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Posts Tagged ‘feminism’

Duckspeak

Posted in Adria Richards, Bruce Byfield, communication, Donglegate, duckspeak, feminism, George Orwell, Personal, speaking, Uncategorized, writing, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on March 30, 2013 | Leave a Comment »

George Orwell’s legacy includes dozens of memorable phrases. They include “Big Brother is watching you,” “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others,” and “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever,” all of which are more chilling for seeming all too probable. But if anything, he is even better known for the words he coined, like “doublethink” and “thoughtcrime.” However, one Orwellian coining that I’ve always wished had become a part of English is “duckspeak.”

According to Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, “duckspeak” means superficially different things depending to whom it is applied. When used of a speaker who follows the current orthodoxy, it is a word of approval. However, when applied to an enemy, it’s an insult;.

In its vividness, the word reminds me of some the great invective of the eighteenth century, including “toady,” “bootlicker” and “lickspittle.” And now I think, the eighteenth century developed a near-synonym for duckspeak, too – “cant.”

Both cant and duckspeak refer to a bland and unthinking expression of conventional ideas, often with enthusiasm and stubbornness. The difference is that cant was usually applied to statements that the speaker disagreed with. Duckspeak retains that application, but becomes a compliment when you agree with the statement, because speaking in cliches implies an unthinking loyalty. The implication is that a person who is a duckspeaker is unlikely to be disloyal, because they have no original thoughts.

Essentially, duckspeakers are those who break every rule for clear expression that George Orwell summarized in “Politics and the English Language.” They don’t use short, effective words; they use long, vague ones that obscure their meaning. They frown on original thought, and prefer instead to string cliches together into an approximation of meaning.

Rather than communication, their goals are inter-personal. They may hope that a flow of empty phrases will silence the opposition and impress bystanders into a silent admiration of their eloquence. However, their main purpose – quite unconsciously – is to show themselves orthodox followers of whatever line of thinking they happen to support.

The idea that speech or writing might be used to get things done is foreign to their actions, although when you point out the fact, they are likely to stare at you and wonder why you are stating the obvious – thereby proving that they are also engaged in what Orwell termed “doublethink,” the holding of two completely contradictory ideas at the same time.

Examples of duckspeak are everywhere. You might say that it is the dialect of modern industrial culture. But what got me thinking about duckspeak was the incident at PyCon that people call Donglegate. Hearing two men behind her joking about big dongles, Adria Richards posted a picture of them on Twitter to shame them, and complained to the conference organizers, who reprimanded the men. Richards later blogged about the incident with what can only be called a triumphant tone, suggesting she had struck a blow for women in technology. Soon after, others started giving their opinion of what happened. Richards and one of the jokers lost their jobs, and anti-feminists sent her death and rape threats.

Anybody with a claim to impartiality might have seen these events as evidence that feminism has come to high-tech, and that exactly how it will fit into that sub-culture needs to be discussed. However, with few exceptions, people on both sides could only respond with duckspeak.

The anti-feminists attacked Richards for the joker’s loss of his job, while openly rejoicing when she lost hers. They labeled her a stereotypical feminist – dictatorial, humorless, and erratic – and suggested that she deserved what happened to her. Rather than trying to analyze the memes that might have caused Donglegate, they used it as an excuse for the same old invective, ignoring the fact that many things need to change.

But to my dismay, the feminists – the women and men I support – responded as badly.. They excused Richards’ actions on the grounds that talking to the jokers one-on- one might be difficult for a woman, ignoring the fact Richards is articulate and capable. They petitioned for Richards’ employer to rehire her, while showing little sympathy for the fired joker, suggesting that he deserved what happened to him. They painted her as the victim of racism and misogyny (which she was), but made little mention of her arrogance and carelessness.

In other words, all nuance was lost in the discussion, and with it any hope for serious discussion. Both sides were too busy proving their orthodoxy to manage anything constructive.

Aside from a possible emotional catharsis, all that came out of the affair was the tendency of some anti-feminists to quote their opponents in squeaky voices. To a reader of Orwell like me, they seemed to have independently re-invented duckspeak in the most literal sense. But of course, what they never noticed is their verbal manifestos could have been lampooned in exactly the same. way.

Most people didn’t even get that much from the affair. We are all so used to public discussion degenerating in this way that most of us forget that it could be conducted in any other way.

That’s probably why duckspeak, like cant before it, has become obsolete. You don’t need a word for the norm. It’s just how people behave.

Still, watching episodes like Donglegate unfold, I conclude that a revival at least of duckspeak, with its ambiguous meanings, would be a useful way to improve public thought. Watching the anti-feminists and feminists demonstrate their separate orthodoxies, I couldn’t help thinking of the end of Animal Farm, in which humans and pigs are mingling, and the watching animals are having an increasingly hard time telling the two apart.

That’s where duckspeak leads. And if, by any chance I’m guilty of it here, then all I can say is – quack to you, too.

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Marriage and name changes

Posted in Bruce Byfield, feminism, marriage, name-changing, Personal, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on March 9, 2013 | 4 Comments »

I’m surprised – and more than a little sad – to learn that women are still being pressured to change their names when they marry. I had hoped that my generation had put an end to the entire issue and it was now entirely a matter of personal choice.

When Trish and I proposed to each other simultaneously in my dorm room at Simon Fraser University, we both had a condition: she wouldn’t change her name. We both considered ourselves feminists, so it wasn’t even a question we needed to discuss. We would stand firm on the decision, and be example for couples in the future – or so we imagined in our naivety.

What we hadn’t imagined is how much we would be pressured to change our minds. “It is a woman’s pride and privilege to take her husband’s name,” a female co-worker told Trish, and stalked away angrily when Trish said she was marrying a partner, not a husband.

“Can’t you change her mind?” Family and friends asked me repeatedly, apparently unable to believe that the condition had been mine as much as hers.

“Won’t your children be confused?” Everyone said to both of us. Then they accused us of flippancy when we suggested that any children would somehow muddle through.

In the months between our engagement and marriage, we must have heard every argument imaginable against our decision. It showed a lack of commitment, we were told. It showed that Trish had reservations about becoming part of my family. We would have trouble checking into hotel rooms. It would be awkward socially. People would assume we were immoral. People would talk.

Of course, the reaction was worse because Trish had been married before, and had already changed her name. She had been reluctant, but the idea of continuing the family name was important to her first spouse, so she had gone along with it. But after he had died in an epileptic seizure, she had never got around to reverting to her original name because the paperwork was a nuisance. She had come of age with her married name, and it was something to remember him by, and she was not going to accustom herself to another name when she had become comfortable with the one she was using.

For reasons I have never understood, I was supposed to find her decision a deeply personal insult. Her first spouse and I might have been rivals had we ever met, but we hadn’t. We obviously had similar tastes in women, and Trish’s ten months with him had helped turn her into the woman I met, so why should I care if she kept her name as a memento? I don’t believe in existence after death, but I was so comfortable with the fact of him that I even had a dream in which he encouraged Trish and I to marry.

I couldn’t help noticing, too, that, her first husband’s family welcomed our marriage more than either of ours did. I couldn’t help but sympathize with him after Trish’s mother told me, somewhat grudgingly, “Well, I like her second choice of husband better than her first.”

But throughout all this, we kept to our original intention. By the rehearsal dinner the night before the wedding, we thought we had weathered the worst.. Then, after the dinner, family members on both sides told us privately that, if Trish didn’t change her name, scandal would result, and we would never be accepted by anyone – never mind that we were legally married.

I spent a sleepless night before the wedding, not worrying about whether I was making the right decision, or about the ceremony, but about the emotional blackmail with which we had been ambushed. Finally, I gave up trying to sleep and wrote a long letter explaining out decision which I planned to ask the priest to give to our parents at the reception after we had left.

To this day, I don’t know whether he ever did as he asked. But he was a bit of a diplomat regardless. As we left the church, he announced us as, “Mr and Mrs Byfield,” a form of address that gave both of us a start, but which he rightly judged wouldn’t disturb us unduly and would placate the families long enough for us to get away on our honeymoon.

Soon enough, everyone found out that we had done as we had planned all along. And for a few years, the conversation got a little frosty any time Trish’s last name was about to become relevant. But the families grew used to her choice of names, and none of the prophesied inconveniences or disasters came anywhere near to happening.

At the most, some strangers might have disapproved of us, but, if they did, we never heard their disapproval. Most likely, even such passing disapproval was rare, because by that time common-law relationships were becoming acceptable.

Our story amuses more than angers me now, although enduring it was an exercise in self-control while I lived it.. But when I remember the unfairness of the reactions to what we considered a rationally reached conclusion, I want to leap up and shout at any new couples facing the same pressures today to hold firm. None of the difficulties predicted for you will actually happen, and you’ll have the advantage of starting your lives together by having stood up together to emotional bullying. You’ll have learned that you can trust each other, and that will help your relationship to be a long one.

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When women came to the canon

Posted in Bruce Byfield, feminism, literary canon, Personal, Uncategorized, women writers, writing, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 19, 2013 | Leave a Comment »

I have been lucky enough to witness several social revolutions in my time. The most obvious is the personal computer; I only regret that it didn’t happen twenty years earlier. But the one that is most important to me personally is the acceptance of women into the literary canons.

Art being the record of human experience, this change did as much as any friendship or relationship to help me understand that women’s experiences were human experience, and therefore were something I needed to know.

When I started studying literature in Grade 12, women were severely under-represented in the works studied in academia. Except for those who might be hidden under the name of Anonymous, the first female writer mentioned was usually Jane Austen. She was too important a novelist to ignore, but for the rest of the nineteenth and twentieth century, women’s representation was limited. Charlotte Bronte was credited with having written one worthwhile novel. Elizabeth Barrett Browning had written a collection of soppy sonnets to her husband. Christina Rossetti had written a few children’s poems and minor lyrics. Emily Dickinson was a decided eccentric.

And so it went, with women consistently written out of the literary history whenever possible, and presented as minor if they had to be mentioned at all. Even George Eliot was known for only three novels, one of which, Silas Marner, was taught mainly because it had the virtue of being short enough for undergraduate’s attention spans.

The only exception was contemporary literature, especially science fiction. There, you could find female authors in something close to the percentages that you might expect from random chance, and I read writers like Ursula K. LeGuin and James Tiptree, Jr. (actually, Alice Sheldon) as eagerly as their male peers. But even these pioneers sometimes had little to say about women as women, as Le Guin would come to acknowledge later in her career.

Anyway, there was something daring about asserting the worth of writers who were still living. Somehow, they were not taken with quite the same seriousness as writers in the canon.

By contrast, by the time I finished my bachelor’s degree, the canon had been drastically revised. In those pre-Internet days, the main reason for this change was the feminist-inspired publication of more female writers, often by small, painfully non-profit imprints.

Suddenly, Charlotte Bronte, Christina Rossetti, and George Eliots were revealed to have had not just the occasional success, but entire writing careers. Other writers were suddenly being talked about – people like Aphra Behn, Mary Shelley, Ann Radcliffe, Zora Neale Hurston, and dozens of others.

I viewed this change with a mixture of enthusiasm and confusion. On the one hand, here was enough fresh reading to keep me busy for years (which it has). On the other hand, just what had I been taught?

More importantly, who were these women? As a science fiction reader, I already knew that all worthy works were not contained in the canon, and reading Robert Graves’ literary criticism had taught me that exercising my own judgment on the canon was not only permissible, but necessary for independence of thought.

Yet if these women were any good, then surely I would have been taught something about them. I suspected that the promotion of some of these writers was as much the result of academics creating careers for themselves as it was of negligence. And, aside from the occasional exception for historical reasons, why should I bother with mediocrity?

Gradually, though, I realized I was being unreasonable. How could I possibly learn who was worth reading unless a wide variety of works were available? Besides, while most of the work of Elizabeth Gaskell (for example) struck me as uninspired back then, so did that of accepted male members of the canon, such as Anthony Trollope or William Thackeray. If mediocre men were accepted, there was no reason not to accept mediocre women as well. If nothing else, tastes differ, not only between person and also occasions.

At any rate, the newly available work had enough masterpieces to justify the era of rediscovery in general. Without it, I might never have discovered the slippery mind of Aphra Behn, or learned as a non-Christian to appreciate the quirky thoughts of Christina Rossetti. I would have enjoyed Middlemarch and The Mill on the Floss, but not have had Eliot’s other books to put them into context.

Just as importantly, I found myself reading works by women differently once a critical mass of their work became easily available. Being a young man and as egocentric as most young men, I had always read Jane Austen’s novels about courtship and marriage or Jane Eyre‘s story of love and indendence as exceptions – interesting in their own way but somehow trivial compared to the concerns of male writers.

However, discovering dozens of female writers changed my perception. Newly able to place their subject matter in context, I realized that such topics were not exceptions. For a very long time, they were the concerns of half the human race. If I were to be fully human myself, I needed to understand these concerns, and appreciate them – and in a matter of months, I did.

I like to think that ordinary life was leading me to similar conclusions, and perhaps it was. But I think that, without the rewriting of the canon, the process would have taken me years, instead of months. I might not have even been ready for love and marriage when they came my way near the end of my readjustment.

People often talk about how feminism transforms women’s lives. But, if my personal example is any indication, its effect on men’s lives can be just as great. Throughout my life, my outlook has been broader – more mature – because of the simple fact that, when I was in my late teens, suddenly I could read about women’s lives and learn to appreciate them as the material of art.

The lesson remains one of the most valuable ones that I have ever had.

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Garth Ennis and Gender

Posted in Bruce Byfield, comics, feminism, Garth Ennis, gender, gender roles, graphic novels, Personal, Preacher, Pride and Joy, The Boys, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on February 17, 2013 | Leave a Comment »

Gender issues don’t play well in comics. The most notorious example is Dave Sims’ Cerebus series, which, as soon the topic was raised, degenerated from a hilarious and inventive series into self-indulgent, misogynistic rants that quickly became unreadable. By contrast, though, Garth Ennis has not only been discussing gender issues repeatedly in his series, but doing so in with an artistry that makes what he has to say intelligent even if – as I do – you have reservations about his opinions.

This suggestion, I realize, requires some defense. Garth Ennis? The hard-swearing, raunchy, ultra-violent, hilarious Garth Ennis, who had to start his own publishing company to write the sort of things he wanted? And there is no denying that Ennis is fascinated by machismo and war, so much so that his treatment of super heroes almost always involves men trained in violence overcoming those with super powers.

Remember, though, that this is the same writer whose best-known work, Preacher, ends with the hero literally riding into the sunset with the love of his life – the same writer who gave loner John Constantine a major love interest in Kit Ryan, a tough, cynical woman from Belfast, and even managed to make their breakup poetic and sentimental.

If you focus on the scripts and ignore the often gratuitously sexist artwork, he is also the writer who manages believable portraits of strong women like Deborah Tiegel and Bloody Mary. Yes, there is a large degree of male wish-fulfillment in female characters like Tulip O’Hare or Annie January, but there is also an effort to give them their own inner lives and concerns in a way that few male writers of graphic novels have even attempted.

I have read much of Ennis’ work, but far from all of it. To say the least, he is prolific, and some of his work, such as his war stories, would only interest me because they were done by him. However, three of works stand out as places where gender roles play a major role.

Pride and Joy

The first is Pride and Joy, a relaitvely little-known series that fits into a single trade paperback. Pride and Joy tells the story of Jimmy Kavanagh, a petty criminal who goes straight because of his love for his wife. His wife dies, to Kavanagh’s frustration as much as his despair – cancer being something he cannot fight – leaving him to raise their daughter and son on stories of his own father’s exploits as a tailgunner in World War Two. These stories cause endless conflicts with his son, a quiet, more intellectual type than Kavanagh.

One of the most interesting scenes in the series shows him with his wife in the hospital. She asks if he remembers her reply when he assumed that he would be making the decisions in the marriage. With a wistful grin, he quotes from memory, “Like hell.” She replies:

That amazed look on your face . . . It was priceless. You were such a little boy. I gave you such a hard time about that stuff, that Being a man thing. I used to really hate it. My Mom and her Mom, they both lost their men to wars. Men off being men, chasing some ideal they’re meant to live up to. My Mom used to say, ‘All men can do is die and leave the women and children to suffer.’

Now, she is doing the same to him. Yet even in the stress of the moment, Kavanagh needs her reassurance that this is a case where he can cry.

Another key scene is his discussion with his son. While his son asserts that “we’ve got nothing in common,” Kavanagh expresses concern that his son needs to toughen up in order to survive. He remembers his father’s war stories, which Kavanagh’s wife condemned as “macho bullshit,” and for a moment father and son bond. “I guess that’s why she made sure you . . . . You saw a different side to things, maybe. But I still think your Grandad had a point.”

However, as they flee a killer from Kavanagh’s past, any fragile understanding is broken by Kavanagh’s admission that his accidental killing of a child has poisoned his life. His son considers the admission proof of the underlying hypocrisy of Kavanagh’s machismo.

The story ends with the issues unresolved. The son stands up to the killer long enough for Kavanagh to kill him, but as Kavanagh lies dying, it is him, not the son, who cries. As the authorities close in and ask whom he is kneeling over, his son fights to keep from crying – apparently remembering his father’s advice about how not to cry — and replies simply, “He’s my Dad.” Belatedly, the son has found some truth in his father’s philosophy, although there is no reason to believe he accepts it whole-heartedly.

The Boys

The Boys is a twelve volume series about an off-the-books CIA team whose job is to keep super heroes in line. The series cynically assumes that super powers lead to corruption, and is full of thinly-veiled parodies of mainstream comics – for instance, the creator of the G-Men, and most of his original team, turn out to be child molesters. However, beyond the obvious critique of the traditional morality of comics, in many ways the story centers on Billy Butcher, the leader of The Boys, and Hugh “Wee Hughie” Campbell, the newest recruit.

Butcher and Wee Hughie each see the woman they love murdered by self-indulgent super heroes. However, as the son of an abusive father and as an ex-Marine who saw action in the Falklands War, Butcher’s response is to launch a decades-long campaign for revenge that ultimately leads to the attempted genocide of everyone with super powers in the world.

By contrast, Wee Hughie is “an ordinary bloke.” In that respect, he resembles Butcher’s deceased young brother. He learns to fight and kill, but, unlike Butcher, not to enjoy it. In that respect, he is more like Butcher’s maternal grandfather, who lost an arm in World War Two, but refuses to dwell on those aspects of his life. Butcher is constantly trying to get Wee Hughie to accept the need for violence, but he also views him as someone who, like his younger brother, can potentially keep him from becoming a complete sociopath.

Wee Hughie’s back story is given in the eighth trade paperback of the series. Despite being an orphan, he turns out to have had an idyllic childhood, complete with adventures straight out of popular children’s literature – in fact, as the cover art makes clear, he has a childhood straight out of the British children’s annuals. However, a return to his childhood home ends in the death of one of his childhood friends. Innocence, clearly, is no option for him; violence can still affect him.

Butcher’s back story is given in the tenth trade paperback in the series. Like Kavanagh in Pride and Joy, Butcher was raised by a tough father. But where Kavanagh’s was simply macho and ultimately fell short of his own ideals, Butcher’s was outright abusive.

Uncomfortable in his growing resemblance to his father, Butcher is saved from becoming his clone by the love of his wife Becky. Trying to be worthy of her, he quits drinking, and learns to control his temper. Thanks to Becky, he also manages to get his mother to leave his father and free herself from abuse, a move that he considers the best things he has ever done in his life.

Becky sets the limits in the relationship the first time they are in bed. She notices a scar, and as he launches into what is obviously an often-told tale, silences him with, “I don’t wanna hear war stories.” Later, as she runs a finger down his body, she muses, “All this strength. All this power. It has to be tempered. Men without women, Billy. It ain’t a good idea.”

As he lies dying at the end of the series, Butcher expands on her viewpoint: “All that macho shit, that gunfighter, Dirty Harry bollocks – it looks tasty, but in the end it’s fuckin’ self-defeatin’. It just leaves you with bodies in ditches an’ blokes with headfuls of broken glass. Men are only so much use, Hughie. Men are boys.”

Ennis does not spell out the message, but, considering the behavior of the super heroes in The Boys, it seems that men’s physical strength and social positions are just other forms of power that lead to corruption. The dying Butcher’s last advice to Wee Hughie is to return to his estranged lover. “Grab hold of her, Hughie,” Butcher advises. “Feel her strength inside yer own. An never, ever, ever let her go.”

In the closing pages, Wee Hughie takes this advice, and the series ends with a classic romantic happy ending at the end of all the destruction and political upheavals.

Preacher

Preacher is generally considered Ennis’ major work to date. The main plot concerns Jesse Custer, a young Southern minister who becomes possessed by Genesis, a creature whose power causes God to flee from heaven. Angered by this literal abdication of responsibility, Jesse sets off with his girlfriend Tulip and a hard-living vampire named Cassidy to hold God to account.

However, the story is as much about Jesse’s self-discovery, in which gender roles play a major role. The dialog even includes references to feminist theory that are used as humor for those in the know – for instance, Jesse mentions that he much prefers reading Germaine Greer to “the Dworkin woman.”

Jesse is the ideal of a Southern Gentleman: Good-looking, polite, and slow to fight but more than able to hold his own once he does. In fact, he is so much the epitome of traditional male roles that he channels the spirit of John Wayne. Early in the series, he witnesses Tulip being killed. When she is resurrected by God in an effort to placate Jesse, he remains haunted by the fear of her dying again.

After a firefight in which Tulip’s shooting skills help them to survive, this discussion takes place:

TULIP: If I was another guy, you wouldn’t have given it a second’s thought. You’d just think, “He can handle himself. Cool.” but you can’t accept the fact that I can deal with this stuffy, can you?

JESSE: Honey … What I been trynna tell you is, it ain’t what’s happened at one time or other that worries me. It’s the thought of what could happen to you. It scares the livin’ shit clean out of me.

TULIP: So no matter what you see me do, you’ll never believe I can take care of myself? Jesse, that just doesn’t make any sense.”

What makes this discussion work is the fact that both views have some validity. Tulip is proud of her competence, so her anger at the thought that it might be ignored is understandable. At the same time, while Jesse’s attitude is part machismo, it is also the natural concern for someone he loves.

Unable to overcome his fears, Jesse abandons her to rescue Cassidy. When he rejoins Tulip, she leaves him handcuffed to a bed for several hours in revenge. Later, they discuss what happens:

TULIP: You know what the worst thing about it was . . .? It reminded me of when I was eight and the boys wouldn’t let me play soldiers . . . . And when you dumped me in that motel and ran off on your big guy’s adventure, I felt just as dumb and useless and stupid as they made me feel all those years ago.

JESSE: Well . . . um . . . I ain’t trynna get off the subject her or anything like that, but I really got to ask . . . How come you wanted to play soldiers, instead like with dolls an’ stuffed toys an’ shit like that?

TULIP: Remind me why I have sex with you again?

. . . .

JESSE: I know, I know. I’m constantly reexaminin’ my approach to gender issues. But sometimes I slip up . . .

Despite the humor and Jesse’s best efforts to act differently, the problem remains. In the sixth trade paperback, they discuss it again:

TULIP: Nothing but demeaning, patronizing, sexist, macho crap

JESSE: Or badly phrased love.

TULIP: Can you think of a single reason why I shouldn’t kill you for trying a line like that?

Yet, as they start to make love, and, she murmurs, “Don’t ever change,” suggesting that, at some level, she responds to the machismo that she verbally condemns. While the limits of Jesse’s ethics anger her, his code of behavior is part of what makes him deeply attractive to her.

In the end, Jesse is unable to overcome his fears, and abandons her again as he goes into action. Waking after being drugged by Jesse, Tulip arms herself while muttering, “I’m going to kill him. I’m going to save his stupid fucking life for him – and then I’m going to kill him.”

For Tulip, this is the last betrayal. At the end of the series, when Jesse catches up with her at the bus depot, she asks him, “Do you think breaking your word doesn’t matter when it’s to a woman? Do you think honor is something that only counts between men?” Jesse starts to give his usual rationales, but even he is aware that he has gone too far. He breaks off with, “I ain’t got no defense.”

Chasing after her, he finally admits that their love is what matters most to him, and that “I do know that I have to change a little, if this macho bullshit you talked about is gonna keep getting’ in the way.” Unable to shed a tear ever since he watched his father’s murder, faced with losing Tulip, he finally manages to cry. “I guess I must be learnin’,” he says, and this sign of humanity gives Tulip and Jesse their last minute happy ending.

Yet as though to show that Ennis is not willing to completely abandon machismo, the last pages of the series show Cassidy waking, newly human again. He starts to put on his sunglasses, the symbol of his irresponsible lifestyle, then throws them away. “I think I’ll try actin’ like a man,” he tells himself. The macho code may be flawed, but it is still better than the amorality with which Cassidy lived as a vampire – if for no other reason than because it prohibits abusing women.

The Power of Ambiguity

I am not claiming that gender issues are all that Ennis’ work is about. But I do suggest that their importance have been overshadowed by more obvious aspects of his work, such as the critique of the comics tradition. No one who is not deeply interested in a subject would return to it as often as Ennis does gender issues.

Nor am I agreeing with Ennis’ positions. If nothing else, I can imagine few women who want to think of their role as the redeemers and moral compass for their lovers and spouses. Yet, despite everything, Ennis’ discussion of gender roles works in a way that Dave Sims’ do not, and is far less offensive.

The reason, I think, is that Ennis seems genuinely divided on the subject. On the one hand, he is obsessed with machismo, and of how manly men interact with each other. On the other hand, he also views machismo as ultimately childish, and needing to give way to a less violent maturity that can only be won through the love of wife and family. The places where machismo operates may be the places where he finds stories, but he also considers those who remain there too long as immature.

This unresolved dichotomy, I suspect, is what keeps Ennis from descending into polemic. Genuinely fascinated by all perspectives on gender – including women’s – he weaves his interest into the sub-plots rather than interrupting the action to lecture. You don’t have to agree with his perspectives to see that the result is the complexity of true art.

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Men’s rights and how not to create a self-identity

Posted in Bruce Byfield, feminism, gender, men's rights, Personal, self-identity, social roles, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on February 13, 2013 | 11 Comments »

So-called men’s rights advocates make me impatient. Yes, men’s roles are changing, and modern men need to think more about the changes. But men’s rights advocates are so vicious, so full of a sense of entitlement that I find sympathizing with them impossible. Instead, I am simply astonished that anybody could be so wrong in so many different ways at the same time.

I may not be an expert on identity, but I have been around long enough that I’m no stranger to the issues, either. From my own ups and down and self-questioning, I can say with some assurance that no one can build a healthy sense of identity based upon:

  • A negative identity based upon what you are not. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with a negative identity in the short-run; for instance, most boys and girls go through a period in which they claim to dislike everything to do with each other. But in the long run, a negative identity requires constant reinforcement. In the case of men’s right advocates, that means a constant and tiresome denunciation of women and supposedly feminine traits.
  • Bullying or abuse. Not only are both socially unacceptable, but neither creates a stable personality.
  • An assumption that you have the right to every woman’s time and space. Believe it or not, most women have their own priorities, which do not include listening to a man’s passing attraction to them, dealing with a man sitting too close to them, or putting their own concerns on hold for a man. Even a man in a permanent relationship can’t assume that; if he does, the relationship is unlikely to last long.
  • A sense of privilege. While many people unconsciously think of themselves as the stars of their own movies, most people learn that other people are not extras in that movie. The learning process is called growing up, and it involves a reining-in of the ego.
  • Considering yourself a victim of women (or anyone else). You can’t assert your own rights to self-realization by complaining when other people do the same. Ironically, the traditional gender roles whose loss men’s rights advocates frequently bemoan would find this attitude shameful.
  • Equating the difficulties faced by modern women and men. With the changes in modern society, men feel uncertain. But women are also likely to face abuse and discrimination. The two are not even remotely comparable, no matter how much anyone quibbles and rationalizes.
  • Trying to continue old narratives. Personally, I suspect that the old gender roles were never as simple as the nostalgia of men’s rights advocates would make them. At the most, people – mostly women – simply suffered in isolation. But, whether that’s true or not is irrelevant. Whatever value the old roles might or might not have had, they’re gone, and for strong social and economic reasons. They’re not coming back.
  • Creating an imaginary opposition. In the case of men’s right’s advocates, this opposition is generally “all women” or “all feminists.” Either way, everyone lumped into the category is assumed to act or think the same way. This is a map so different from the territory as to be useless for anything.
  • Not listening. Much of the rhetoric of the men’s right movement seems dedicated to denying the truths of women’s lives – claims that women really don’t face discrimination, that gender differences in pay are reasonable, that rape doesn’t happen as often as the statistics suggest, and isn’t so bad as women claim. The trouble is, these things are not only too well-documented, but – more importantly – too well-witnessed that anyone can do more than nitpick about the details. Not only is that a waste of time, but believing such things mean that you are acting on faulty intel. Act on faulty intel, and you end up doing things like invading Iraq.
  • Anything so fragile as gender. Gender may be all-important to adolescents or to transsexuals trying to figure where they fit. However, for the rest of us, it’s not the only source of self-identity, or necessarily the most important. You need much more to build any sense of identity.

I could go on and on, but my point is clear enough: The men’s rights movement is based on half-truths and psychologically unhealthy. Its complaints are a form of mourning for a social order that never existed the way its members imagine, and the only reason not to dismiss it completely is that even an out-of-touch group can still be dangerous.

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Gender and writing

Posted in Bruce Byfield, feminism, gender, gender differences, Personal, Uncategorized, writing, tagged , , , , , , on January 9, 2013 | 2 Comments »

Whenever someone claims they can tell if a piece of writing was written by a man or a woman, I have to suppress a knowing smile. They have only a fifty percent chance of being right, and a near certainty of embarrassing themselves with rationalizations if they are wrong. Writing, apparently, is a skill that has very little to do with gender.

I first became aware of this basic fact through the reactions to James Tiptree, Jr. As a young teen, I remember critics praising Tiptree for a supposedly masculine prose style. When rumors emerged that Tiptree might be a woman, many explained at great length why that could not possibly be so. Then it was revealed that Tiptree was actually a woman named Alice Sheldon – and in a perfect demonstration of double-think, many of the same critics began explaining how they knew that all along, and pointing out aspects of her prose as evidence for what was suddenly an obvious fact.

Something of the reversal happened a few years later with F. M. Busby, a writer of intelligent space opera. Because Rissa Kerguelen, one of Busby’s greatest successes, featured a female protagonist, dozens of people assumed that Busby was a woman. A man, they argued, couldn’t possibly write such a sympathetic female character. But Busby was a man – although one fond of saying that “An intelligent man who isn’t a feminist isn’t.” The reasons that he went by his initials were that he disliked his given names of Francis Marion, and that his publisher considered his nickname “Buz” too informal for a book cover.

Having these two counter-examples, I have always been skeptical about efforts to identify gender through writing samples. Like too much alleged social science, such efforts always assume that certain subject matter and stylistic choices are somehow innately masculine or feminine (gay, lesbian, transgendered, or queer are always left out). A male writer, for instance, might be supposed to use “I” and to write short, unqualified statements. By contrast, a woman might be said to be more tentative in offering an opinion, and write about emotions or domestic subjects. Needless to say, such divisions say more about the devisers of such studies than any actual differences.

In fact, I’ve always found such studies rather dismissive of writer’s abilities. Most writers I know would have no trouble imitating the so-called masculine or feminine prose styles of such studies. Once they knew the required mannerisms, all that would be needed is a few hundred words of practice.

Moreover, whenever I have tried any online versions of such studies, the results have been random. For example, this morning I ran samples of my writing through Gender Genie, an online adaptation of one such study. My journalistic articles registered consistently as male, and my personal blog entries as female. My fiction registered as both male or female, although neither very strongly. Similarly, two women writers of my acquaintance registered as male, and a male friend as female. I would have tried more samples, but at this point, it was obvious that the results had such a large margin of error as to be unreliable in any given case.

And apparently, my personal observations were correct. Recently, fantasy writer Teresa Frohock invited readers of her blog to identify the gender of the writers of ten different writing samples. Of 1,045 guesses, only 535 were correct – a number slightly above random chance, but well within statistical variation. As Frohock noted, despite all the elaborate rationalizations and the stereotyped ideas that men were more likely to write epic stories and women emotional-driven ones, people were unable to tell men from women based on how and what they wrote.

In other words, exactly what my experience would predict.  Excuse me while I cackle, “Told you so!”

But this subject goes far beyond a mildly diverting observation. The obvious conclusion is that, if writing samples don’t reveal who is male or female, then why are most people so quick to assume that supposed differences in male and female brains are significant? If the products of those brains are indistinguishable from one another, then the brain differences can’t matter much, either. As often happens when gender is discussed, too many people tell themselves comforting stories, then look for reason to believe the stories instead of examining the evidence.

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A trivial moment of harassment

Posted in anti-harassment, Bruce Byfield, feminism, harassment, male feminism, Personal, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on November 11, 2012 | 1 Comment »

On Friday, I was harassed in the local mall. By any standards, it was a trivial incident, but I believe that the encounter gave me, if not insight to what women endure regularly from men, then at least something from which I could emotionally extrapolate how they must feel.

I was walking through the local mall at the end of a long day. I had just come from the gym, and I was unwashed and limping from a minor injury. I was tired, and had just discovered my bank card was missing, and that I needed to add canceling it to my list of errands to do. I wanted nothing so much as to drag myself home and collapse in a hot bath, but I knew that I had at least another hour’s worth of errands. All in all, I was feeling about as attractive as the sweaty towel in my gym bag.

As I neared a kiosk selling spa products, I saw one man holding a tray of hand lotion samples break into a little dance. By the time I reached the kiosk, he had moved to its other side, and a woman in black blocked my path, holding out a tray.

I tried to step around her, and she moved to block me again. Ordinarily, I would have just kept walking, but, as I said, I was tired. Taking the path of least resistance, I reached out for a sample, and rubbed it on my hand.

“Do you have a special woman in your life?” she asked.

Since I’m a widower, that is a bit of a tender point with me. “No,” I said shortly.

“No sister? No friends? No mother? No aunt?”

I replied “no” to each question, becoming increasingly annoyed at a stranger asking me personal questions.

“Let me show you something,” she said. Not thinking, but relieved that the questions had stopped, I let myself to be steered over to the kiosk.

Without asking, the woman grabbed my hand and started demonstrating a nail buffer on my right thumb. She was standing close to me, and her breasts kept rubbing against my arm as she worked. When I took a step away, she followed, talking continually about how attractive regular the products she was selling would make me.

“Younger women just love men who use them,” she told, stroking my hand.

I was more embarrassed than enticed, and I more or less tuned her out. So far as I was thinking at all, I was hoping that the demo would be over soon and I could move on without being polite.

“You’re not listening to me,” she said. “You’re looking at my breasts.” I wasn’t, but she plucked at her top, an action that not only drew my eyes, but exposed more cleavage rather than less.

Abruptly, I pulled myself together and decided that, single as I was, I wasn’t so desperate as to prolong this encounter. “Sorry, I have to go now.”

“No you don’t,” she said with a knowing smile, trying to grab my hand again.

“Yes I do.”

We repeated the same sentences several times apiece. Then I realized that I didn’t even owe her even politeness, and simply turned and left, shaking my head.

The next day, I was in the mall again. I seriously considered taking a roundabout route so I wouldn’t have to pass the kiosk. But I told myself I wasn’t going to inconvenience myself to avoid embarrassment, and made myself walk by.

“Oh, you’ve come back,” she said, smiling. “I knew you would.”

This time, I was rested enough to know that the last thing I wanted was to stop and listen to her.

I held up a hand without slowing. “No, I haven’t.”

I felt better for walking on. But I admit that I was glad that she was helping another customer when I walked by twenty minutes later.

If you’re a man, especially a young one, you might wonder why I didn’t play along, enjoying the contact and the innuendo as long as they lasted. But such things were far from my mind. All through the encounter, I kept thinking that I might be desperate for female contact, but I would never be that desperate. Besides, as irresistible as I might sometimes imagine myself to be, I knew the whole thing was about selling products. I was disgusted with her tactics, and not much pleased with myself for going along with them, however briefly.

In fact, as I retell the story, I find my lip curling in distaste, and I have had to stop several times to calm myself before I could go on. What, I keep wondering, did she see in me that she would imagine that I would be open to these sales tactics? Did she think that, as an older man, I would buy for the pleasure of having a younger woman come on to me? Or was I supposed to buy because I was embarrassed?

I’m not going to be scarred for life by what happened. I am not even going to report the woman, although I’m sure that I’m not the only one she has used such tactics on. But the experience does leave me with a more immediate understanding of a situation that I ordinarily understand only intellectually, or with an imaginative effort.

All the reactions I felt are similar to those I’ve heard hundreds of times from women recounting petty harassment. My annoyance at being imposed upon, going along with what was happening out of a misguided sense of politeness, the sense of being impersonally manipulated by sexuality, the wondering whether I was somehow to blame, the temptation to avoid the place where it happened – despite my gender, I was reacting much the same as many women do in a similar situation.

So, if anyone thinks that I should have enjoyed it, let me assure you that what happened wasn’t flattering and wasn’t a compliment. It was intrusive and annoying, and an over-obvious attempt to manipulate me that is still making me uneasy several days later.

Admittedly, it was only one encounter. For many women, such encounters are a daily occurrence. Quite justifiably, some women may wonder why I imagine my experience worth recording, or how I imagine that I can extrapolate from my experience to theirs.

All I can say is that, if their reactions are anything like mine, I wonder how they endure such incidents – and why. And you can be sure I am going to be monitoring my behavior very carefully from now on, to make sure that I don’t – even accidentally – leave a woman feeling the way that I am feeling now.

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A wish for a redefinition of “chivalrous”

Posted in Bruce Byfield, chivalrous, feminism, male role models, masculine identity, Personal, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on September 22, 2012 | 3 Comments »

I don’t usually waste much time lamenting that the meanings of words change. It simply happens, and little I can do can change the results one way or the other. However, having grown up on stories of Sir Lancelot and Sir Gareth of Orkney, I do regret the loss of the original meaning of “chivalrous.”

Today, if a man is described as “chivalrous,” the speaker means that he has a condescending attitude to women. At best, he has an old-fashioned gallantry that a handful of women might find charming, but that most would quite rightly find irritating.

Either way, “chivalrous” is not an adjective that I would care to have applied to me. If it ever were, I would wince, and immediately ask the speaker what I had done to annoy them. Somewhere along the line, I would most likely apologize.

However, “chivalrous” used to have other meanings as well. The most basic one is derived from “cheval,” the French word for “horse,” and means a mounted warrior – by implication, a member of the medieval social elite.

But the meaning whose loss I regret means a sort of ethical activist. Influenced, interestingly enough, by the Moorish culture of the Iberian peninsula, this meaning was partly an effort to control the medieval warrior class when it wasn’t fighting.

By this definition, a chivalrous man was one who did not abuse his strength, but was self-effacing and used it on behalf of those unable to help themselves. In the courtly love tradition, this chivalry was especially extended towards women of the same social class – hence the modern meaning – but in medieval tales and ballads, the same obligations were supposed to extend to other men and other social classes. By this definition, a chivalrous man was an admirable one, doing his best not to abuse his privilege and act socially responsible.

So why does this lost meaning matter? Aside, I mean, from the fact that, if I had grown up to live my childhood dreams, I would be spending my days wandering the highways and back roads and looking for wrongs to right, preferably on horseback?

Simply this: it would still be useful to have a word that covered this original meaning. Specifically, it would refer to a man who was aware of male privilege and did his best to disavow it – or, failing that, turned male privilege around on itself, and used it to advance the equality and dignity of women, minorities, and the powerless. We need the word to describe what I believe is an important ideal, to answer those who say that social progress has nothing to offer men by offering an imaginative concept to live by that would promise to bring out the best in men.

Unfortunately, if such a word is ever coined, it is unlikely to be “chivalrous.” The current, debased meaning of the word is too entrenched, and is an important referent in its own right. But I think that having a name for such a desirable male role model would be no bad thing, even thought one of the most appropriate is already subsumed by another concept.

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Harassment and clothing

Posted in Bruce Byfield, feminism, misogyny, Personal, sexism, sexual assault, sexual harassment, street harassment, Theresa M. Beiner, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on August 13, 2012 | 4 Comments »

“Yes means yes, and no means no – whatever we wear, wherever we go!”

These words have been chanted by feminists and their allies for decades. I’ve never doubted they described the way things should be, but I sometimes wondered if they described the way things are.

In other words, does the way a woman dress affect her chances of facing sexual or street harassment? A researched answer proved surprisingly hard to find.

Anecdotal evidence seems to support the feminist viewpoint. If you look, for example, at maps of reported incidents of street harassment, you sometimes find annotations about what women were wearing. Often, the women doing the reporting note that they were dressed in a sweat suit or a T-shirt and jeans. At times, they sound surprised, as though they expected to be untroubled in such clothes.

If they were surprised, they would hardly be alone. A web search quickly locates studies that show that a majority of both men and women believe a woman is in greater danger of harassment if she is wearing revealing clothing. In some countries, this belief can be strengthened by the association of such clothing with Western decadence and immorality, but it seems a world-wide assumption that few people care to examine.

But is the assumption true? That is harder to answer, although perhaps it would be easier if more academic research was open access. Probably not, however, given that few search results even sound as though they are relevant to the question, regardless of whether they are freely available for reading.

In fact, after searching for half an hour, I found only one accessible, relevant paper: Theresa M. Beiner’s “Sexy Dressing Revisited: Does Target Dress Play a Part in Sexual Harassment Cases?” There may be more, but it is well-worth summarizing (and reading in full if you’ve followed me this far).

Beiner begins by noting that American rules of evidence prohibit discussing how a woman dresses or acts in sexual harassment cases unless its use outweighs the danger of harm to the victim or is likely to incite prejudice. That may not sound very satisfactory, but, in practice, this means that such evidence is almost never introduced.

The two exceptions Beiner notes are extremes: in one, a victim wore a sign implying she would give blow jobs, and encouraged men to leave impressions of their hands in paint upon her back and buttocks, and, in another, a woman offered private lingerie displays. However, according to Beiner, “even in cases in which the evidence of the target’s dress was admitted, its impact was minimal in persuading trial judges that the plaintiff welcomed the harassment.”

What these practices suggest is that the American legal system (which is hardly a center of radicalism) is generally unconvinced that how a woman dresses or acts is relevant to sexual harassment – and, after all, those with experience with such cases should have a better idea than the majority of us.

However, the most interesting part of Beiner’s article is the last third. There, Beiner establishes a reason to believe that rapists and sexual harassers are on a continuum of behavior and personality, and turns to studies of rapists for insight into harassers.

According to the studies that Beiner cites, what rapists look for in victims is not revealing clothing at all. Instead, “rapists look for signs of passiveness and submissiveness.” Furthermore, not only can men accurately detect passiveness and submissiveness, but tend to regard attractive women as less submissive – and, while attraction is not synonymous with any particular style of dress, the two do have some connection. It might even be that revealingly dressed women intimidate rapists and harassers.

By contrast, passiveness and submissiveness, “studies suggest, are more likely to coincide with more body-concealing clothing.” Sexual harassment, she suggests, “appears to be triggered by power imbalances – the kind of imbalances that might well be triggered by target submissiveness.”

In other words, so far as clothing plays any role in who is targeted, it might actually be that concealing clothing is more dangerous.

As for why people are so quick to believe the opposite, Beiner offers two possible reasons. Both men and women, she says, may want to believe in a just world, where nothing happens to someone unless they deserve it. Possibly, too, they want to blame the victims so they can sustain an illusion of control. They would prefer to believe that if they don’t do certain things or go to certain areas, they will be safe.

“Sexy Dressing” is not definitive, but it does provide a logical argument about who is likely to be harassed. I’d need more convincing that concealing clothing might be dangerous, but, thanks to Beiner, I’m reasonably confident that revealing clothing is not a factor in harassment.

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The outdated roles of masculinity

Posted in Bruce Byfield, feminism, gender roles, masculinity, Personal, Stiffed, Susan Faludi, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on May 17, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

Anyone who troubles to think knows that traditional male roles are outdated. They started going stale fifty years ago, and by now they are too moldy for anyone to digest. Yet almost no discussion takes place about what – if anything – should replace them.

As with any trend, the media is eager to seize on every explanation for the unsuitability of traditional male roles. The decline of heavy industry and the outsourcing of jobs are popular explanations. Often, too, the changes in women’s roles is cited, sometimes with urban legends like reverse discrimination, but increasingly by even uglier methods such as personal misogyny and laws about reproductive issues that have been called a war on women (and that have about as much chance of succeeding as demands to ship both legal and illegal immigrants home). But the shallowness of these explanations is suggested by the facts that they are inevitably voiced in aggrieved and puzzled tones, and that they offer no alternatives.

The trouble is, men are the least politically conscious gender. Robert Bly’s mythic men’s movement was never much more than another media-manufactured craze, while modern male supremacists sound like a parody of the popular stereotypes of feminism and provoke laughter more than serious consideration.

Even more importantly, such efforts are essentially reactionary. They demand a return to the roles of a past that lasted very briefly. To the extent that these roles were widely accepted, they existed from about 1850 to 1960, and never did manage to influence the working or lower middle classes very thoroughly.

While gender roles certainly existed before that, and were often weighted in favor of men, any social history reveals that they were rarely those that we think of as traditional. Nobody thought it odd that a medieval English merchant’s widow should take over his business, while women in tenth century Iceland had legal rights that women in modern society only regained midway through the twentieth century. Nor, as we find increasingly, is there much evidence of our social roles having an evolutionary origin – all of which only makes the arguments of male supremacists even more desperate than they initially sound.

So far, the best analysis of modern male roles can be found in Susan Faludi’s Stiffed. Faludi, who is best known for Backlash!, an analysis of the reactions against the second wave of feminism, is equally insightful in talking about men’s roles. She suggests that the generation of men who fought World War 2 returned home emotionally distant, losing themselves in their careers in their overwhelming desire for normality. As a result, they became distant parents, and failed to pass on an image of responsible masculinity to their Baby Boomer sons.

Left to shape their own images of masculinity based on the movies, these sons focused on the more superficial aspects of their father’s roles. They expected control of both family and society, but failed to notice that this control was supposed to be justified by their support and loyalty. Male roles became such a caricature of themselves that today, watching sports is supposed to have more to do with masculinity than making sacrifices for your family, or worrying about the moral values of your children.

In a few places, some of the old masculine roles survived. Faludi notes, for example, that until just before the millennium, father and son roles were common in places like shipyards, where new workers were routinely assigned to the care of older men. These mentorships, by Faludi’s accounts, were highly valued by everyone involved. But most Baby Boomers had no opportunity for a similar experience, and had to make up masculinity as they went along.

Many never got past an adolescent concept of masculinity. If you doubt that,check the leading movies of the last twenty years, especially the comedies.

Yet even if they learned their father’s values, the usefulness of these values in recent decades would have been limited. As self-actualization and economic necessity brought more women into the workplace, the justifications for traditional sex roles quickly declined. In particular, the economic justification of marriage for women diminished. At the most, a woman might marry to extend the prosperity of herself and her future children. No longer needing marriage for basic survival, why should any woman put up with even the appearance of deferring to her partner?

In this light, the confusion and anger of many modern men about feminism is understandable – not admirable and by no means excusable, but understandable. Unsure of their roles, then finding those roles diminished, they could hardly be expected to react except with fear and anger, especially when no obvious alternative exists.

This subject is, of course, endless. But it seems to me that, in the same way that women are starting to learn to move beyond their traditional roles, men need to learn to move beyond theirs. The trouble is, the average modern man is completely unprepared to do so. For many men, their gender role is central to their identity. More – making sure that no one can accuse them of being in any way female is important to their sense of self-worth. Yet, with the social differences between men and women diminishing in industrialized culture, men have less and less to compare themselves to. They can only fall back on trivialities, such as preferring beer to wine – which in the end makes their gender identities even less secure.

What men need is to analyze their recent history as thoroughly as feminists have analyzed women’s. Once they do that, more men might manage to identify themselves less as men and more as humans, and even learn to ally with feminists.

But that is an effort that many men are still reluctant to make. Instead of recognizing the inadequacy of the roles they model themselves upon, they would rather cling to those roles and ignore their increasing irrelevancy. But, until they are ready to move on, the personal and social cost is going to be as high as it is needless.

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