I can’t recommend Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America enough, and I’m honored to be asked to be a part of the TPMCafe Book Club discussion of it. Happily, mine is the first post up after Rick’s: Overcoming The Spite Vote.
Yesterday at TPMCafe, Rick Perlstein kicked off a week-long examination of his new book Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. I’ve been asked to join this week’s cafe (a fun departure from writing about politics through a feminist lens), and I recommend checking it out, because the book is wonderful. And very relevant to today’s post topic: “Reagan Democrats“. The seeds of creation for this group of voters means they’re probably more “Nixon Democrats”, a name that would at least show how fruitless getting them back into the fold might be.
Ezra’s post gently puts to rest the ancient Democratic hobbyhorse of lamenting the loss of that percentage of white working class voters that long ago quit voting their economic interests and started voting against uppity black people and women, and against the “liberal elite”. Interestingly, the “elite” label doesn’t quite cut it when it comes to liberals—the lower you go on the income ladder, the more liberal you tend to be statistically speaking:
So why do Republicans win when (because of Republican policies no less), the number of people falling below the cutoff line greatly outnumbers the people falling above it? In part, because the higher you get up the income ladder, the more likely you are to vote. Also, there’s racial issues (gender a bit less, because while women are more liberal than men, they also vote more regularly, so it probably evens out):
I know I’m supposed to find the character of Pepper Potts in Iron Man offensive and sexist. As the main female character in the movie, she’s, well, a servant. From one perspective, she’s like a fantasy wife-for-hire—hot, devoted, thoughtful, and submissive. She never brings the coffee cold and relieves Tony Stark from his duties for running the dull, domestic parts of his life, freeing him up to conquer the world. But I liked Pepper a lot. She was smart, wry, and professional, and her attraction to Tony seems to be a result of her being a workaholic, and she snaps out of it at the end of the movie. She’s brave and clever under fire. But I was ashamed to put it that way, because none of that really addressed the fact that she’s still a personal assistant.
And then I read this thread, where a discussion about whether or not Pepper is negatively portrayed as materialist hinged on her purchase of an evening gown with Tony’s money for her birthday. I actually thought the dress incident had nothing to do with materialism, and Pepper’s choices were cast in a flattering light. I’d say the dress incident in the movie has two plot functions: to show that Pepper has really good taste like she always said (we usually see her wearing all black) and to show that she has this whole inner life that Tony wasn’t aware of. There was no intention to shame the character for materialism.
7PM tonight at MonkeyWrench Books , which is in one of my favorite parts of town, the North Loop area, which is like the hipster central shopping district. If you haven’t come out to a reading yet, try to make it to this one, because that might be the last for awhile.
If you haven’t seen it, here’s the highlight reel of my last reading at Book People.
Amanda Marcotte book reading from Marc Faletti on Vimeo.
It’s a good time! Luckily, for those in Austin who missed the experience the first time around, I’ll be reading at Book Woman tonight at 7PM. Show up and buy some books, yo. Feminist bookstores were the backbone of feminism for a long time, and we’re lucky to have one of the remaining ones in Austin, and they could use the support. I’m sure readers of this blog will find many tempting tomes at Book Woman. I won’t make it out alive with my hands empty, I’m sure. Much to the consternation of those who have to share my living space, because the piles of books around here on my “To Read” list is getting insane.
I’m hosting the Book Salon at Firedoglake today from 5-7PM EST. The book in question is Outright Barbarous: How the Violent Language of the Right Poisons American Democracy. The discussion will naturally be around framing, and particularly the right wing’s use of violent metaphors.
My own Firedoglake Book Salon for It’s a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments will be on June 7th. I’m also going to be joining the TPM Cafe round table the week of May 26th to discuss Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America.
The emergency room at hospitals are surreal places, and I always wonder how people who work there full time deal with it. One broken bottle of salsa on our tile floor, one misplaced foot, one aborted attempt to remove the sliver of glass with tweezers, one sinking realization that the attempts were just pushing it in further, and I find myself face down on a hospital bed with the doctor rolling up one of the bells on my cute new corduroy pants to keep from getting iodine and blood on them while he pulls out the sliver. Now I’m moving slowly and cautiously all along my left side, because not only does my foot hurt, but so does my entire left arm from the tetanus shot. To add to the surreal nature of my afternoon, after we got home, a short thunderstorm dumped giant, ill-formed hail all over our apartment complex, putting a dent in the top of my truck.
The hurry-up-and-wait nature of the E.R. meant I had a chance to finish Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer. My mother gave me her copy a long time ago, and I figured with the recent raid on a polygamous cult in Texas, I should bone up on the information about Mormon fundamentalism inside this book. I found the book to be a fair book, empathetic towards why people are drawn to Mormonism and fascinated by the religion’s perseverance while pulling no punches in exposing how the history of the church breeds this conservatism that made the fundamentalists inevitable, along with the sexual abuse they dish out to young people of both sexes.
The ostensible purpose of the book is to chronicle the story of the Lafferty brothers, two men who, angry that the wife of their youngest brother was resisting their attempts to transform their entire family into a polygamous fundamentalist Mormon one, decided to murder her and her baby daughter. The daughter’s death was justified because of her gender; daughters of “bitches” grow up to be forbiddingly independent-minded women as well was the theory, a theory that makes more sense if you really understand the Mormon obsession with lineage. In telling this story, though, Krakauer also tells the story of how the LDS church evolved, especially how the doctrine of polygamy was, at various times, fiercely defended and just as fiercely rejected, depending on the need to either separate the Mormons from the mainstream of America, or to embrace it.*
Marc filmed my reading at Book People and reduced it to a 5 minute taster recap. Enjoy! And yes, that’s all hi-def and totally not YouTube.
You want to read a book that will make you uncomfortably reexamine the kind of rhetoric you use, right down to your choice of metaphors? Well, if you don’t, you should: Jeffrey Feldman’s new book Outright Barbarous: How the Violent Language of the Right Poisons American Democracy. It’s a convincing argument that the right wing punditry has adopted a violence stance, tone, and choice of words and media battles that undermines the concept of deliberative democracy. And while deliberative democracy can be unbelievably frustrating for liberals, a step back shows that it does work in our favor, because slowly over time, Americans have really become a more liberal (read: gentle, considerate people).
I can hear the bristling, but think about it. Liberals, for instance, have won the ideological war about equality. Conservatives have to find another way to frame issues when they’re arguing against equality, and thus have created empty concepts like “abortion is murder” or “reverse racism”. Those phrases burn, but it’s wise to remember that they’ve been forced into a dishonest territory because liberals have won the argument over equality. Conservatives can’t win in a fair debate where all sides present their views to be hashed out in the public forum, and they clearly know it, because instead of submitting themselves to the debate, the right wing pundits have instead turned to fear-mongering and reimagining our objectively peaceful country as a war zone. Think of how the gun control debate goes down, an example Feldman turns to early in the book. There’s not much of an honest debate about gun control in this country, because right wingers skip the facts and go straight for the mythologizing about how every Republican man is besieged by a bunch of gun-wielding maniacs, attacking him in airports and fast food joints, and even coming into his home to rape his wife, and if he wasn’t able to periodically litter the landscape with bullets, it would be worse. That this doesn’t reflect reality seems inconsequential to this image, probably because the image of violence has so much power over reason.
From Salon, I caught this article complaining about books-by-women-for-women, or more precisely, their covers. The writer Karen Heller is appalled at the dismembered female body parts trend that was really started by chick lit smash books like this one:
I haven’t read this book, making me the last woman in America it seems to have not read it, but I see the appeal of the cover immediately. Who doesn’t want to believe that being “good in bed” is about indulging your appetite for strawberry shortcake? In the real world, women experience sexual striving more as depriving ourselves of the shortcake.
Women’s literature has moved beyond the pale - all matter of pinks from pale to insistent - to dismemberment. These days, publishers are partial to flashing body parts, specifically women’s body parts, often legs and exquisitely shod feet, on book jackets…..
Publishers are also fond of blurry photos featuring the backs of women, often in fluttery summer dresses. No faces, please, we’re women.
Okay, Austinites, you know where Book People is, I’m sure.
Random display at Book People.
Many cities in the U.S. are suffering under the onslaught of corporate bookstores, but we have an abundance of awesome independents in Austin, which is one reason I feel so lucky to live here. Book People, of course, is the behemoth of Austin independents, and that’s where I’ll be reading tonight at 7PM. There will also be readings at smaller independents with more explicit political missions. Austin also has one of the few remaining feminist bookstores in the country, called Book Woman, and I’ll be reading there in May. There’s also a reading at Monkey Wrench in May, another store I like to poke around in to find books of leftist importance that are harder to find anywhere else.
I’ll probably read a couple of short passages and then open the floor up to a Q&A, of which I encourage people to join. We had a lively one at Bluestockings, where all sorts of interesting points and tangents were raised.
Roger Gathman of the Austin-American Statesman interviewed me in preparation for this reading, and you can read that interview here. Ft. Worth Weekly also has a write-up.
New York Pandagonians! Come out to the KGB Bar tonight for drinks and a reading from It’s a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments. If you can’t make it tonight, though, there’s a reading at Bluestockings on Thursday. Or, hell, come to both! I’ll be reading something different each time.
New Yorkers, I’m going to be in your city next week promoting the book, as well as just enjoying the city while my significant other attends/covers the NFL Draft. The week after, the book release party is scheduled in Austin.
KGB Bar
85 West 4th St
NY, NY 10003
Tuesday, April 22
7pm
Bluestockings
172 Allen Street
New York, NY 10002
Thursday, April 24
7 pm
Glenn Greenwald sent me a copy of his newest book Great American Hypocrites, and I have to say that I liked it even more than his last one. It’s Glenn at his best—he never fails to muster the proper outrage at right wing behavior, even when lesser humans start to lose our ability to be outraged because it’s just so common. And his sense of humor is on full display, causing me to laugh pretty hard throughout the book.
The topic is hypocrisy, which is a rich source of material, because to condemn someone for a hypocrite doesn’t necessarily mean you are making a statement about what they’re hypocritical about. To say that Ted Haggard is a hypocrite because he condemns gay men while having gay sex doesn’t mean you disapprove of gay sex. In fact, you’re probably pro-gay to call out such a hypocrite in this instance. In this book, you have a buffet of hypocrite flavors. You have the conservatives preaching small government while driving the country’s economy into oblivion with overspending on war, and conservatives who claim they want the government to leave you alone while endorsing intensive spying on American citizens. Of course, you have your conservatives who talk about family values while being avid about trading down old model wives for new ones, visiting prostitutes, paying for abortions while condemning the right to have one, condemning adultery while being a big fan of it, having anonymous gay sex, and even more. And then you have chickenhawkery, which Glenn defines not just as agitating for wars you won’t fight in, but thinking that your penis gets two sizes bigger because you sit in your air conditioned home or office, promoting the war. Anyone who lays claim to the idea that starting or cheerleading for wars you won’t fight in is a sign of “toughness” is a chickenhawk.
My grand plan was to find something newsworthy to blog about this Sunday afternoon, but I’m feeling a little fried for whatever reason, so I’m going to review the latest book I’ve read, which has been out for like 15 years: Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets by David Simon. It’s a perfect fix for those of us who are trying to wean ourselves off “The Wire”, and you really get a chance to see the seeds planted in Simon’s year following the homicide detectives of Baltimore PD that came to fruition on that show. The book is absolutely compelling, and gets better and better as it goes along, leaving you a bit bereft at the end, wishing you could still be the fly on the wall following this set of detectives as they investigate drug murders, domestic killings, drunken brawls gone wrong, and those homicides that still have the power to shake even the hardened detectives, mostly the rape/murders and the child killings.
The most amazing thing about the book, I’ve concluded in the 24 hours since I’ve finished it, is that Simon really does a remarkable job of extending his sympathy to almost every that he encounters in the course of this book. He’s got no love in his heart for people who murder in cold blood, and especially not those who victimize the truly innocent, but everyone else is played with a sympathetic hand. And that’s remarkable, since there’s a lot of people that lock horns or have ill will towards each other—detectives who dislike each others’ styles, the largely black citizenry of inner city Baltimore’s distrust of the police, the prosecutors versus the detectives versus the defense attorneys—but Simon allows that everyone has a point and portrays conflicts between people as usually not being a matter of right versus wrong, but of circumstances that are out of any individual’s control. This is a theme that he developed more substantially in the fictional world of “The Wire”, but you can really see that eye that casts sympathy to every person’s circumstances already in play here. It’s a much different thing than the fetish for “balance” observed by the lazier assholes of the journalism world, where people are pitted against each other and their arguments/beliefs drained of real meaning for fear that someone will actually take something seriously in this world. Above all, Simon is, while a seemingly grouchy and cynical person, a real humanist, as grouchy and cynical people often are.
Whoops, I guess Alison Bechdel’s marvelous book Fun Home caused some people to accidentally feel sympathetic towards queer people, and realize they are human beings, deserving of equality like everyone else. That’s why they had to flip out and label it “pornography” in an attempt to get the book out of university classes.
Time Magazine voted it the book of the year, but some students are calling it pornographic and asking it be removed from their curriculum.
Thomas Alvord, with the group “No More Pornography,” says, “The issue is exposing people to pornography.”
The issue is with “Fun Home,” a book assigned for reading in a mid-level English class at the University of Utah. The class introduces students to different literary genres. In the case of “Fun Home,” it’s told in the style of a comic book. The story centers around the author as she comes to terms with her own and her father’s homosexuality.
Drawings depicting sex acts are included in the 230 page novel. A student in the class was offended and approached the group “No More Pornography,” which made headlines earlier this year when it staged a successful protest of music videos shown a gym in Provo.
This sort of bullshit will pretty much permanently fuck up any attempt of feminists to start a reasonable discussion about why so many men are attracted to a flavor of pornography that is as much, if not more, about humiliating and hating women as it is about getting men off. Which is not even all porn, but certainly doesn’t encapsulate novels like this. Hell, we’re stuck in definitional hell, with the right wingers defining porn as “any material that portrays sexuality in a way that I don’t approve of”, and most everyone else in liberal land defining it as, “sexually explicit materials designed to sexually arouse the reader/viewer”, and radical feminists defining it as “photos and videos where the humiliation and pain of the woman is considered an essential part of the erotic experience for the viewer”. Which is, to be fair to radical feminists, the majority of the material available through your internet channels or “Girls Gone Wild” videos. I’m not getting into the discussion of censorship from feminists, since it’s a red herring, since the number of feminists willing to talk censorship is a minority of a minority.
What I will say is that I suspect the events portrayed in this book are much more dangerous to the right wing worldview than actual porn. Below the fold is one of the offending illustrations, posted by Bechdel.
Okay, this article that Jill linked to is so worth blogging. It’s this weird, semi-guilty article about those oh-so-picky-bitches who just want men they partner with to clear certain basic standards in conversation ability. Okay, well, dumping someone just because he’s never heard of Pushkin is a little extreme, at least if he demonstrates good taste overall. Some women need to learn the joys of introducing a lover to something new, though of course you always run the danger that he’ll hate it.
But the notion that holding potential mates to a taste standard is shallow frankly blows my mind. I think, and said this in the comments at Feministe, that the admirable liberal movement against being judgmental sometimes suffers from what can only be considered a definitional issue. Judging someone for their race, religion, sex life, whatever, when it comes to their basic human rights and access to involvement in the political system is clearly wrong. Judging someone on these things and refusing to be friends or lovers with them is your right, but it makes you stupid and limits you more than anything else. But judging someone that you share a friendship with, much less your life, on personal qualities strikes me as perfectly reasonable and the only efficient way to handle your social life. If you can’t stand someone’s horrible taste or sense of humor, it seems that it’s best for everyone involved to go their separate ways.
With that in mind, I offer the same discussion question Jill did: What are your deal-breakers with someone you’re dating?
I think I read Jim Hightower and Susan DeMarco’s book Swim against the Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go With the Flow at the right time. The primary season is leaving me deflated and cynical, especially since the importance of campaigning against the actual bad guys has been all but forgotten. The 5th anniversary of the war, crossing the 4,000 number of the dead from it, and the sinister could-give-a-fuck attitude of the administration about it hasn’t helped matters. And then I read this book, and it’s a collection of uplifting stories of people who actually made a difference, and I was mightily cheered. They’re having a storytelling contest to promote the book, so if you have a good story to tell about making a positive difference in your community, be it your local, state, or national community, check it out.
Okay, this is going to be a perilously gushy book review, but I don’t care. I am stoked by Who Hates Whom: Well-Armed Fanatics, Intractable Conflicts, and Various Things Blowing Up A Woefully Incomplete Guide by Bob Harris, who is one of the few people to (partially) make a real name for himself by winning on “Jeopardy!” The book is what it sounds like, a guide to various world conflicts, which sounds initially like it would be in conflict with the skills of a trivia whiz, and then you remember this is a person who knows how to process large and confusing amounts of information for easy recall. That, it turns out, is a major advantage when it comes to writing a quick-and-dirty guidebook to all these bewildering conflicts that you should know about, but because of the bewildering factor, let’s face it, you probably don’t.
Sometimes the pressure to know more about world politics is overwhelming. The U.S. is, after all, the most powerful country in the world and responsible citizens know this means that we have comparatively more responsibility than the rest of the world to actually know about countries and conflicts other than our own. And once you start to research this stuff, you find out that the U.S. has basically acted like a massive bully (of the Mafia sort, not of the childhood bully sort) to the rest of the world, you see that we have a large responsibility indeed to know about the rest of the world, so maybe we can exert influence in stopping our bullying. But despite all this responsibility, Americans have a lot of other conflicting demands on our time, and most of us find it hard to keep up with politics at home, nevermind the rest of the world. This book was written with this dilemma in mind, though of course Harris peppers admonishments to learn more about all these nations and conflicts throughout.
w00tness! I just want everyone to note that you can now buy a copy of my book It’s a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments. If you buy through the ad at the top of the right hand column, then I get a small kickback from Amazon, FYI.
I’m so stoked. I have a box of them here and they look just awesome. It was funny writing that book while still writing this blog. On the blog, you have the day to day fighting, but of course, the book is more the stuff that’s going on all the time.
Starting at 5PM EST (now, that is) today, I’ll be hosting a book salon at Firedoglake on This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor by Dr. Susan Wicklund. It was a great book, very inspiring, and so very highly recommended. I’m going to be in the comments there answering questions about the book, abortion, and reproductive rights, and lucky for all of us, so is the author Dr. Wicklund. I’m really excited about this opportunity, and hope that the Pandagonian crew can hop on over and join the conversation. Especially since, you know, it’s one that often attracts some contentious, mean-spirited assholes.
As someone who’s both into skepticism and feminism, you’d think being a Salem witchcraft crisis buff would have been a part of my life, but actually, I have never read a book on it until I got a copy of In the Devil’s Snare by Mary Beth Norton. I read about the book in Susan Faludi’s new book The Terror Dream, and I was so intrigued by the references to it, I wishlisted it and got a copy from my family for Christmas. As a fan of the theory that delusional social crisises happen because they’re a way to channel other concerns that might be less than politic to raise directly, the theory of this book intrigued me. Norton argues that the Salem crisis was channeling a bunch of negative fears and energies in the community that arose in the framework of the Second Indian War.
To put this kind of theory in context, think about delusional social crisises of our time. The “pro-life” movement is of course an enduring movement built on bullshit-based crisis thinking, and taken in the larger context of social conservatism that’s in a full-blown panic about contraception, gay rights, etc., it becomes clear that the “saving babies” thing is a cover story for anxieties about sexual freedom and women’s liberation. Or for a historical incident that’s similar to a witchcraft crisis—the Satanic day care panics of the 80s. In retrospect, it’s easy to see how these panics fit into a larger backlash against women’s growing presence in the workplace. Day cares were an anxiety-laden symbol of middle class women’s willingness to leave the hearth and enter into the paycheck-drawing workplace, and the panic created a convenient way to rebuke women for abandoning their child-rearing duties. The myth that Mexican immigrants are coming to the U.S. to conquer us by stealth is a racist cover for anxieties about trade and labor issues that drive immigration. Really, name your poison.
Courtney Martin’s first book Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters ended up being a lot more personal, and thus moving, than I would have assumed considering the general gist of it from the marketing as a piece of journalism investigating what she deems the new normalcy of hating your body. Martin puts forward a controversial, but I think convincing, argument that the girls and women born after the second wave of feminism are in this weird situation where we suddenly have all these new opportunities but don’t have the social esteem to go with it. The “perfect girls” that she describes in the book, a type of girl or woman that is prone to eating disorders and is increasingly of any class or racial identity, is someone who has internalized the belief that she can make it, but she has to be twice as good to be considered half as good. Which means at least 4 times as good, probably 5 times as good.
The greatest strength of the book is how she explicates this phenomenon that we all know so well, but most of us have trouble describing. It’s why women are outnumbering men in universities (but falling behind still in the job market). It’s that we see the ring in our grasp and want it so badly, and know that because we’re women, we can’t have a single flaw or else that will be used to deprive us of what we want so badly, what we know men of our talents and efforts would get without a sweat. And we can’t show our sweat, either, because that too is a flaw. Thus the phrase that crops up repeatedly in the book from Courtney and her interview subjects: “effortless perfection”.
Perfect grades, perfect job, perfect house, perfect life plan—women are still largely judged on our appearances, so for perfect girls, none of this counts unless you have the perfectly starved body to prove to the world how in control you are, how perfect. And increasingly, that’s defined by how thin you are, because weight and body shape are increasingly contextualized in our society as a matter of effort, not genetics or situation. As Courtney makes clear, this isn’t even about the discourse around being obese versus the medically defined healthy weight. Anyway, as most perfect girls know, the healthy weight is way too fat. Normal and healthy isn’t good enough, because it’s moderate, and you’re looking to be perfect.
Word has it (from Lauren) that reviews of my book are beginning to trickle out. It comes out in April, y’all, and I’m currently putting together a schedule of book stores to do readings at. I will keep you updated on these.
In the meantime, here is the cover:
If you click the cover, you can see the Amazon page and pre-order it.
Via Our Bodies, I found this interesting Salon article that I can’t believe I missed when it first came out. It’s about that “Skinny Bitch” book you see everywhere and how the veganism preached within allows the writers and their audience to have the excuse to finally make explicit what’s implicit in our culture, which is the notion that body fat is a moral flaw. Convinced of the righteousness of veganism, the authors apparently feel entitled to berate their readers in the same voice women the country over use to berate themselves for fat-based imperfections like cellulite and weight gain, voice that holds fat not to be just unhealthy or unattractive, but to be sinful.
The relentless bullying peppered throughout the authors’ advice accounts for much of the book’s humor, including quips like “you need to exercise, you lazy shit,” “coffee is for pussies” and “don’t be a fat pig anymore.” It was a formerly anorexic friend of mine who nailed it when she read excerpts from the book. “When you have an eating disorder,” she told me, “that’s the voice you hear in your head all the time.”
Thanks to “Skinny Bitch,” women who hate their bodies no longer need rely on their own self-loathing to stoke the flames of what seems like motivation but is actually self-flagellation — penance for the sin of being too fat. Now dieters can have the convenience of a former model (Barnouin) and a former modeling agent (Freedman) putting their transgressions in the black-and-white terms of right and wrong. “If you eat crap,” they chirp, “you are crap.”
This one definitely belongs in the “I’m not sh*tting you” hall of fame. Daniel Gonzales and Jim Burroway of Box Turtle Bulletin point to this cover of a new anti-gay book published by conservative Anglicans, God, Gays and the Church: Human Sexuality and Experience in Christian Thinking, published by the Latimer Trust.
According to Anglican Mainstream, this tome includes testimonies of “ex-gays” and “essays in the fields of psychology, psychotherapy, genetics, biblical and pastoral theology, social ethics and cultural analysis” to counter that veritable tsunami of homosexualist propaganda out there and “analyse the impact of the gay agenda on our culture.”
The book, edited by Dr Lisa Nolland, Sarah Finch and Dr Chris Sugden, seeks to correct the imbalance in the ‘Listening Process’ called for by the Archbishop of Canterbury. The editors argue that, so far, the whole listening process has been in “one direction and with one ultimate end” - the full inclusion of practising gay Anglicans at the very heart of the church’s establishment.The selection of the cover image at left clearly indicates a sly marketing approach for the tome…
The chapter list gives you an idea of what’s in store, and the contributors are from the ex-gay stable of propagandists.
* Pastoral Considerations for Homosexuality
* Post-Gay: The Transforming Power of God
* Post-Lesbian: My Testimony
* Same Sex Attraction. Is it innate and immutable?
* A Faithful Church: The Bible and Same-Sex Sex
* Civil Partnerships: Advice to UK Parishes and Clergy
* Unexpected Consequences: The Sexualisation of YouthExpert contributions include chapters by Professor Joseph Nicolosi, former President of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, and Professor Robert A. J. Gagnon, author of The Bible and Homosexual Practice (2001).
If I hate Clinton, will you like me better?
James Wolcott draws my attention to this kick-ass review by Susan Faludi* of this new book Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary: Reflections by Women Writers. I was wanting to read this book, because I think it would be awesome having 30 different women talk about how Clinton’s achievements and the sexism that impedes her affects them personally, but unfortunately, it seems that only a handful of the writers went that way. According to Faludi’s review, far more common was the attempt to distance one’s (female) self from Clinton, perhaps in a pissing-in-the-wind hope that by doing so, you’ll escape the same pressures put on her. Same as why a prosecutor doesn’t necessarily want a bunch of women on a jury in a rape case—they’re just as likely to victim-blame as men, because they hope that by blaming the victim, they can somehow escape being the victim.
I’m not endorsing Clinton in the primary, but should she win, I’m behind her, and the sexist abuse of her has made me like her more, not less, because she prevails under it. To me, she’s a role model. Her willingness to stand by an adulterer is not something I hope to emulate, but it’s understandable, and in the grand scheme of her accomplishments, it strikes me as both a small thing and none of my business. It seems so straightforward, and yet Faludi reports that the dominant tone of the book is something like, “I just don’t like her, and I can’t explain it, probably because to do so would reveal how much misogyny I’ve internalized.” Faludi explains that this sort of opinion arises in a culture where young women can gain some semblance of power by becoming ciphers for the anti-female opinions of sexist men.
I’ll just echo what Jill said: This is sad.
Update: Lauren notes in comments that the survey has a reductive definition, limited to “literature” and excluding non-fiction. While I think fiction should be part of one’s reading diet, I also think that it’s stupid to think you don’t get the benefits of complexity if you only read non-fiction. Plus, histories aren’t literature but can be as rich in story-telling detail as novels.
I’m usually the first to decry the hand-wringing over young people these days and calls of social decline. I even have a blog category called “Signs Of The Non-Apocalypse”, I’m so dedicated to my opposition to moral panics. But I can’t help but think there’s a problem when people don’t read books at all. Hopefully the surge in Internet use indicates that people are reading something, though.
I’m not going to bash other forms of entertainment, like TV or video games. In fact, I think different mediums improve different kinds of intelligence. My skill at picking up foreshadowing has improved more from watching “The Wire” than reading a dozen novels, so that show has ironically made me a better reader of novels. Video games have taught my clumsy ass some necessary motor skills, and weirdly they’ve really improved my self-esteem. I don’t feel the need to defend movies—they’ve finally been allowed into the pantheon of culturally redeeming media by the reactionary snob patrol.
The face that launched a thousand hysterical wingnut rants.
So Jill links this bizarro rant at iMAO about one of the official demons of the right wing mythology, Toni Morrison. (There’s an official-sounding story for why all this rampant opposition to Morrison isn’t racist and sexist, but Michael Bérubé lays waste to it here.) We were all wondering in comments what provoked an attack on Morrison today—I suggested that Frank J. stubbed his toe on a copy of Beloved—but zuzu alerted us in comments to the fact that Morrison endorsed Obama today. Nifty.
Anyway, this rant is an excellent bit of wingnuttery, so I thought I’d do a point-by-point examination of all the wingnut hobgoblins he managed to cram into one post.
I’ve known this since freshman year of college1 when, for a class, I read an interview with her in which she lamented that too many blacks were going to school2, but I’ve never said it here: Toni Morrison is a racist3 dumbass of monumental proportions. If you combined the worst condescending attitudes towards black people of a white liberal4 with an actual black person who thus has no fear of saying whatever she wants about blacks5, you get Toni Morrison.
I remember in that college class I had a choice between getting an A6 or saying exactly what I thought of Toni Morrison in my final paper. It was an easy choice.7
BTW, I learned from that same class by reading Beloved that a novel has to be some pretty atrocious crap to win both the Pulitzer and the Nobel Prize8. Man did I need a Tom Clancy novel as a palate cleanser after that8.
Before I begin reviewing all the various books I’ve been reading and neglecting to review these past few weeks, I thought I’d announce a new book club. Digging through my stack of intriguing books, I’m going to go ahead with Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters by Courtney Martin. It’s a book about the increasing normalization of body hatred and perfectionism in younger women. I have an interview with Courtney coming up in Monday’s podcast, and listening to it again, I’m impressed by how deep and thorough her thinking is on this. So I figured it would be a ripe book for discussion. Discussion date: March 3rd.
Now onto the book reviews. I’ve got three books I really liked to review, but they’ll be short because there’s not a whole lot to add to what is already in them. The first is a novel sent to me by David Mizner, called Hartsburg, USA. I liked the premise immediately—it’s about a small town in Ohio where a Bible-thumper and a latte-drinking liberal go head to head in a school board election that gets so dirty it makes national news—but it got even better when I dove in and found that Mizner wisely takes a character-based approach to a semi-satirical novel about the rightward drift of populist middle-staters. The character you expect to be the villain of the book, Bevy Baer, a Christian housewife running on an anti-gay, anti-evolution platform, ends up being less a villain and more something of a tragic figure. A lot of us spend a lot of time noting that Bible-thumpers can’t even live by the rules they set out for the rest of us and want mandated by law, and we call this hypocrisy. It is, of course, but there’s more to it, and Mizner explores in depth how fundamentalist religions are rushing in and becoming an anchor for people who are adrift, and who desire to have their lives ruled for them because they don’t trust themselves to take care of themselves without the rules.
