Flynn’s Sharp Objects, and didn’t like it that well, although it had some good elements.  I particularly didn’t like the fact that all the villains were women or girls and all the men were kind of saintly, if clueless.  And two, it meant lugging a hardback book around for a week.

In the genre fiction writing class I just took, the teacher was talking about why some genre writers “cross over” into “literary” fiction, while others don’t.  Gillian Flynn’s name came up.  He said the difference between her and all the writers stuck in the “pocket mystery” section of the used bookstores is that she has a better agent.

But Gone Girl was such a huge best-seller, and the only other mystery writer in my writing group had raved about it (though she and I don’t necessarily have the same taste).  So I decided to give it a whirl.

Near the end of the first half, I told a friend, “This book really surprised me.  I kind of love it.”  It’s extremely well written.  It’s not necessarily more “literary” than a lot of other mysteries – Marcia Muller does great place evocations, Sara Paretsky builds unforgettable characters, and they both do great issue coverage as do Walter Moseley (who may also be considered “cross-over”) and Tony Hillerman.  But Flynn’s writing combined the quality most important to me – which I inelegantly call “unannoyingness,” with a biting satire that made me want to jump up and cheer.

One bit in particular has already risen to the level of feminist classic.  If you’ve read the book or a review of it, you know what I’m referring to.  But in case anyone hasn’t, here it is (again):

Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.

Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl...(How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: “I like strong women.” If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because “I like strong women” is code for “I hate strong women.”)”

If you’re a feminist, you can’t not love a book that contains those paragraphs.  I tore through the alternating chapters counterposing the diary of Amy, the embittered trying-to-be-Cool Girl with the present-day tribulations of Nick, the apparently bumbling, lying, philandering wife-killer.  Now I knew that the story was sure to turn, because it could not be so simple as it seemed, and I had more or less guessed how.  But I was unprepared for how cheated I felt when I realized that the character I’d grown so fond of was as fictitious as Cool Girl is.

The book kept me turning the pages, I’ll say that for it, and it retained flashes of brilliance.  But by the end, I threw it across the room, saying, “This woman is anti-feminist.”

How could Flynn go from uber-feminist to anti-feminist in 200 pages?  The only possible answer is that she’s neither.  I looked online to see what other women were saying.

The best thing I found is “Gone Girl and the Specter of Feminism” from a great blog called interrogatingmedia:

Ultimately, Gone Girl is done in by its ambition. It desperately wants to do interesting, subversive things, but in trying to, falls into some really misogynist narratives and implications. …

In the end, I suppose Gone Girl is really indicative of a post-feminist mindset, wherein the problems of misogyny become somehow the fault of feminism. Perhaps this is why the novel has a weird jab at post-feminist men. Perhaps that’s how one can say brave rape victims are tired, and go on to write a novel like Gone Girl. Or how we can blame the lack of diverse female characters on girl power. It’s a strange world out there for feminism, but this particular mystery isn’t fooling me.

Unfortunately, Ms. Interrogating and I seem to be out there mostly alone in the feminist blogosphere.  Most bloggers and reviewers quote the Cool Girl passage, nod to Flynn’s formidable writing skill, and accept her skewering of feminist tropes as so much good storytelling.

“There’s a difference between writing misogyny for misogyny’s sake and pointing out that misogyny exists and is as insidious in fiction as it is in the real world, and that’s what Gone Girl gets right.” http://earlybirdcatchestheworm.wordpress.com/2012/11/22/gone-girl-by-gillian-flynn-review/

“But even with this feminist treatise hidden within, Gone Girl has no particular affiliations. It’s not really a feminist novel, nor is it a political one. It’s just a damn good book about murder, marriage, and mystery.” http://www.literarytraveler.com/books/murder-she-wrote-reviewing-gone-girl-by-gillian-flynn/

“Gone Girl is ultimately a political novel. More accurately, it is a feminist novel, and it is at its most exhilarating in this particular manifestation of its existence.
Gone Girl is a feminist novel in the elementary sense that it would have been impossible for a man to have written it. No man writing today would be allowed to take the side of a falsely-accused rapist and portray his alleged victim as not only a fraud but a vicious aggressor.” http://tychy.wordpress.com/2012/08/02/book-review-gone-girl/

Had I not read Sharp Objects, I would have dismissed Gone Girl as basically falling into the “wanting to do something different” trap and ending up being predictable in an under-analyzed way.  On her website Flynn says the reason she writes women villains is that “I’ve grown quite weary of the spunky heroines, brave rape victims, soul-searching fashionistas that stock so many books. I particularly mourn the lack of female villains — good, potent female villains.”

I don’t know what Flynn’s been reading or watching, but in the mysteries I read or watch on TV, I would say a woman is the killer eight times out of ten.  Even if it’s a guy – as in Tana French’s In the Woods – a woman pulled the strings.  There are whole television series devoted to women who do bad things, from “Snapped” about women who kill to the British hit series “Bad Girls” about women in prison to the Broadway mega-hit “Chicago,” you can’t turn around without seeing evil women.

A couple years ago I was bored one night so I decided to check out “Law & Order: Los Angeles” on on-demand.  (Okay, I was really really bored.)  I started watching the first episode.  Since the teenage actress was the first suspect, I figured she likely wasn’t actually the killer, but when it turned out to be her mother, I turned it off and went on to the second.  In that one, a young woman who’s recently been released from prison is found dead and the killer turns out to be her rapist cellmate.  Tried the one about the mistress of the Congressman.  It seemed like the woman’s ex-husband had done it, but no, the Congressman’s wife had hired him.  In the one where the female pro golfer is killed, the prime suspect is the male golfer she was besting, but of course his mother turned out to be the mastermind.  I think the series went eight for eight that night.  The only thing television cop-and-lawyer shows have more of than female killers is Black women judges.

Flynn’s fascination with female killers, she says, came from her childhood love for Brothers Grimm fairy tales.  “Screw the blonde, gentle heroines, it was those wicked queens and evil stepmothers I adored.”

The fact is that those fairy tales, just like the murderous-masterminding-mother-wife motif in Law & Order, expressed the fear of women’s power in a gender-stratified patriarchal society.  It’s not that I think anyone is sitting there saying, “Let’s make all the women killers so people will agree with taking away women’s right to abortion.”  But it’s nonetheless true that in a country obsessed with stopping women from “killing their babies” it helps to have images of murdering mothers all over the media.

Gillian Flynn may be “tired of brave rape victims,” but unfortunately, men are not tired of rape.