In a four-letter word, a panoply of meaning
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
The evolution of the `s' word illuminates some thorny truths
As with so many fraught or politically tricky words, context is everything when it comes to "slut."
These days the word is often used as an affectionate tease among friends, especially adolescent girls. Or it has metaphorical meaning – you're a slut for something you can't resist.
At first it might seem that feminism and the sexual revolution have dulled the word's power to demean: how can anyone be a slut – "a promiscuous woman," as The Canadian Oxford Dictionary puts it – if females are free to be as sexual as men?
The word has become so benign that there's at least one "Slut" line of clothing, not to mention lip balm and bubble bath bearing the word.
You could argue that the "slutification" of female fashion has further demolished the barrier between what used to be considered "good" and "bad" girls.
But "slut" can still pack a knockout punch of contempt, even when it's aimed at someone who isn't being, well, slutty. For people lashing out against a girl or woman, the four-letter word is – like "bitch" – one of those reflex insults that leap from the tongue.
Why does it pop up so readily? Because it can still hurt.
Witness Barbara Amiel Black's meltdown last week in a Chicago courthouse, in which she called a female Canadian TV producer a "slut." Apparently, Black was upset by the journalist's assertiveness in trying to get into the same elevator – not exactly sluttiness in the traditional sense.
The word first emerged in Middle English as "slutte," which denoted a dirty, untidy woman, a meaning it still bears in the U.K. By the middle of the 15th century, it had acquired its taint of sexual licentiousness.
Until recently in North America, that was the only sense in which it was used. (In fact, "slut" is one of the few judgmental terms from pre-sexual revolution days that still has currency. "Loose," "floozy," "easy" and "has a reputation" now seem awfully quaint.)
The funniest bit of pop culture to remove some of the sting from "slut" was the Saturday Night Live "Weekend Update" skit in which Dan Aykroyd routinely addressed co-anchor Jane Curtin as "Jane, you ignorant slut."
Marcel Danesi, an anthropologist at the University of Toronto who teaches semiotics and youth culture, observes that "slut" is now an ambiguous word whose various meanings include – in hip-hop – "my woman." Yet he was taken aback when a colleague called him a "slut" recently. "I was complaining about the inane bureaucracy at the University of Toronto, and he said, `You're a typical slut ...' It was kind of friendly – he was saying that I break the rules."
To him, "slut" still reverberates with negative connotations linked to sexual promiscuity. "I would never, absolutely never, present my wife in this way."
Among younger people, though, the friendly use of "slut" is common. Mimi Hagiepetros, a 13-year-old Toronto student, says her schoolmates mostly use it "lovingly" and "as a joke."
Grown-up women will good-naturedly call each other "slut," employing the word with all its sexual connotations in subtle, ironic rebellion against a double standard that refuses to go away.
Yet the word hasn't been completely defanged. A battery-operated Little Mermaid Shimmering Lights Ariel doll that supposedly says the words "You're a slut" made it to the ABC news website last December after a "shocked" mother contacted the media. Visitors can watch a 48-second video clip of the doll "speaking" to try to hear the offending words themselves (Mattel denied the accusation, and this writer was unable to detect any Exorcist-like language).
Another cartoon creature, Paris Hilton, vigorously defended herself in a July interview with the celebrity gossip website TMZ.com against readers' assertions that she was a "stupid, ugly slut" and "an overused human condom."
"I am not a slut at all," she declared. "I've only had a few boyfriends, and I don't even do anything with them any more ... I'm far less promiscuous than any of my friends."
The best defence against being relegated to slut-dom, it seems, is to point a finger at women who are sluttier.
Amiel herself stoked controversy in a 2003 column for London's Telegraph in which she discussed the word provocatively. "A woman can look and behave like a slut – it's her right – and there will be no consequences," Amiel wrote. "She may consent to intercourse on Thursday night, but if the chap is discourteous on Friday morning, the previous evening's sizzling sex will cool into rape."
Whatever one makes of Amiel's argument, it's clear that, for all our jocularity about the "s" word, it can still shock.
Toronto filmmaker Andrea Dorfman completed a documentary called Slut a year ago in which 10 females talk about having been labelled the slut of their class. "Literally, the 15-year-old had the same story as the 85-year-old," says Dorfman. The film's older subjects, "carried (the insult) around with them their whole lives. It affected their self-confidence, their careers, their self-esteem."
Dorfman, 38, says a girl who's branded a "slut" in gossip – and she adds it's usually females who use the word against other females, competing for the attention of the still-more-powerful male – "is the receptacle of everybody's anxiety about sex."
posted by LeBlues @ 12:33 PM,
,
One of the Guys
Friday, March 16, 2007
The distraction of 'sexual orientation' and the lost world of the American male
On Saturday afternoon at the Cineplex you can see them: adolescent boys, there to watch one of the action films that Hollywood makes with an audience of young males in mind. What’s distinctive is where the boys sit in the theater. Though they might’ve come to the movie together and might even be close friends, they’ll leave an empty seat between them.
Just where the empty physical, as well as emotional, space between men comes from has been the essential subject of my research as a scholar of American culture. My work has culminated in a recent book, Picturing Men: A Century Male Relationships in Everyday American Photography
What accounts for that space? A short answer, something academics like me are notoriously reticent to provide, is that countless American boys and the men that they become are afraid of intimacy with each other, fearful of how intimacy might be construed––of what others and maybe even they themselves might decide that the closeness suggests. What I’m alluding to, of course, is homophobia.
I have examined the shifting history of intimacy among American males, charting the role that homophobia has played in the shifts that men’s intimacy has experienced over the last century and a half. What are the implications that my historical work might have for two matters prominent in contemporary public debate: first, the so-called “boy problem” in the United States, and secondly, whether persons of the same sex should be permitted to marry?
At Cal State Fullerton, I teach courses called The American Male and Sexual Orientations in American Culture. In some ways these classes occasionally overlap, as my students and I discuss the differences and the similarities between men who consider themselves gay or bisexual and those who think of themselves as straight. Though of course widely accepted today in the United States, the idea that one’s own identity is grounded in the sex of those whom one desires sexually, that the sex of the object of yearning identifies the yearner, rather than simply defining his desires, is a comparatively recent cultural notion.
But it isn’t a universal way of thinking about human sexuality. Scholars too rarely ask if what we know as “sexual orientation” is a fundamental distinction between human beings, or instead is less significant, perhaps much less significant, than gender distinctions.
My students and I often consider whether various kinds of fuss over sexual orientation actually are indirect ways of addressing more basic issues of gender, the ways that a particular society defines the appropriate behavior of males and of females. We examine the ways that negative stereotypes of gay men, for example, not only stigmatize those males considered gay, but also coerce all men to stay within the boundaries of culturally prescribed “male behavior,” lest they be thought queer. It’s common in our culture for a gay male to be thought “unmanly,” but it’s not inevitable that this equation be in force, or even that sexuality be viewed as a simple question of one or the other, gay or straight, with bisexuality in the middle ground.
Such, however, has been our society’s obsession with sexual orientation—and with “appropriate” manliness—that an association with gayness came to include certain occupations, words, gestures, and items of apparel, as well as one male’s willingness to express intimacy with another. The greater the scorn heaped upon gay males, the more that all males have been discouraged from displaying behavior associated with gayness––with anything resembling intimacy heading the list of taboos.
Reflecting the powerful significance of gender in our society is the fact that lesbianism functions quite differently in the culture than does male homosexuality. Though lesbians and gay men are subjected in common to certain forms of discrimination, lesbianism is both stigmatized in some segments of “straight” society and powerfully eroticized in some “straight” quarters as well, a largely unknown occurrence with male homosexuality.
One hardly need suggest that life is easy for lesbians to observe that gay men seem to trouble straight people more, to observe that gay men are more associated with “perversion” than lesbians have been. A tomboy, revealingly enough, is often thought appealing or amusing, qualities never attributed to sissies.
This situation, rather than suggesting that lesbians (often stereotyped as the ultimate tomboys) have it easier, probably attests instead to the fact that the doings of men are simply paid more attention in our society. With male behavior mattering more, those who deviate from the strictures of manhood, then, are singularly bothersome. For those who believe in traditional gender distinctions, females whose behavior is thought to mirror that of males would be considerably less annoying, disgusting, laughable, or even noteworthy than that of “effeminate” men. Whatever the reason, a dislike of lesbianism did not bring about severe restrictions on displays of intimacy among all women in any way analogous to how homophobia prompted distancing between all American men.
For many centuries, various societies in various ways have differentiated between same-sex and different-sex activity. But the word “gay” and, according to many historians, even the very notion of sexual orientation on which it’s based, are of comparatively recent vintage. “Heterosexual” and homosexual” were coined, initially in German, less than a century and a half ago, a simple fact that should give pause to those who speak as if everyone everywhere has always been subject to inborn biological imperatives directing their sexual attention.
Societies may vary in terms of how sexual activities between persons of the same sex are scorned, ignored, or endorsed, but about the existence of oriented sexuality––even the existence, some suspect, of a gay gene––there is rarely any doubt. Those who expect to discover a “gay gene” may be just as wrong-headed as those who believe that they have discovered a Biblical injunction against homosexuality.
My own belief, by contrast, is that sexual meanings do not travel well across time and space, that history suggests that “sexual orientation” may be more of a recent human contrivance than a timeless biological phenomenon. Yet one doesn’t have to solve or even directly address the nature versus nurture riddle to simply observe that belief in an oriented sexuality brought with it a fear of male intimacy.
In the late nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth, as Americans increasingly came to believe that “homosexual” was both an adjective and a noun, and that the word referred to something highly undesirable, men became much more hesitant to express, and even perhaps to feel, intimacy toward one another. In what might aptly be called a lost world of American men, it once was different. Other scholars, notably E. Anthony Rotundo in his 1993 book American Manhood, have shown that intimacy between men was once so encouraged and so widespread in our society that we may accurately speak of “romantic friendships” between males of the nineteenth century.
Picturing Men
While others have relied on traditional historians’ sources, letters and diary entries, to document nineteenth-century comfort with male intimacy (elaborate terms of endearment and unselfconscious physical closeness, for example), my own documentation of the lost world has been with everyday photographs of two or more American men together. With these photographs we can literally see the lost world as it existed, as it later began to disappear, and as it then reappeared with revealing intensity in a particular moment and setting, only to disappear yet again with stark finality.
Just where the empty physical, as well as emotional, space between men comes from has been the essential subject of my research as a scholar of American culture. My work has culminated in a recent book, Picturing Men: A Century Male Relationships in Everyday American Photography
What accounts for that space? A short answer, something academics like me are notoriously reticent to provide, is that countless American boys and the men that they become are afraid of intimacy with each other, fearful of how intimacy might be construed––of what others and maybe even they themselves might decide that the closeness suggests. What I’m alluding to, of course, is homophobia.
I have examined the shifting history of intimacy among American males, charting the role that homophobia has played in the shifts that men’s intimacy has experienced over the last century and a half. What are the implications that my historical work might have for two matters prominent in contemporary public debate: first, the so-called “boy problem” in the United States, and secondly, whether persons of the same sex should be permitted to marry?
At Cal State Fullerton, I teach courses called The American Male and Sexual Orientations in American Culture. In some ways these classes occasionally overlap, as my students and I discuss the differences and the similarities between men who consider themselves gay or bisexual and those who think of themselves as straight. Though of course widely accepted today in the United States, the idea that one’s own identity is grounded in the sex of those whom one desires sexually, that the sex of the object of yearning identifies the yearner, rather than simply defining his desires, is a comparatively recent cultural notion.
But it isn’t a universal way of thinking about human sexuality. Scholars too rarely ask if what we know as “sexual orientation” is a fundamental distinction between human beings, or instead is less significant, perhaps much less significant, than gender distinctions.
My students and I often consider whether various kinds of fuss over sexual orientation actually are indirect ways of addressing more basic issues of gender, the ways that a particular society defines the appropriate behavior of males and of females. We examine the ways that negative stereotypes of gay men, for example, not only stigmatize those males considered gay, but also coerce all men to stay within the boundaries of culturally prescribed “male behavior,” lest they be thought queer. It’s common in our culture for a gay male to be thought “unmanly,” but it’s not inevitable that this equation be in force, or even that sexuality be viewed as a simple question of one or the other, gay or straight, with bisexuality in the middle ground.
Such, however, has been our society’s obsession with sexual orientation—and with “appropriate” manliness—that an association with gayness came to include certain occupations, words, gestures, and items of apparel, as well as one male’s willingness to express intimacy with another. The greater the scorn heaped upon gay males, the more that all males have been discouraged from displaying behavior associated with gayness––with anything resembling intimacy heading the list of taboos.
Reflecting the powerful significance of gender in our society is the fact that lesbianism functions quite differently in the culture than does male homosexuality. Though lesbians and gay men are subjected in common to certain forms of discrimination, lesbianism is both stigmatized in some segments of “straight” society and powerfully eroticized in some “straight” quarters as well, a largely unknown occurrence with male homosexuality.
One hardly need suggest that life is easy for lesbians to observe that gay men seem to trouble straight people more, to observe that gay men are more associated with “perversion” than lesbians have been. A tomboy, revealingly enough, is often thought appealing or amusing, qualities never attributed to sissies.
This situation, rather than suggesting that lesbians (often stereotyped as the ultimate tomboys) have it easier, probably attests instead to the fact that the doings of men are simply paid more attention in our society. With male behavior mattering more, those who deviate from the strictures of manhood, then, are singularly bothersome. For those who believe in traditional gender distinctions, females whose behavior is thought to mirror that of males would be considerably less annoying, disgusting, laughable, or even noteworthy than that of “effeminate” men. Whatever the reason, a dislike of lesbianism did not bring about severe restrictions on displays of intimacy among all women in any way analogous to how homophobia prompted distancing between all American men.
For many centuries, various societies in various ways have differentiated between same-sex and different-sex activity. But the word “gay” and, according to many historians, even the very notion of sexual orientation on which it’s based, are of comparatively recent vintage. “Heterosexual” and homosexual” were coined, initially in German, less than a century and a half ago, a simple fact that should give pause to those who speak as if everyone everywhere has always been subject to inborn biological imperatives directing their sexual attention.
Societies may vary in terms of how sexual activities between persons of the same sex are scorned, ignored, or endorsed, but about the existence of oriented sexuality––even the existence, some suspect, of a gay gene––there is rarely any doubt. Those who expect to discover a “gay gene” may be just as wrong-headed as those who believe that they have discovered a Biblical injunction against homosexuality.
My own belief, by contrast, is that sexual meanings do not travel well across time and space, that history suggests that “sexual orientation” may be more of a recent human contrivance than a timeless biological phenomenon. Yet one doesn’t have to solve or even directly address the nature versus nurture riddle to simply observe that belief in an oriented sexuality brought with it a fear of male intimacy.
In the late nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth, as Americans increasingly came to believe that “homosexual” was both an adjective and a noun, and that the word referred to something highly undesirable, men became much more hesitant to express, and even perhaps to feel, intimacy toward one another. In what might aptly be called a lost world of American men, it once was different. Other scholars, notably E. Anthony Rotundo in his 1993 book American Manhood, have shown that intimacy between men was once so encouraged and so widespread in our society that we may accurately speak of “romantic friendships” between males of the nineteenth century.
Picturing Men
While others have relied on traditional historians’ sources, letters and diary entries, to document nineteenth-century comfort with male intimacy (elaborate terms of endearment and unselfconscious physical closeness, for example), my own documentation of the lost world has been with everyday photographs of two or more American men together. With these photographs we can literally see the lost world as it existed, as it later began to disappear, and as it then reappeared with revealing intensity in a particular moment and setting, only to disappear yet again with stark finality.
After systematically reviewing many thousands of images, as well as more conventional sources, I write in Picturing Men that American males, together in pairs and larger groups, once had professional portraits of themselves taken with a revealing frequency, in dramatic contrast to the virtual lack of the practice today. The poses they once commonly struck were even more revealing than the fact that the portrait was taken. With notable nonchalance, they might hold hands, sit on a companion’s lap, share a chair, drape their arms around each other, or perform for the camera what I’ve termed a “pageant of masculinity,” perhaps dressing up as cowboys or striking a frivolous pose that often included a “token of manhood” such as a cigar, liquor bottle, or firearm. Official athletic team portraits were once especially common scenes of closeness among males, with teammates sometimes lying atop each other. When George Eastman’s introduction of roll film in 1888 made it easier for amateurs to take pictures, the earliest snapshots also often showed males, boys and men alike, posing very close together, obviously delighting in one another’s company.
With a distancing and stiffness of pose in team portraits, the first widespread signal of a change, males began slowly but quite surely to move apart in photographs as the twentieth century progressed. If there was to be any more hand-holding, lap-sitting, or chair-sharing, there would usually be an exaggerated facial expression or some other gesture, reassurance to the observer and the observed alike that this was all purely in fun, with no genuine intimacy involved. The contrast between earlier and later poses of men together in photographs is striking, charting an increasing discomfort with closeness to each other’s bodies. The practice of males having their studio portraits taken together, once such a common token of association, was by comparison virtually extinct by the 1930s.
The closeness of old, and even studio portraits of men together, survived, however, even thrived, in the military, particularly in wartime. So common were poses of obviously tender affection between servicemen during the Second World War, and so extensive was men’s participation in that war, that one can speak of no less than a widespread revival during those years of romantic friendships among men.
Some of the wartime photos displayed in Picturing Men may well be of those who discovered other men with same-sex yearnings during the War, a development analyzed well in Allan Berube’s 1990 book, Coming Out under Fire. But the everyday photos that I have studied, unless there is some explicit inscription on an image, cannot document a sexual relationship between the subjects. The presence or absence of intimacy is another matter, and is something to which an everyday photo can sometimes eloquently attest.
Revealingly enough, the ubiquitous intimacy of wartime was conspicuously absent among male civilians in photographs taken during the early postwar years. Even young boys, who, in contrast to older males, had shown more closeness in everyday photos before the War, posed in the 1950s with a formality and lack of closeness that mirrored the poses older males had been striking for decades. The fear of intimacy that would account for the empty theater seat had triumphed, commonly inhibiting the relationships of American males of all ages. Though Picturing Men ends with the 1950s, I believe that the distancing and fear of intimacy that was intensified and became so widespread during those years continues to vex American males in our own time.
The price paid for the fear of men’s intimacy is high––for all males, not just those who yearn for each other sexually. William Pollack, Jr., in his Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood, and Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson, in their Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys, have been foremost among those contemporary analysts looking at how lonely and emotionally inhibited the world of boys can be. They have shown how an intense fear of being thought gay can lead to various forms of overcompensation with cruel consequences. For many American men, this overcompensation does not cease with the end of boyhood.
Because men’s doings have been given more weight, deviations from the culture’s prescriptions for men are particularly troubling for many Americans, with displays of intimacy between men arousing much more scorn than similar displays among women. For example, with a tiresome, utterly predictable, yet highly revealing frequency, the lead actors in Brokeback Mountain were asked what in the world it was like—implicitly how they could possibly have endured—kissing another guy. You’d have thought that Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal had climbed Everest. Culturally speaking, for male leads in a major American film, apparently that’s just what they’d done.
It seems plausible, therefore, to propose that some of today’s opponents of same-sex marriage are more bothered by men marrying than by weddings for women. My argument for a gendered approach to sexual orientation does not imply that lesbians have it better. If this must be made a contest, it might be said that, as women, with their doings trivialized, lesbians actually have it worse. What I am suggesting is that some opposition to “gay marriage” is animated by tremendous discomfort with the love, tenderness, and intimacy between men that their marrying each other implies. Notions of men having furtive sex with multiple male partners with whom they are not in love or lastingly involved might be considerably less disagreeable.
Apparently thanks to the cynical design of Bush partisans, debates over same-sex marriage, usually focused on proposals to ban the practice, have in recent years aroused the Bush political base, sending the president’s supporters to the polls in numbers larger than might have been the case without a “gay marriage” controversy. However, the recent Democratic electoral successes suggest that many voters weren’t as distracted by the sexual orientation of their fellow citizens as they had been in 2004. This allowed attention to be turned to more pressing concerns.
It might be well if sexual orientation were less of a distraction––for us all––in other aspects of American life beyond politics. We would be a considerably healthier society were we to see sexuality as a matter of much more nuance than a simple gay-straight dichotomy implies. And American men, whoever their sexual partners, would surely have a better time of it if they were able to restore some of that world lost to homophobia. At its heart, history teaches us that little in life is inevitable or immutable, that things surely don’t have to stay the way they currently are. In looking at the quite different way that things once were, Picturing Men reinforces that lesson.
With a distancing and stiffness of pose in team portraits, the first widespread signal of a change, males began slowly but quite surely to move apart in photographs as the twentieth century progressed. If there was to be any more hand-holding, lap-sitting, or chair-sharing, there would usually be an exaggerated facial expression or some other gesture, reassurance to the observer and the observed alike that this was all purely in fun, with no genuine intimacy involved. The contrast between earlier and later poses of men together in photographs is striking, charting an increasing discomfort with closeness to each other’s bodies. The practice of males having their studio portraits taken together, once such a common token of association, was by comparison virtually extinct by the 1930s.
The closeness of old, and even studio portraits of men together, survived, however, even thrived, in the military, particularly in wartime. So common were poses of obviously tender affection between servicemen during the Second World War, and so extensive was men’s participation in that war, that one can speak of no less than a widespread revival during those years of romantic friendships among men.
Some of the wartime photos displayed in Picturing Men may well be of those who discovered other men with same-sex yearnings during the War, a development analyzed well in Allan Berube’s 1990 book, Coming Out under Fire. But the everyday photos that I have studied, unless there is some explicit inscription on an image, cannot document a sexual relationship between the subjects. The presence or absence of intimacy is another matter, and is something to which an everyday photo can sometimes eloquently attest.
Revealingly enough, the ubiquitous intimacy of wartime was conspicuously absent among male civilians in photographs taken during the early postwar years. Even young boys, who, in contrast to older males, had shown more closeness in everyday photos before the War, posed in the 1950s with a formality and lack of closeness that mirrored the poses older males had been striking for decades. The fear of intimacy that would account for the empty theater seat had triumphed, commonly inhibiting the relationships of American males of all ages. Though Picturing Men ends with the 1950s, I believe that the distancing and fear of intimacy that was intensified and became so widespread during those years continues to vex American males in our own time.
The price paid for the fear of men’s intimacy is high––for all males, not just those who yearn for each other sexually. William Pollack, Jr., in his Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood, and Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson, in their Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys, have been foremost among those contemporary analysts looking at how lonely and emotionally inhibited the world of boys can be. They have shown how an intense fear of being thought gay can lead to various forms of overcompensation with cruel consequences. For many American men, this overcompensation does not cease with the end of boyhood.
Because men’s doings have been given more weight, deviations from the culture’s prescriptions for men are particularly troubling for many Americans, with displays of intimacy between men arousing much more scorn than similar displays among women. For example, with a tiresome, utterly predictable, yet highly revealing frequency, the lead actors in Brokeback Mountain were asked what in the world it was like—implicitly how they could possibly have endured—kissing another guy. You’d have thought that Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal had climbed Everest. Culturally speaking, for male leads in a major American film, apparently that’s just what they’d done.
It seems plausible, therefore, to propose that some of today’s opponents of same-sex marriage are more bothered by men marrying than by weddings for women. My argument for a gendered approach to sexual orientation does not imply that lesbians have it better. If this must be made a contest, it might be said that, as women, with their doings trivialized, lesbians actually have it worse. What I am suggesting is that some opposition to “gay marriage” is animated by tremendous discomfort with the love, tenderness, and intimacy between men that their marrying each other implies. Notions of men having furtive sex with multiple male partners with whom they are not in love or lastingly involved might be considerably less disagreeable.
Apparently thanks to the cynical design of Bush partisans, debates over same-sex marriage, usually focused on proposals to ban the practice, have in recent years aroused the Bush political base, sending the president’s supporters to the polls in numbers larger than might have been the case without a “gay marriage” controversy. However, the recent Democratic electoral successes suggest that many voters weren’t as distracted by the sexual orientation of their fellow citizens as they had been in 2004. This allowed attention to be turned to more pressing concerns.
It might be well if sexual orientation were less of a distraction––for us all––in other aspects of American life beyond politics. We would be a considerably healthier society were we to see sexuality as a matter of much more nuance than a simple gay-straight dichotomy implies. And American men, whoever their sexual partners, would surely have a better time of it if they were able to restore some of that world lost to homophobia. At its heart, history teaches us that little in life is inevitable or immutable, that things surely don’t have to stay the way they currently are. In looking at the quite different way that things once were, Picturing Men reinforces that lesson.
posted by LeBlues @ 1:26 PM,
,
Is Your Baby Gay?
Thursday, March 15, 2007
Pretty soon, a DNA test could tell you
It's a day in the not-too-distant future. A woman, three months pregnant, sits anxiously in her obstetrician's office pondering the possibility of giving birth to a gay kid.
Perhaps, she thinks, she shouldn't have agreed to the test in the first place. Maybe it would've been better not to know, to have left everything to fate. And what difference did it make, really? Like most of her friends, the woman, though moderately religious, considers herself an open-minded cosmopolitan with a Seinfeld-ian attitude toward homosexuality: "not that there's anything wrong with that!"
At least that's how she feels about other people's gay children. But this is her baby, her first and perhaps only one. And however much she and her husband try to reconcile themselves to the idea, they know the world at large will always remain a uniquely difficult place for a boy who likes other boys.
Without resolving this conflict, she consents to an analysis of her amniotic fluid sample, mentally grouping it with the tests already performed to look for markers of Huntington's disease and Down syndrome—things to be ruled out. Only this time, the results have come back positive.
And now she has a choice to make. A hormone patch, applied to her belly, could redirect her child's genetic destiny, reversing the sexual orientation inscribed in his chromosomes. There would be one fewer homosexual in the world—if that's what she wants.
Your Favorite Genes
Perhaps, she thinks, she shouldn't have agreed to the test in the first place. Maybe it would've been better not to know, to have left everything to fate. And what difference did it make, really? Like most of her friends, the woman, though moderately religious, considers herself an open-minded cosmopolitan with a Seinfeld-ian attitude toward homosexuality: "not that there's anything wrong with that!"
At least that's how she feels about other people's gay children. But this is her baby, her first and perhaps only one. And however much she and her husband try to reconcile themselves to the idea, they know the world at large will always remain a uniquely difficult place for a boy who likes other boys.
Without resolving this conflict, she consents to an analysis of her amniotic fluid sample, mentally grouping it with the tests already performed to look for markers of Huntington's disease and Down syndrome—things to be ruled out. Only this time, the results have come back positive.
And now she has a choice to make. A hormone patch, applied to her belly, could redirect her child's genetic destiny, reversing the sexual orientation inscribed in his chromosomes. There would be one fewer homosexual in the world—if that's what she wants.
Your Favorite Genes
It's not as far-fetched as it sounds. Already, some scientists claim they can potentially identify fetuses hardwired for homosexuality, and the gap between recognition and intervention is quickly narrowing. Lately some of the more notable research on the subject has focused on animals—namely, sheep. As it turns out, one in 10 rams prefers the company of other rams, a situation of considerable concern to the livestock industry. Last December, following an intensive three-year study, researchers at two Oregon universities announced they had successfully used a hormonal patch to alter the brains of gay rams to make them mate with ewes—effectively turning them straight. (The experiment didn't go over well with some gay rights advocates, notably tennis player Martina Navratilova, who called the study "homophobic and cruel" and said it deprived the sheep of their "right" to be gay.) In an article on the study in London's Sunday Times, experts predicted that within a decade, similar patches would allow parents to change fetuses' sexual orientation.
Well before that, expectant parents will likely be able to screen their embryos and choose one with the "correct" sexual preference. Even now, doctors are testing for a number of attributes using a procedure called Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD), which involves growing embryos in petri dishes and testing their DNA before implanting them in the uterus. PGD has until recently been used exclusively to check for more than 1,300 chromosomal disorders, but traits such as eye color, height, and hair color can also easily be predicted by DNA analysis. In many cases, they're marked by a single gene.
Soon, as geneticists map the location of the genes responsible for more complex behaviors and pinpoint, once and for all, those that help determine homosexuality, such traits, too, will factor into would-be parents' decisions to implant an embryo and carry it to term—or to toss it and all of its undesirable qualities in the trash.
In a culture that encourages us to customize everything from our Nikes to our venti skinny lattes, perhaps it is only a matter of time before baby-making becomes just another consumer transaction. Already have a girl? Make this one a boy! Want to impress your boho friends? Make a real statement with lesbian twins!
Well before that, expectant parents will likely be able to screen their embryos and choose one with the "correct" sexual preference. Even now, doctors are testing for a number of attributes using a procedure called Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD), which involves growing embryos in petri dishes and testing their DNA before implanting them in the uterus. PGD has until recently been used exclusively to check for more than 1,300 chromosomal disorders, but traits such as eye color, height, and hair color can also easily be predicted by DNA analysis. In many cases, they're marked by a single gene.
Soon, as geneticists map the location of the genes responsible for more complex behaviors and pinpoint, once and for all, those that help determine homosexuality, such traits, too, will factor into would-be parents' decisions to implant an embryo and carry it to term—or to toss it and all of its undesirable qualities in the trash.
In a culture that encourages us to customize everything from our Nikes to our venti skinny lattes, perhaps it is only a matter of time before baby-making becomes just another consumer transaction. Already have a girl? Make this one a boy! Want to impress your boho friends? Make a real statement with lesbian twins!
Dueling Agendas
Of course, the introduction of choice into a realm that has always been governed by chance promises to create a new galaxy of ethical and political problems. In the past 30 years, no two issues have been more polarizing—or more politicized—than abortion and gay rights. The arrival of "gay gene" testing will force activists on all sides to re-examine long-held pieties.
Conservatives opposed to both abortion and homosexuality will have to ask themselves whether the public shame of having a gay child outweighs the private sin of terminating a pregnancy (assuming the stigma on homosexuality survives the scientific refutation of the Right's treasured belief that it's a "lifestyle choice"). Pro-choice activists won't be spared, either. Will liberal moms who love their hairdressers be as tolerant when faced with the prospect of raising a little stylist of their own? And exactly how pro-choice will liberal abortion-rights activists be when thousands of potential parents are choosing to filter homosexuality right out of the gene pool?
Then there's the question of whether some gay parents will use genetic testing or hormonal treatments to intentionally produce gay offspring. It's hard to imagine the conservative culture warriors (who accused PBS of using a cartoon bunny to infect young minds with the gay agenda) sitting idly by as actual gays—even just a handful of them—use science to pass their sexuality on to the next generation. Will the surrogate mom replace the pervy Boy Scout leader as the anti-gay bugbear of choice?
Within a generation—sooner if genetic testing companies have their way—such questions will no longer be hypothetical. Even now, with a finger prick and a few keystrokes, expectant parents are ordering detailed genetic information on their unborn children, though caveat emptor is the rule in the marketplace.
A British study published in 2000, for example, identified a string of genes that affect an individual's stamina and exercise efficiency. Soon after, a company called CyGene rolled out a test that purports to measure athletic ability. Its claims are tenuous, but this hasn't stopped the company from selling hundreds of tests. What some critics have blasted as sketchy science, CyGene calls "an extremely unique way of interpreting the information out there."
Another firm, Acu-Gen Biolab Inc., is marketing a fetal DNA test that it claims predicts the gender of a baby just six weeks after conception. Apparently there are a few kinks to work out; the company faces a class-action suit filed by 40 individuals who received inaccurate information. Still other Web-based firms offer prospective parents DNA-based drug-reaction testing, nutritional genetic testing, diet consultation, and more.
"I think that people are going to be able to test for intelligence, appearance, personality, and, let's face it, they're going to select their babies to have characteristics that they consider to be superior," says Howard Coleman, CEO of Genelex, a Seattle-based biotech outfit. "Did you see Gattaca? The ability to do that kind of testing is definitely coming."
Conservatives opposed to both abortion and homosexuality will have to ask themselves whether the public shame of having a gay child outweighs the private sin of terminating a pregnancy (assuming the stigma on homosexuality survives the scientific refutation of the Right's treasured belief that it's a "lifestyle choice"). Pro-choice activists won't be spared, either. Will liberal moms who love their hairdressers be as tolerant when faced with the prospect of raising a little stylist of their own? And exactly how pro-choice will liberal abortion-rights activists be when thousands of potential parents are choosing to filter homosexuality right out of the gene pool?
Then there's the question of whether some gay parents will use genetic testing or hormonal treatments to intentionally produce gay offspring. It's hard to imagine the conservative culture warriors (who accused PBS of using a cartoon bunny to infect young minds with the gay agenda) sitting idly by as actual gays—even just a handful of them—use science to pass their sexuality on to the next generation. Will the surrogate mom replace the pervy Boy Scout leader as the anti-gay bugbear of choice?
Within a generation—sooner if genetic testing companies have their way—such questions will no longer be hypothetical. Even now, with a finger prick and a few keystrokes, expectant parents are ordering detailed genetic information on their unborn children, though caveat emptor is the rule in the marketplace.
A British study published in 2000, for example, identified a string of genes that affect an individual's stamina and exercise efficiency. Soon after, a company called CyGene rolled out a test that purports to measure athletic ability. Its claims are tenuous, but this hasn't stopped the company from selling hundreds of tests. What some critics have blasted as sketchy science, CyGene calls "an extremely unique way of interpreting the information out there."
Another firm, Acu-Gen Biolab Inc., is marketing a fetal DNA test that it claims predicts the gender of a baby just six weeks after conception. Apparently there are a few kinks to work out; the company faces a class-action suit filed by 40 individuals who received inaccurate information. Still other Web-based firms offer prospective parents DNA-based drug-reaction testing, nutritional genetic testing, diet consultation, and more.
"I think that people are going to be able to test for intelligence, appearance, personality, and, let's face it, they're going to select their babies to have characteristics that they consider to be superior," says Howard Coleman, CEO of Genelex, a Seattle-based biotech outfit. "Did you see Gattaca? The ability to do that kind of testing is definitely coming."
"Morally Unacceptable"
Not that people haven't tried to stop it. In October 2002, the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, a leading UK-based medical science think tank, released a 258-page report called Genetics and Human Behaviour: The Ethical Context. In it, the council warned of dire implications of widespread testing and called for a ban on tests to determine behavioral traits such as intelligence, sexual orientation, and personality in unborn babies. "We take the view that the use of selective termination ... to abort the fetus on the basis of information about behavioural traits in the normal range is morally unacceptable," the report concluded.
And at a congressional hearing last July, representatives from the Genetics and Public Policy Center at Johns Hopkins blasted the government's laissez-faire response to this new wave of genetic testing and called for immediate action. "I don't think there is awareness of the degree to which the government does not oversee genetic testing," center spokeswoman Gail Javitt says.
None of it seems to bother Holt Vaughan, president of Texas-based testing outfit Health-CheckUSA. Vaughan believes that parents are entitled to information about the genetic future of their unborn children, provided they get counseling to help them avoid rash decisions. Asked if he'd market a "gay gene" test, Vaughan doesn't miss a beat: "It's a very hypothetical question," he says. "But if our medical director looked at it and believed it was a credible test, then yeah!"
Know the Code
The role of DNA in determining sexual orientation has been coming into focus since 1979. That's when a landmark study conducted at the University of Minnesota found that identical twins who had been separated at birth and raised apart were likely to share a wide range of personality traits not often attributed to genetics. Building on those findings, in 1991 Michael Bailey and Richard Pillard found that identical twins were much more likely to both be homosexual than were fraternal twins or non-twin or adopted brothers. Their discovery—as well as the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003—informed a growing scientific consensus that homosexuality was at least partly biological.
No one has come closer to finding specific genetic markers for it than Dean H. Hamer, Ph.D., Chief of the Section on Gene Structure and Regulation in the Laboratory of Biochemistry of the National Cancer Institute. Hamer is, as Discover magazine put it in 1997, the nation's premier "big gene hunter."
In 1996, Hamer was able to connect neurotic behavior in humans to the gene responsible for our processing of serotonin, a brain chemical that affects impulsiveness and anxiety. Clearly not averse to controversy, in 2004 Hamer published The God Gene: How Faith is Hardwired into Our Genes (Doubleday), in which he traced feelings of spiritual transcendence to a single gene called VMAT2. Needless to say, religious fundamentalists did not rejoice.
But none of his previous work generated as much attention—or outrage—as his 1993 discovery of the "gay gene." Working with noted British neuroscientist Simon LeVay (who went on to find differences in the brains of gay and straight men), Hamer made his groundbreaking discovery by accident. He had started out looking for the genetic root of Kaposi's sarcoma, an otherwise rare cancer that kills many AIDS patients. His cancer search was unsuccessful, but as Hamer was examining sets of genes in 40 pairs of homosexual brothers, he found five markers that revealed the Xq28 chromosome region as the site of the genetic code for homosexuality.
Since he published his report in the July 1993 issue of Science, Hamer has faced a barrage of criticism. N.E. Whitehead, coauthor of My Genes Made Me Do It!, blasted Hamer for restricting his sample to gay men, arguing that the results might have been different if he'd included a control group drawn from the general population. Religious groups protested, insisting heterosexuality is the biological norm, and deviance from that norm is learned, not inherited. Even many psychologists were skeptical. But so far, no one has offered convincing evidence to refute his claims.
Rainbow's End?
Hamer's findings hold out the ethically-dubious promise that parents who are no friends of Dorothy may one day be able to discard suspiciously swishy embryos. By examining a string of genes in the Xq28 region, Hamer says he can predict with unprecedented accuracy whether a child is likely to be gay. It's certainly not foolproof, but access to such information would no doubt inspire many parents to abort an embryo whose results suggested a high probability of homosexuality.
Though he is gay himself, Hamer seems curiously unconcerned about the potential implications of his research. "People are often afraid that finding [a gay gene] will lead people to rethink homosexuality as a disease," he says. He doesn't share that fear, and argues that few people will make life-and-death decisions about their unborn babies based on single traits.
But as it turns out, they already are. A survey of 415 genetic labs conducted by the Genetics and Public Policy Center (GPPC) found that 42 percent of them had used genetic testing to help parents select the gender of their children. Labs are also regularly tossing embryos with genetic predispositions to colon cancer or Alzheimer's. While infants born with these genes are far from certain to come down with these diseases, many prospective parents opt to play it safe.
Gay rights advocates worry that genetic testing puts homosexuality on the same level as such diseases, pointing it down the road to the same goal: elimination. Even if it were possible to genetically erase homosexuality, however, doing so would come at a social price. Glenn Wilson, a reader in personality at the Institute of Psychiatry in London and coauthor of Born Gay: The Psychobiology of Sex Orientation, argues that the same genes that influence homosexuality are crucial to the expression of valued behavioral traits, such as verbal fluency and mastery of spatial relationships. (Translation: It's not entirely accidental that your Uncle Jimmy has a knack for show tunes and interior design.)
"If you did ever succeed in wiping out homosexual orientation, you would also remove many positive traits that are good for humanity as a whole and also good for individuals," Wilson adds. Thus, eradicating homosexuality, even if it could be done without the destruction of a single organism, "would be ethically indefensible."
Ethics, however, might not dissuade the many who continue to view man-on-man action as the ultimate threat to Western civilization. "You put this stuff in the hands of a real homophobe," warns Martin Munzer, president and CEO of CyGene, "and that's when it gets scary."
But if genetic testing could become a weapon for those hoping to wipe out homosexuality, one trend suggests it could also be a tool to preserve it. In the GPPC survey cited above, three percent of labs reported having used genetic testing to help parents who wanted to conceive a child with a disability, such as deafness. Last year, in a much-publicized case in New Jersey, a couple with dwarfism sought to use PGD to conceive a baby that shared their phenotype. They ultimately chose instead to adopt.
While the press attacked the couple bitterly, others were more sympathetic. "These people had lived with this disease all their lives, and they just wanted to have a kid who looked like them," says Jamie Grifo, M.D., Program Director for New York University's Reproductive Endocri-nology Division and professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at NYU medical school.
Grifo, an early proponent of genetic research, has performed PGD procedures for a decade and says he has no qualms about helping parents have babies with certain traits. "Personally, I believe that people should be allowed to make their own decisions. I believe in the right of the individual. They're not going to harm the species."
And, if they are, it's probably too late to do anything about it with the gene genie already out of the bottle. "We're at the advent of a brave new world here," says Munzer. "We don't know where it's going to go, but there's no stopping it now."
posted by LeBlues @ 1:32 PM,
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Mummy’s the word
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Mummy-lit is where chick-lit goes to grow up, get married, have a child (or three) - and now there’s no time for the sex, shopping and scented candles that feature so heavily in young women’s books. Like trendy children’s names, which seem to appear from nowhere and then spread across the land within months, Mummy-lit is a publishing concept that never existed, until one day it was everywhere. Last month four big “mummy” novels came out, all aiming at the same narrow, middle-class readership.
The marketing and timing are just right. As the authors and readership of 1990s chick hits grow up and have children, there should be a large market for these books. Even Sophie Kinsella, cheerleader of the chick-lit pack, has apparently moved on with her new book, Shopaholic and Baby. But the title is misleading: Kinsella’s regular heroine, Becky Bloomwood, is pregnant, but the baby doesn’t emerge until the last chapter. So this is still perfect and relentlessly upbeat chick-lit, with an added twist of slightly deranged pregnancy behaviour.
But true “mummy-lit” books are geared to a different market: the older, saggier and (frankly) less glamorous mother. These books are narrated by stay-at-home mothers with school-age children. This domestic setting is curiously old-fashioned, and sets the new mummy-lit genre apart from Allison Pearson’s pioneering 2002 novel I Don’t Know How She Does It - the tale of full-time City fund manager and part-time mother Kate Reddy.
Pearson’s opening scene gives us Kate in her kitchen at 1.30am, attempting to “distress” supermarket-bought mince pies with a rolling pin in an attempt to make them look home-made for the school Christmas party. “And home-made is what I am after here. Home is where the heart is. Home is where the good mother is, baking for her children.”
The mince-pie scene has become the ur-text of mummydom, the standard against which working mothers judge the hopeless attempts to be as “good” as the saintly stay-at-homes. I think about it every time I’m up at midnight, icing the fairy cakes that I have baked after a full day’s work, having put the kids to bed and completed my evening chores. It would be cheaper and quicker for me to give my daughter a fiver to give to the school kitty. But that’s not the point. Baking is in our genes, if not our skill-sets.
It’s not surprising that mummy-lit ignores office life. Working mothers aren’t interesting book fodder - the conflict between work and family is a never-ending, unresolved tension that leaves little room for any other kind of plot development. Indeed, by the end of Pearson’s book her heroine has “resolved” her conflict by giving up the job: “Richard and I sold the Hackney heap, moved up to Derbyshire, near my family, and bought a place on the edge of a market town.”
Books set among stay-at-home women cut out the cyclical dullness of office politics and go straight to the hidden heart of “mummy world” (where few men, and many working mothers, don’t dare or care to go). It’s exposed in these novels as a surprisingly protocol-heavy and often unwelcoming place. Fran Clarke, the insecure narrator of Maria Beaumont’s book Motherland, explains: “If you want your kids to get on - that is, to get invited to the right parties - then you have to cosy up to their friends’ mums because it is they who draw up the invitation lists.”
Playground witches are quite pale as dark forces go, but they exist and cause real misery. And behind the scenes in mummy-lit there are plenty of other difficult themes - hard-to-handle children, drifting marriages, miscarriage, alcoholism.
In Motherland, Fran drinks to drown out her failing marriage and unfulfilled life. There is a really serious idea here - a mother who has never really recovered from barely mentioned post-natal depression and turns to alcohol: “I’m drinking myself into oblivion. I’ve looked, and, well, there really is nowhere else to go.”
But Beaumont bottles out. Her Fran is potentially the most interesting character in all of these novels - a working-class woman from London’s Bethnal Green who feels uncomfortable among the suburban smug marrieds. But the book’s secondary characters are unconvincing, there are sloppy spelling mistakes, and at the end the drink problem miraculously disappears. Errant husband returns, Fran starts working again, and they all live happily ever after.
Despite the potentially serious subject matter, all these novels use the comic narrative style and chirpy tone already familiar from chick-lit. The covers of these books scream “girls’ fiction” - what man would pick up a book with a pastel cover, the literary equivalent of a tube of Love Hearts sweets?
And there is plenty to laugh at here, including the easily mocked middle-class stereotypes (alpha mummy, yummy mummy, knit-your-own-tofu mummy). These types exist, they are funny, and we should accept that everyone’s style of mothering is labelled. We are all judged and judgmental.
In The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy, Fiona Neill conjures up a north London private-school staple: the woman who has given up her gigantic job to “do kids”. Lucy Sweeney (the slummy mummy) visits an ex-City slicker who now manages her brood using a shelf of high-powered parenting manuals while she co-ordinates after-school activities: “Kumon maths, Suzuki violin, chess, yoga for children”. This alpha mum asks Lucy which parenting philosophy she subscribes to. “’Slow mothering,’ I say, making it up as I go along. ‘It’s part of the slow-town, slow-food movement, aimed at producing free-range children.’ ‘Oh,’ she says, trying to mask her surprise. ‘I haven’t heard of that one.’”
So far, so funny. But do these books tell us anything about motherhood itself? Bringing up children can be fun. But it is a slippery, tricky thing, beset with guilt, anger and worry. It’s also lonely. And most “mothering” is about dealing with the mundane. There isn’t much time to ponder the inner workings of our souls or unleash our creative genius. As Cyril Connolly had it: “There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.”
The long days (and nights) of motherhood are hard to write about in a way that doesn’t leave the reader gagging for a break and a glass of white wine (crucial for every female narrator from Bridget Jones onwards). And these writers are all mothers, themselves mentally and physically encumbered by the prams cluttering their own halls.
Instead of great thoughts, they drill deep into minutiae. Lucy Cavendish’s novel The Invisible Woman tries hard to give the reader an idea of the thousands of small things that fill mothers’ heads. She offers whole screeds on subjects such as the rules of playgroup, and the politics of television: “So here are my television-watching rules: Edward can watch it in the mornings because a. no-one wants to get up with him and b. it seems to be relatively educational. In the evenings he should not watch any other television apart from The Simpsons or something an adult wants to watch.”
Totally mundane. The cumulative effect is somewhere between stupor - do we want to go into so much detail? - and admiration that Cavendish/Smythe has actually formulated theories and rules about these things.
The first-person voice is a must in mummy-lit. What other perspective can there be? Cavendish’s Samantha Smythe is the most carefully fleshed-out protagonist in these new books, and her tale is the most satisfying. Her husband and three boys are vivid and separate, idiosyncratic souls (and presumably based on Cavendish’s own experience as a mother of three).
Neill’s The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy also offers us a mother with three boys, but her book suffers from having started life as a newspaper column (in The Times). It’s funny in places, but it feels episodic and far too long. There’s only so much sexual tension a reader can take - and it’s on overload in Slummy Mummy, in the form of Neill’s Sexy Domesticated Dad, the star turn in her column, here given a name (Robert Bass) and a wandering eye (and hand).
In all these books there’s a remarkable synchronicity of plot development. The crisis in all mummy-lit tales is infidelity, or the threat of it. At heart, these novels are not about motherhood at all. Mummy-lit is about the things that happen to women when they reach a certain age, find themselves in stale relationships, and happen to be mired in domesticity. But - as only happens with such regularity in the fictional world - everyone comes back from the brink (or beyond), marriages survive, and the interloper threatening a happy home is sent packing. It’s all as traditional as baking and sewing-in name-tapes.
In the end the zingy pace of these books, and their set-piece comic climaxes (not sexual climaxes, obviously) made me feel sullied and fed up - for these heroines are hopeless at engaging with life in the wider world.
This feels like a cold leftover from chick-lit. Ditzy may be funny in a twentysomething who has a job, a life and lots of friends, but these older women should have moved on. And they don’t define their own worlds - life is something that happens to them, they are at the mercy of not-very-benign external forces in the shape of tricky teachers, pushy alpha mothers, non-supportive husbands and backstabbing friends.
What’s especially depressing about these women is that no one (least of all their partners) takes them seriously, apparently because they are no longer in the salaried workforce. These are comfortably-off families, where wives don’t have to work - and their spouses like it that way because it means that childcare doesn’t interfere with their creative, long-hours jobs.
The whiff of the economically disempowered, miserable Victorian wife hangs heavy over these lives. Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina are not so far from the bored, tempted, miserable wives of London - it’s as if feminism never happened. Like most women these days, these mothers had great jobs BC (before children). We are even supposed to believe that Neill’s Lucy Sweeney, a woman who can’t even remember where she has parked her car, used to be a producer on Newsnight.
Cavendish’s Smythe still has a freelance column - on the contents of celebrities’ fridges. But even she, worried about a child who has swallowed poisonous berries, is sidelined by the hospital nurses when her husband arrives (”your wife has behaved in an unreasonable fashion”).
These big, easy, mostly funny books aren’t meant as a serious take on what it is to be a mother, however autobiographical some of the detail (and I suspect it’s spouse-wincingly close to the truth). That’s a shame. There’s plenty of thought-provoking, factual writing as well as fiction aimed at those who’ve just embarked on motherhood, including Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother and Anne Enright’s Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood. But new motherhood is a very public time of your life - everyone wants a piece of you when you have a tiny baby, and you can walk for miles with a pram.
As children get older and less cute, the world shrinks - it is bounded by the family home, the walk to school, and the parks and lurid indoor play centres of the villages where we live (even inner London is just a series of small villages).
A mother’s world may be small, but many of us are still sorely in need of a good guidebook. These novels reflect a lot about my life: “Looking after children is like working on a coal face, except there’s never any break between shifts,” as Lucy Sweeney says. But I am still hunting for the book that tells me something brilliant, insightful and life-changing about being a mother.
posted by LeBlues @ 12:15 PM,
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Love-making gets green light from adult stores
Monday, March 12, 2007
Pleasure the planet ... but please don't smoke after
or
Planet-friendly love-making will make others green with envy
or
- - -
You've heard of green cars, green tourism and green weddings. Now Canadians should ready themselves for green sex.
For those who like to make love to the soundtrack of the global warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Greenpeace has released a list of strategies for "getting it on for the good of the planet," suggesting "you can be a bomb in bed without nuking the planet." TreeHugger, an online magazine edited by Ontario's Michael Graham Richard, has just published a guide on "how to green your sex life." The famed adult store Good Vibrations announced last week they would no longer sell sex toys containing phthalates, controversial chemical plasticizers believed by some to be hazardous to humans and the environment alike.
And throughout Canada and the U.S., people who want to pleasure the planet can now buy everything from bamboo bed sheets to organic lubricant and "eco-undies."
"Green living is getting sexy," says Jacob Gordon, author of TreeHugger.com's recent green guide for the bedroom.
"Even a year ago, people wouldn't have been nearly as receptive to this kind of thing. ... But, as the importance of living green gains traction in our culture, people are willing to take things like that a lot more seriously."
Most environmentalists will agree the mainstream success of the Al Gore vehicle An Inconvenient Truth has helped give climate change the pop-culture sheen it's currently enjoying. Indeed, global warming is a cause to which everyone from Diesel apparel to Vanity Fair magazine and Starbucks are pinning their marketing efforts.
And if shopping to save the planet is trendy, having sex to clear your conscience is at the cutting edge.
"It feels like people are just waking up to the fact the planet is suffering under our uses of it," says Rebecca Denk, business manager for the adult toy store Babeland. The U.S. company, which sells to Canadians via Babeland.com, just introduced an "Eco-Sexy Kit" featuring a phthalate-free vibrator, soy massage candle, a natural lubricant with no animal-testing or derivatives, and condoms.
"We have to look at every piece of our lives, including our sexuality, and ask: How is this healthy for me, and how is this healthy for the planet?" says Denk. "Hopefully, we're all becoming better global citizens."
Other ways of "greenwashing" the bedroom, as outlined by TreeHugger and Greenpeace, include turning out the lights, not buying PVC or vinyl accoutrements, ensuring S&M paddles are made from sustainably harvested timber, using organic massage oils, showering together, using bamboo bed sheets (they come from a rapidly renewable resource and are said to be "super sexy"), and wearing lingerie made with renewable fibres such as hemp (Enamore), bamboo (Butta) and other organic goodness (GreenKnickers, Buenostyle, Peau Ethique).
Gordon notes there's even an eco-friendly adult website dedicated to naked vegetarians, appropriately called Veg Porn.
Camille Labchuk, speaking on behalf of the Green Party of Canada, gives the movement two green thumbs-up.
"The general concern for trying to live lightly on our planet has transferred into all areas of people's lives," says Labchuk, the Green party's press secretary. "So, even though what goes on in our bedrooms as a nation is somewhat hidden, we know that's somewhere people want to green-up."
posted by LeBlues @ 12:51 PM,
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In the hirsute throes of a 'menaissance'
Friday, March 9, 2007
In an interview with The Paris Review four decades ago, Saul Bellow, the Canadian-born author, was asked why in recent years his books had moved from tragedy toward comedy.
"Obliged to choose between complaint and comedy, I choose comedy, as more energetic, wiser and manlier," he explained.
It seems men in Canada today have made the same choice.
Guys don't seem to be complaining about the demise of manhood anymore; they're glad to just get on with being guys and maybe laugh at themselves along the way.
Stephen Harper jokes about not being able to seduce even his own wife. Justin Timberlake mocks his boy band past.
A few years ago, when the metrosexual trend was at its peak, it looked as if the very idea of manhood was dissolving in a prepedicure footbath.
But look around now at pop culture or politics and there is a sense that guys are being guys again, this time buoyed by the kind of playful self-mockery that so often attends self confidence.
"There's definitely been a change in what it means to be a man today," says Harvey Mansfield, a Harvard professor and the author of Manliness, part of a recent wave of new books about the changing nature of manhood, from serious studies to tongue-in-cheek explorations.
These also include Yale anthropology professor Richard Bribiescas' Men: Evolutionary and Life History, author Neal Pollack's book on fatherhood, Alternadad, and The Sopranos' Frank Vincent's A Guy's Guide to Being a Man's Man, among others.
This "Menaissance" can be seen on the HBO show Entourage, about a Hollywood actor and his best friends. Television commercials for Miller beer show celebrities declaring "Man Law."
At the movies, the popularity of stars such as Vince Vaughn and Jack Black, pictured, recently prompted Access Hollywood to take note of the return of the alphamale, the manly man.
Just as it did with the rise of the metrosexual or the emergence of the New Age Man before it, manhood has once again undergone some change.
The National Post has decided to look at this change, offering an examination of what it means to be a man in Canada and where men might be headed.
That said, this is not an attempt at offering a definitive, comprehensive guide to manhood.
Instead, we are offering some enlightening, engaging snapshots. We hope today's issue gives you an interesting glimpse of both.
To that end, this series traverses the rather diverse terrain from trends in health and education, where women outnumber men, to the popularity of "mancations" and the newfound respect for "bromance." We also look at what the experiences of a man who has chosen to live in a cave on the banks of the Yukon River say about the universal experience of modern manhood.
There are stories about men in today's workplace, the new model of fatherhood that is emerging in Canada and a host of other glimpses of guyhood throughout the newspaper. Through this diverse series of stories, we look at where we stand on the ever-shifting terrain of what it means to be a man.
In the Canadian man archetypes, the pondering of sexual preoccupations, and the new "mancabulary," there is a mix of the serious with the playful.
Considering that being a man today means having a laugh, such an approach seems fitting.
Like Mr. Bellow, we also choose humour. While today's issue comes with a touch of levity, it also proves thought-provoking by offering readers insights into what it means to be a Canadian man.
posted by LeBlues @ 1:06 PM,
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Invasion of the Prostitots
Thursday, March 8, 2007
Cultural warriors decry the sexualization of girls. But where's the proof there's a problem?
Just how far along the slick slope of cultural decline have we fallen? While you’ve been reading the Superficial and playing Hot or Not, The American Psychological Association's “Task Force On the Sexualization of Young Girls” has been hard at work chronicling our sexed up, dumbed down culture. Liberals and conservatives alike are convinced, it seems, that a toxic mix of toys, music, and media is turning 'tweens into tarts.
It’s all here, in 72 titillating pages—the Kid Rock Lyrics (So blow me bitch I don’t rock for cancer/I rock for the cash and the topless dancers), the characterization of the Internet as a conduit for porn, the descent of the model Disney heroine from modest maiden (Snow White) to “sexy” strumpet (The Little Mermaid.) They’re about two years behind the US Weekly crowd—Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears (not yet depilated ), and Paris Hilton all figure prominently—but it hardly matters. The cast here is changeable, the message eminently recyclable: American teens are at risk like never before.
Well, there is a slight innovation at play in the APA's retelling of good girls gone bad. We’ve apparently moved beyond the age of the tarted up ‘tween and into the era of the prostitot, the epoch of the kinderwhore. The hallowed thong, “an item of clothing based on what a stripper might wear,” now comes in kid sizes. “Pudgy, cuddly, and asexual troll dolls” have been traded for “trollz,” apparently highly gendered. Even the American Girl dolls, who might as well come packaged with promise rings on their porcelain figures, are not immune. “American Girl’s recent co-branding with Bath & Body Works,” we learn, “may lead to product tie-ins that will encourage girls to develop a precocious body consciousness and one associated with narrowly sexual attractiveness.” And let’s not even get started on Bratz.
The report is short on numbers, heavy on anecdote. But it’s easy to be persuaded that 8-year-olds are dressing more like 'tweens, 'tweens more like teens, and teens more like 20-somethings. Which means—what, exactly? Kids ape their older peers, and they’ve never had more access to images of underdressed celebutants. A sixth-grader in a short skirt could well be a sign of a sexually dysfunctional society, a pie-eyed Paris in the making. Or she could simply suggest that 11-year-olds pick an outfit the same way they long have, hoping to find acceptance within a social group and signal mastery over a shared culture. Fashion can suggest sexual availability, or it can imply inclusion. Are they dressing for men, or for one another?
It’s not a question the APA bothers to address. The authors present the escalating Hilton/thong/Bratz situation beside a litany of alarming pathologies that sexualization might conceivably provoke, from eating disorders to depression to low self esteem to addiction. There is no suggestion that some girls are more vulnerable to these problems than others; the weight of an underdressed Lindsay Lohan burdens all of us equally. The report then moves seamlessly from low self-esteem to violent, predatory behavior. Sex abuse “is an extreme form of sexualization,” just a few steps away from those Trollz on the alleged sex continuum.
Again, the report is a designated stat-free zone, but numbers on the state of girlhood are dramatic enough to be worth repeating. The Guttmacher Institute reports (PDF) that the teen pregnancy rate in 2002, the latest year available, was at its lowest level in 30 years. Between 1998 and 2002, the teenage abortion rate dropped 50 percent. Women are 56 percent of college enrollees. Girls have made such strides that conservatives in search of a cause (and eager to blame feminists) have dubbed the reverse gender gap the “War on Boys.” And while those celebrities the girls are slavishly aping cycle in and out of rehab, teen drug and alcohol use are both down.
When it comes to violence, the numbers are even more revealing. As an LA Times op/ed pointed out last week, rape stats have plunged since the '70s. The U.S. Justice Department's National Crime Victimization Survey estimated that 105,000 women were raped in 1973, compared with 30,000 in the latest survey. All indicators of sexual violence are down, and the decrease is most dramatic among younger women. In the past 12 years, according to the survey, sexual victimization rates have fallen 78 percent.
In isolation, those trends don’t say anything particularly interesting about the purported connection between short skirts and violence. But rape stats in freefall should at least call into question the casual conflation of Bratz dolls and child abuse. If girls are more hypersexualized than ever, and objectification leads inexorably to depression and violence, why are girls achieving at such high rates? It may be that a passel of miniature thongs is contributing to violent behavior. (And at this point, shouldn’t we just be impressed that they’re sporting underwear at all?) But it’s not obvious, and pointing at a bunch of fourth graders in belly shirts does not make it so.
You could as easily tell the opposite story—one in which those thongs are the sartorial equivalent of grrl power. Prostitot culture could be the anti-rape, encouraging girls to take control of their sexuality before others do. It’s not likely, but the narrative is no more divorced from reality, or bereft of explanatory power, than its APA-stamped counterpart.
Without any mechanism to explain the process by which precocious fashion taste turns to self-loathing, it’s probably safest to assume that the kid's department at Penny's and the darkest recesses of American culture exist a world apart. Girls, as they always have, will alternately embrace the trappings of girlhood and struggle against the mythologies of gender. Parents and soi-disant experts will continue to cluck their tongues, and possibly publish papers. Objecting to the fashion choices of the young is perfectly natural. While girls may be baring more skin than ever, the need to dress disapproval as social science says less about their pathologies than it does about ours.
posted by LeBlues @ 1:10 PM,
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The private war of women soldiers
Wednesday, March 7, 2007
Many female soldiers say they are sexually assaulted by their male comrades and can't trust the military to protect them. "The knife wasn't for the Iraqis," says one woman. "It was for the guys on my own side."
As thousands of burned-out soldiers prepare to return to Iraq to fill President Bush's unwelcome call for at least 20,000 more troops, I can't help wondering what the women among those troops will have to face. And I don't mean only the hardships of war, the killing of civilians, the bombs and mortars, the heat and sleeplessness and fear.
I mean from their own comrades -- the men.
I have talked to more than 20 female veterans of the Iraq war in the past few months, interviewing them for up to 10 hours each for a book I am writing on the topic, and every one of them said the danger of rape by other soldiers is so widely recognized in Iraq that their officers routinely told them not to go to the latrines or showers without another woman for protection.
The female soldiers who were at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait, for example, where U.S. troops go to demobilize, told me they were warned not to go out at night alone.
"They call Camp Arifjan 'generator city' because it's so loud with generators that even if a woman screams she can't be heard," said Abbie Pickett, 24, a specialist with the 229th Combat Support Engineering Company who spent 15 months in Iraq from 2004-05. Yet, she points out, this is a base, where soldiers are supposed to be safe.
Spc. Mickiela Montoya, 21, who was in Iraq with the National Guard in 2005, took to carrying a knife with her at all times. "The knife wasn't for the Iraqis," she told me. "It was for the guys on my own side."
Comprehensive statistics on the sexual assault of female soldiers in Iraq have not been collected, but early numbers revealed a problem so bad that former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld ordered a task force in 2004 to investigate. As a result, the Defense Department put up a Web site in 2005 designed to clarify that sexual assault is illegal and to help women report it. It also initiated required classes on sexual assault and harassment. The military's definition of sexual assault includes "rape; nonconsensual sodomy; unwanted inappropriate sexual contact or fondling; or attempts to commit these acts."
Unfortunately, with a greater number of women serving in Iraq than ever before, these measures are not keeping women safe. When you add in the high numbers of war-wrecked soldiers being redeployed, and the fact that the military is waiving criminal and violent records for more than one in 10 new Army recruits, the picture for women looks bleak indeed.
Last year, Col. Janis Karpinski caused a stir by publicly reporting that in 2003, three female soldiers had died of dehydration in Iraq, which can get up to 126 degrees in the summer, because they refused to drink liquids late in the day. They were afraid of being raped by male soldiers if they walked to the latrines after dark. The Army has called her charges unsubstantiated, but Karpinski told me she sticks by them. (Karpinski has been a figure of controversy in the military ever since she was demoted from brigadier general for her role as commander of Abu Ghraib. As the highest-ranking official to lose her job over the torture scandal, she claims she was scapegoated, and has become an outspoken critic of the military's treatment of women. In turn, the Army has accused her of sour grapes.)
"I sat right there when the doctor briefing that information said these women had died in their cots," Karpinski told me. "I also heard the deputy commander tell him not to say anything about it because that would bring attention to the problem." The latrines were far away and unlit, she explained, and male soldiers were jumping women who went to them at night, dragging them into the Port-a-Johns, and raping or abusing them. "In that heat, if you don't hydrate for as many hours as you've been out on duty, day after day, you can die." She said the deaths were reported as non-hostile fatalities, with no further explanation.
Not everyone realizes how different the Iraq war is for women than any other American war in history. More than 160,500 American female soldiers have served in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Middle East since the war began in 2003, which means one in seven soldiers is a woman. Women now make up 15 percent of active duty forces, four times more than in the 1991 Gulf War. At least 450 women have been wounded in Iraq, and 71 have died -- more female casualties and deaths than in the Korean, Vietnam and first Gulf Wars combined. And women are fighting in combat.
Officially, the Pentagon prohibits women from serving in ground combat units such as the infantry, citing their lack of upper-body strength and a reluctance to put girls and mothers in harm's way. But mention this ban to any female soldier in Iraq and she will scoff.
"Of course we were in combat!" said Laura Naylor, 25, who served with the Army Combat Military Police in Baghdad from 2003-04. "We were interchangeable with the infantry. They came to our police stations and helped pull security, and we helped them search houses and search people. That's how it is in Iraq."
Women are fighting in ground combat because there is no choice. This is a war with no front lines or safe zones, no hiding from in-flying mortars, car and roadside bombs, and not enough soldiers. As a result, women are coming home with missing limbs, mutilating wounds and severe trauma, just like the men.
All the women I interviewed held dangerous jobs in Iraq. They drove trucks along bomb-ridden roads, acted as gunners atop tanks and unarmored vehicles, raided houses, guarded prisoners, rescued the wounded in the midst of battle, and searched Iraqis at checkpoints. Some watched their best friends die, some were wounded, all saw the death and mutilation of Iraqi children and citizens.
Yet, despite the equal risks women are taking, they are still being treated as inferior soldiers and sex toys by many of their male colleagues. As Pickett told me, "It's like sending three women to live in a frat house."
posted by LeBlues @ 4:17 PM,
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Double vision
Tuesday, March 6, 2007
Surrealism's women thought they were celebrating sexual emancipation. But were they just fulfilling men's erotic fantasies?
Among the "surreal things" to be celebrated at the V&A's exhibition this month is the human body. The body when separated from its identity - or soul, if you prefer - becomes just another thing. In her book The Surreal Body, written to accompany the exhibition, Ghislaine Wood struggles mightily to present the body that "the surrealists endlessly manipulated and fetishised" as unisex or ambisex, but it is actually feminine. Not female. Feminine. Even in the deliberately dis-gendered figure of Claude Cahun, the operation of narcissism is purely feminine. Herbert Bayer mugging at his naked and mutilated self in the mirror is feminine. Hans Bellmer's dolls are all, horribly, feminine.
In our polarised culture, in which real men may not be treated as mere body, and women must consider themselves primarily body, the portrayed body becomes the feminised body, regardless of its sex. At the same time that the women of surrealism were endlessly arraying and portraying themselves, as often in carefully posed photographs as in any other medium, the men of surrealism were disappearing into short back and sides, and suits and ties. Femininity was all image; masculinity had no image at all. Real men don't look in mirrors.
Few people would recognise the surrealist poet Paul Eluard in a photograph. His second wife, Nusch Eluard, by contrast, was so often photographed by Dora Maar and Man Ray that she could be said to be the actual surreal body. She was slim, high-breasted, virginal, eyebrows plucked to a thin line, never without lipstick. Nusch fancied herself an artist; her entire output of photomontages is worth nowhere near as much as a single Picasso sketch of her. Even an artist as committed as Eileen Agar was prepared to drape herself in nipple-revealing georgette to be photographed dancing on a roof. A feminist art historian commenting on Whitney Chadwick's book Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement described Chadwick's insistence on the beauty of the women artists as irrelevant, when of course it was not. The male surrealists were in thrall to it, but, more importantly, so were the artists themselves.
Meret Oppenheim is supposed to have described her famous Objet (Le Déjeuner en Fourrure), the fur-covered cup, saucer and spoon, as "the image of femininity imprinted in the minds of men and projected on to women". Reification, according to the feminist orthodoxy of the 1980s, is something that men do to women; Oppenheim's judgment, if she ever really uttered it, could have been made by any lecturer in elementary feminist theory.
In this conventional scenario, we must identify the men of surrealism as those who sought out sexual partners who corresponded to their fantasy and then forced fetishistic roles upon them. Eluard wrote poems about Nusch, and published them in a collection called Facile, with nude pictures of her by Man Ray. He certainly wanted and orchestrated her exhibitionism, but did he actually create it? Perhaps Leonora Carrington's narcissism was imposed on her by Max Ernst, but it seems as likely that it is an aspect of female self-fashioning at any time, and does not correspond in any way to demands made by a male partner.
Indeed, it may be partly or entirely delusional. Léonor Fini's endless elaborations of her own likeness are unlikely to have been carried out in response to prompting from any of her "legions of lovers". Fini was convinced that she was inventing her own ideal of femininity: sensual, powerful, merciless. To a jaundiced eye, it is more of the same: huge hair, virginal breasts, tiny waists, long legs, Barbie before Barbie.
The woman of surrealism is certainly stereotypical, but the stereotype seems to exist before the art, which is largely a capitulation to it. The women who walk through Delvaux's dreamscapes, for example, are all identical. If there is an exception to the slender maidens of the surrealist dream it is Gala Dalí, whose body is heavier and older than the fashionista stereotype and is used by Salvador Dalí in a very different way. The effect of Dalí's work depends upon illusionistic painting; the portrayed objects and creatures must look even more real than they would in photographs. Dalí always lights Gala's body harshly from a single source, accentuating imperfections, the loose flesh on the arms, for example. The world of the female surrealist - Carrington, Fini or Remedios Varo, say - is stage-lit, gloomy perhaps, but without shadows. Dalí never lengthens Gala's legs by so much as an inch.
Her hands are always capable, grasping or demonstrating. Her shoulders are slightly bowed. Even when she is mockingly cast as a goddess or a madonna, she always looks like herself. In leaving Eluard for Dalí, Gala escaped into a freer, more playful and at the same time more serious way of life.
Gala is the best known muse of the surrealist movement, but she is also the woman who had least in common with surrealist fashion. Surreal Things tracks the process by which the stereotypical female figure in surrealist photographs, poetry and painting, stepped into the shop window as the store-front mannequin. Where once Eileen Agar had to wear her hat made of gloves and her hat made of seafood herself, the mannequins would now wear Elsa Schiaparelli's rather more timid extravagances, a hat vaguely like a shoe, a gown with lines of padded quilting. Dalí was part of this activity, but he never subjected Gala to it. Indeed, when he had to deal with mannequins, he was likely to replace their heads with clumps of greenery.
The puzzle must remain: when Man Ray posed a nude woman as half a coat-stand in 1920, was he turning her into a servile object, or was he protesting against her own view of herself as a servile object? Today's growing girls are obsessed by supermodels who are ever more extravagant versions of the surrealist stereo-type, whose gorgeous heads might as well be replaced with clumps of greenery, for all the thinking they are allowed to do. We can't blame men for this, can we? ·
posted by LeBlues @ 1:54 PM,
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Is Kevin MacDonald Right?
Monday, March 5, 2007
The evolutionary psychologist argues Jews evolved to triumph over Gentiles.
Kevin MacDonald has been described as the “Marx of the Anti-Semites.” Google around the slimier regions of the web and you’ll see that his trilogy of books on Jews—A People that Shall Dwell Alone, Assimilation and its Discontents, and Culture of Critique—is celebrated in the nastiest Jew-hating environs on the net. And MacDonald himself is a hardcore American nativist in the Charles Lindbergh mold.
None of which necessarily means that MacDonald’s academic arguments are wrong. H's a tenured professor of psychology, his theories have received some support from well-respected colleagues, and there’s no getting around the fact that his Jewish trilogy is as fascinating as it is alarming, a sui generis look at Jewish history and psychology with the help of modern evolutionary theory.
In this week’s Big Question, National Review columnist John Derbyshire and Jewcy’s own Joey Kurtzman mix it up over the question “Is Kevin MacDonald right about the Jews?”
Joey and Derbyshire take the query and launch into a whole host of questions related to Jews and race in America: can a gentile journalist criticize Jews without being “smashed to pieces”? Would Jews benefit from more WASP criticism of Jewish culture? Are politically correct liberals in fact hopelessly racist? And so on.
But all the time, the question lingers: might Kevin MacDonald be right about the Jews?
From: Joey Kurtzman
To: John Derbyshire
Subject: Is Kevin MacDonald right about the Jews?
John,
All right, so why don’t I start this off by giving a quick synopsis of Kevin MacDonald’s work?
The man’s a professor of psychology at Cal State Long Beach who used to study wolves, and then one day switched to Jews. For reasons inexplicable to me, his work on wolves attracted rather less attention than his work on Jews.
MacDonald is an advocate of "evolutionary psychology," a rapidly growing field which seeks to explain the human mind and human behavior by examining them through the lens of evolutionary theory. He promotes the controversial idea that evolutionary competition takes place not just between individuals or genes, but also between human groups. He’s studied the Amish, the Roma, the Overseas Chinese, and other groups from an evolutionary perspective. But his primary focus has been on Jews.
I would boil down his theses to these two: In the course of Jewish history, Jews have developed predispositions to high intelligence, verbal intensity, altruism to kin, and a suite of other traits; and these traits further a “group evolutionary strategy” by which the Jewish population competes with non-Jewish populations.
To see some examples of how MacDonald’s theories have been treated in popular media, have a look at Judith Shulevitz’s “Evolutionary Psychology’s Anti-Semite” in Slate, and Mr. Derbyshire’s “The Marx of the Anti-Semites” in The American Conservative.
Okay, onto the meat.
True story: a Jewess of my acquaintance, who happens to be a veteran of several mainstream Jewish organizations, tells of stumbling upon MacDonald’s essay “Understanding Jewish Influence.” As she read about the gobsmacking ability of Jews to obtain power and influence in Western societies, about our eminence in academia and law, about how our high intelligence and organizational skill are key to our ability to achieve such prominence, my friend’s chest swelled with ethno-religious pride and she forwarded the essay on to a former colleague of hers, also a functionary in a Jewish organization. The friend replied: “The article was written by a non-Jew! And an antisemite no less! Don’t forward it to anyone else!”
It’s a tiresome old story. Self-celebratory, triumphalist Jewish historiography looks a heck of a lot like much of the stuff we dismiss as “antisemitism.” Had Kevin MacDonald proposed the same thesis about a Jewish “group evolutionary strategy” but been careful to pleasure us Jews with the sort of masturbatory interpretation we like—you know how it goes, something along the lines of “look at everything those Jews have given us with this strategy of theirs, all the wonderful scholarship and Nobel Prizes and scientific advances and cutting-edge social science!”—you can be sure his work would have met a rather different reaction. A reaction more like that received by the recent University of Utah study that argued that the Ashkenazi Jewish population has acquired genetic traits that confer high intelligence.
Sure, some of us were made a bit nervous to hear “Jewish genetics” discussed, but we were titillated and flattered by the study’s argument, too. When the New York Times wrote about the study we forwarded it around, helping make it the Times’ “most e-mailed story,” and instead of denouncing it as horrendous and antisemitic, I’d say most of us look forward to learning whether its thesis stands up to future study.
Which, really, is the only reasonable reaction to MacDonald’s work. In his preface to Culture of Critique, MacDonald says, “For me the only issue is whether I have been honest in my treatment of sources and whether my conclusions meet the usual standards of scholarly research in the social sciences.”
I don’t think it would be a courtesy too far if we were to evaluate MacDonald’s work based on those very criteria. Jewish academics have advanced their fair share of controversial theories and were within their rights to ask that those theories be evaluated based on their scholarly (rather than aesthetic) merit.
Whether we dislike MacDonald’s arguments or not, whether we find them gratifying or insulting, all that matters is whether his premises and models are valid, and whether the insights they produce stand up to further research. If a critic wants to wade into the debate over whether “group selection theory” is a useful scientific model, fair enough. If someone wants to argue that the Ashkenazi experience in Europe did not last long enough for selective evolutionary pressures to work their genetic magic, go to it. But accusations of antisemitism are irrelevant to all of these issues, and they serve only to prevent a rigorous examination of MacDonald’s work.
In Slate, Judith Shulevitz pleaded with John Tooby—the director of UC Santa Barbara’s Center for Evolutionary Psychology, and at that time the president of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society—to produce an academic rebuttal of MacDonald's arguments. He assured her that he would soon do so. He never did.
So is Kevin MacDonald right about the Jews? I don’t know. For now, that seems to me the only answer.
So I’ve got to ask…when you reviewed MacDonald’s work in The American Conservative, why did you play all the same games as Shulevitz? Before you even got down to examining MacDonald’s work you had already tainted him as “The Marx of the Anti-Semites” who had “the Jew thing.”
Come on, now. Were you afraid of offending Jews if you gave MacDonald a fair hearing, without prefacing your review with the equivalent of a flashing red neon light announcing “SUBJECT OF REVIEW IS AN ANTISEMITE! DISREGARD! DISREGARD!” Or was it Pat Buchanan or Scott McConnell who was afraid of getting pilloried by angry Jews? Whose sack was missing?
Over to you.
posted by LeBlues @ 3:39 PM,
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