The Rumpus.net » Roxane Gay

Peculiar Benefits

Roxane Gay — Wed, 16 May 2012 18:44:23 +0000

When I was young, my parents took our family to Haiti during the summers. For them, it was a homecoming. For my brothers and I it was an adventure, sometimes, a chore, and always a necessary education on privilege and the grace of an American passport. Until visiting Haiti, I had no idea what poverty really was or the difference between relative and absolute poverty. To see poverty so plainly and pervasively left a mark on me.

To this day, I remember my first visit, and how at every intersection, men and women, shiny with sweat, would mob our car, their skinny arms stretched out, hoping for a few gourdes or American dollars. I saw the sprawling slums, the shanties housing entire families, the trash piled in the streets, and then, the gorgeous beach, and the young men in uniforms who brought us Coca Cola in glass bottles and made us hats and boats out of palm fronds. It was hard for a child who grew up on cul-de-sacs, to begin to grasp the contrast between such inescapable poverty alongside almost repulsive luxury and then, the United States, a mere eight hundred miles away, with it’s gleaming cities rising out of the landscape, and the well-maintained interstates stretching across the country, the running water and the electricity. It wasn’t until many, many years later that I realized my education on privilege began long before I could appreciate it in any meaningful way.

Privilege is a right or immunity granted as a peculiar benefit, advantage, or favor. There is racial privilege, gender (and identity) privilege, heterosexual privilege, economic privilege, able-bodied privilege, educational privilege, religious privilege and the list goes on and on. At some point, you have to surrender to the kinds of privilege you hold because everyone has something someone else doesn’t.

The problem is, we talk about privilege with such alarming frequency and in such empty ways, we have diluted the word’s meaning.When people wield the word privilege it tends to fall on deaf ears because we hear that word so damn much the word it has become white noise.

One of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do is accept and acknowledge my privilege. This is something I am still working on. I’m a woman, a person of color, and the child of immigrants but I also grew up middle class and then upper middle class. My parents raised my siblings and I in a strict but loving environment. They were and are happily married so I didn’t have to deal with divorce or crappy intramarital dynamics. I attended elite schools. My master’s and doctoral degrees were funded. I got a tenure track position my first time out. My bills are paid. I have the time and resources for frivolity. I am reasonably well published. I have an agent so I have every reason to believe my novel will find a home. My life has been far from perfect but I have a whole lot of privilege. It’s somewhat embarrassing for me to accept just how much privilege I have.

It’s also really difficult for me to accept my privilege when I consider the ways in which I lack privilege or the ways in which my privilege hasn’t magically rescued me from a world of hurt. On my more difficult days, I’m not sure what’s more of a pain in my ass—being black or being a woman. I’m happy to be both of these things, but the world keeps intervening. There are all kinds of infuriating reminders of my place in the world—random people questioning me in the parking lot at work as if it is unfathomable that I’m a faculty member, whispers of Affirmative Action when I achieve a career milestone I’ve busted my ass for, the persistence of lawmakers trying to legislate the female body, street harassment, strangers wanting to touch my hair, you know how it is.

The ways in which I do not have privilege are significant, but I am lucky and successful. Any number of factors related to privilege have contributed to these circumstances. What I remind myself, regularly, is this: the acknowledgment of my privilege is not a denial of the ways I have been and am marginalized, the ways I have suffered.

We tend to believe that accusations of privilege imply we have it easy and because life is hard for nearly everyone, we resent hearing that. Of course we do. Look at white men when they are accused of having privilege. They tend to be immediately defensive (and, at times, understandably so). They say, “It’s not my fault I am a white man.” They say, “I’m working class,” or “I’m [insert other condition that discounts their privilege],” instead of simply accepting that, in this regard, yes, they benefit from certain privileges others do not. To have privilege in one or more areas does not mean you are wholly privileged. To acknowledge privilege is not a denial of the ways you are marginalized, the ways you have suffered. Surrendering to the acceptance of privilege is difficult but it is really all that is expected.

At times we forget that accepting privilege is not a game. John Scalzi recently wrote about privilege without invoking the word privilege by using the difficulty levels of video games as a metaphor. His framework works well but his metaphor is only a starting point in understanding privilege and its effects. More than one commenter said something like, “I own my privilege, now what?” as if there is some unknown territory beyond the acknowledgment of privilege.

You don’t necessarily have to do anything once you acknowledge your privilege. You don’t have to apologize for it. You don’t need to diminish your privilege or your accomplishments because of that privilege. You need to understand the extent of your privilege, the consequences of your privilege, and remain aware that people who are different from you move through and experience the world in ways you might never know anything about. They might endure situations you can never know anything about. You could, however, use that privilege for the greater good–to try to level the playing field for everyone, to work for social justice, to bring attention to how those without certain privileges are disenfranchised. While you don’t have to do anything with your privilege, perhaps it should be an imperative of privilege to share the benefits of that privilege rather than hoard your good fortune. We’ve seen what the hoarding of privilege has done and the results are shameful.

When we talk about privilege, some people start to play a very pointless and dangerous game where they try to mix and match various demographic characteristics to determine who wins at the Game of Privilege. Who would win in a privilege battle between a wealthy black woman and a wealthy white man? Who would win a privilege battle between a queer white man and a queer Asian woman? Who would win in a privilege battle between a working class white man and a wealthy, differently abled, Mexican woman? We can play this game all day. We will never find a winner. Playing the Game of Privilege is mental masturbation—it only feels good to the players.

Privilege is relative and contextual. Few people in this world, and particularly in the United States, have no privilege at all. Among those of us who participate in intellectual communities, privilege runs rampant. We have disposable time and the ability to access the Internet regularly. We have the freedom to express our opinions without the threat of retaliation. We have smart phones and iProducts and desktops and laptops. If you are reading this essay, you have some kind of privilege. It may be hard to hear that, I know, but if you cannot recognize your privilege, you have a lot of work to do; get started.

President Barack Obama enjoys a great deal of privilege. He is wealthy, educated, young, and extraordinarily successful. He is in what appears to be a loving marriage. He has two healthy children. He is the president of the United States and, arguably, the most powerful man in the world. Even as he enjoys such immense privilege, Obama knows what all successful people of color know. All the wealth and power in the world won’t shield you from racial epithets, assumptions about how you’ve achieved your success, and resentment from people who feel that the trappings of privilege are their rightful due.

Given that even very privileged people can be marginalized, how do we measure privilege? What is the correct hierarchy? We can’t measure privilege. We shouldn’t even try. Our energies would be better directed to what truly matters.

Too many people have become self-appointed privilege police, patrolling the halls of discourse, ready to remind people of their privilege, whether those people have denied that privilege or not. In online discourse, in particular, the specter of privilege is always looming darkly. When someone writes from their experience, there is often someone else, at the ready, pointing a trembling finger, accusing that writer of having various kinds of privilege. How dare someone speak to a personal experience without accounting for every possible configuration of privilege or the lack thereof? We lose sight of this but we would live in a world of silence if the only people who were allowed to write or speak from experience or about difference were those absolutely without privilege.

When people wield accusations of privilege, more often than not, they want to he heard and seen. Their need is acute, if not desperate and that need rises out of the many historical and ongoing attempts to silence and render invisible marginalized groups. Must we satisfy our need to be heard and seen at the expense of not allowing anyone else to be heard and seen? Does privilege automatically negate any merits of what a privilege holder has to say?

We need to get to a place where we discuss privilege by way of observation and acknowledgment rather than accusation. We need to be able to argue beyond the threat of privilege. We need to stop playing Privilege or Oppression Olympics because we’ll never get anywhere until we find more effective ways of talking through difference. We should be able to say this is my truth and have that truth stand without a hundred clamoring voices shouting, giving the impression that multiple truths cannot coexist. At some point, doesn’t privilege become beside the point?

Today’s Required Reading

Roxane Gay — Tue, 15 May 2012 16:19:17 +0000

At Guernica, Randa Jarrar writes about this one time when she tried to visit her sister in Palestine and she was deported by Israel.

I was so afraid of facing the guards at the airport that I had a difficult time imagining the rest of my trip. I would picture myself walking around Ramallah with my sister, or attending a concert, or visiting my aunts, or seeing the separation wall, or staying at the American Colony Hotel for an evening, and I would draw a blank. There was a wall there, too, between my thoughts and Palestine.

John Scalzi tries to explain privilege to straight white men without invoking the word privilege.

Dudes. Imagine life here in the US — or indeed, pretty much anywhere in the Western world — is a massive role playing game, like World of Warcraft except appallingly mundane, where most quests involve the acquisition of money, cell phones and donuts, although not always at the same time. Let’s call it The Real World. You have installed The Real World on your computer and are about to start playing, but first you go to the settings tab to bind your keys, fiddle with your defaults, and choose the difficulty setting for the game. Got it?
Okay: In the role playing game known as The Real World, “Straight White Male” is the lowest difficulty setting there is.

The Rumpus Interview With Julianna Baggott

Roxane Gay — Fri, 11 May 2012 19:01:34 +0000

Julianna Baggott’s Pure is about a post-apocalyptic world where the responsibility for changing and saving civilization lies with children.

In Pure, the world has suffered a nuclear holocaust. A chosen few, Pures, live beneath a dome protecting them from the fallout, while the rest of humanity ekes out a stark existence on a scarred landscape, their bodies ravaged by the nuclear detonation, fused with objects or animals or other people, breathing the poisoned air, living with the threat of being taken by the OSR, a military force, when they turn sixteen. The scope and dark intensity of the world Baggott has created is impressive. She has rendered the setting meticulously. The thickness of the air outside the dome, the constant sense of fear and loss, the impossible ways bodies have been mutated—every detail is visceral and compelling.

The story follows Pressia, who has lived her entire life outside of the dome, a bright, brave sixteen-year-old girl whose hand is fused with a doll head, and whose only family is a dying grandfather. Partridge, a young man, a Pure, who has lived most of his life inside the dome escapes and meets Pressia. The pair soon learns they are connected in ways they could have never imagined and together, with some help, they try to find their way to a better place. They are helped by Bradwell, the boy with birds in his back, angry, determined to fight the people in the Dome, a young man who knows a great deal about how the world was destroyed and works to spread the truth.

What would happen if global nuclear ambitions went unchecked? Who would survive and why? These are big questions Baggott answers, unflinchingly. There is a dark, relentless, almost macabre quality to the prose. As the novel progresses, and we learn the extent to which the world has been damaged, how humanity has been forever altered because of the terrible decisions of a few.

As I read Pure, I was really interested in the imagination of the writer who could envision such a future for the world. The author and I had a really interesting e-mail conversation over the course of a couple weeks, one that offers some insight not only into Pure, but also managing a diverse writing career, the matter of gender and publishing, writing darker stories, and much more.

***

The Rumpus: What’s the first thing you ever wrote?

Julianna Baggott: I wrote before I could write. I got my hands on a journal, maybe a hand-me-down; I had three older siblings. My first entries are in the handwriting of the sister closets in age (5 years my senior). She must have gotten tired of my dictations because she gave up and then my blocky scrawl shows up. I wrote plays as a kid mostly. My oldest sister was an actress living in NYC by the time I was ten, and desperately wanted to be the one in charge of the words.

Rumpus: As a Libra, I’m pretty obsessed with the idea of balance and find myself, as a writer, drawn to all kinds of things which is why I’ve always followed your career with great interest–you give me hope that I don’t have to write only one kind of story. You write across so many genres and with different names. You seem, at least from the outside to be absolutely unconcerned by the constraints of genre or the pigeonholing the publishing industry is so fond of. How have you been able to shape such a career for yourself? Have you always been omnivorous as a writer?

Baggott: I’m a Libra, too. Genres are just bottles for the various boats. The boats matter to me. New ways of storytelling are coming at us. I was born in the era of the novel. I’ve written many, as well as collections of poetry, and essays for mouthing off. I’ve written to inches, word-counts, page-counts, even the sonnet and the screenplay (which I call a plot poem). I write narrative. That’s it. I just want to tell it.

Also, writing across genres has made me more prolific. When one is fighting me or simply not cutting it, I turn to another.

And each genre has something to teach me about the others. Not all the lessons are transferable, but many of the most important ones are.

Rumpus: In all the genres you write within, do you have a favorite? What are some of the lessons you’ve learned writing across genres?

Baggott: I don’t have a favorite. I need different genres at different times. Being cross-genre, you can encounter an image and decide not only how to best express it but what form would express it best. You learn to exploit genre for the more important things — to my mind — like story, character, image, language. The best example I can give is how the rigors of poetry apply to the screenplay. Both can have truly formal aspects, but even when form is stripped away, the poem and the screenplay both have to be essential enough to deserve —no, to bear up under the white around them — like small houses burdened by the weight of snow. The poem has to bear the weight with image, language… the screenplay with dialogue, plot… The lessons learned in journalism also apply. Writing for NPR has taught me to cut a piece in half and then in half again—without losing the essence. Apply that to the swollen prose of a bulky novel and you might reveal a beautiful work.

Rumpus: I really admire women who are willing to stand up and voice strong opinions. I still remember your op-ed in the Washington Post from a couple years ago and when I first read it, I thought, “Thank goodness someone is talking about this.” Over the past couple years, thanks to VIDA and Jennifer Weiner, and others, the conversation about sexism and publishing has remained at the forefront though little seems to be changing. Do you think you would write a similar editorial today? What might it take for us to advance this conversation in some meaningful way, and perhaps, bring about results?

Baggott: I think the calling out just has to keep going. No letting up. No whining just stating the facts, again and again. The generation of women who came before us did much of our shouting. They laid the groundwork and now we can be calm and constant and steady. There are a number of nuances to the discussion that I’d like to talk about. But, honestly, the last few months have been really hard—on a national level — for women’s rights. The Republicans have made it feel like the Dark Ages. I really have taken my eye off of the inequities for women in our field to look at the larger issues for women, some very basic rights. But literature has done great work for feminism — writing and reading are a practice of empathy — and great literature will continue to do so. I want to keep looking at ways to stride forward with positivity. I loved the new VIDA list of under-acknowledged women writers. This is exactly the kind of work I like to see—where we celebrate those who deserve that level of recognition that’s simply not been there. But mostly, I want women writers to write boldly, wildly, deeply. I want them to feel really liberated to tell the brutal truth, however they see that truth and are moved to tell it.

I have a risky premise. After VIDA’s first count, 2009, I wrote a piece in the Washington Post—and now since Wolitzer’s piece (similar issues)—I’m thinking what would happen if we decided: Okay, you’re right. You keep telling us again and again that male writers are simply better than women. So, let’s meet them there.

Why?

Let’s pretend it’s not just because we live in a completely male-dominated society where men get paid more for equal work. (Though it would stand to reason that if men get paid more for equal work they might also get praised more for equal work, no?)

I would go into what makes someone the head of their field. Research shows that it’s hours of practice. Here I’d quote Anders Ericcson (widely quoted by Malcolm Gladwell) and I’d explain how each of these small (and large) accolades actually turn into time—the gift of time—which for the writer is what money is all about.

So, each time a man’s book is on Publishers Weekly’s best books list, he has an argument that his work is valuable and therefore deserves more time to invest in it. Sometimes this is quite literal—sabbaticals, reduced teaching loads, etc. It comes to kitchen debates (not a Nixon reference), when a couple is trying to figure out who should be given more undiluted time to work on something that may or may not make money/lead to a career. Men win that argument, kitchen after kitchen and, according to Best Books Lists, they should. But, it’s a cycle, an endless cycle.

Women who are great successes—especially in the past few years with Rowling, Meyers and Collins kicking ASS in sales—women gain momentum in that argument. But for literary writers who hope not for huge advances but literary accolades to secure their next book deal, well, it’s a tougher sell.

So, it’s a cycle, see? When a colleague of mine had a notable New York Times book, I said, turn one of the chapters in the collection into a pitch for a novel and sell it to your publisher, now. He did. Those things matter and have very tangible results.

And in this we’re not alone. If men are paid/praised more than women for the same work than it always pays to allow the man to have more freedom to pour himself into his work—think of athletes, actors over the age of 28, lawyers, accountants, college deans…

Rumpus: The Republicans have made it feel like the Dark Ages. I have been simply stunned by the regression of women’s rights across the board. As a writer, I always wonder what I can do to bring attention to these larger issues women are inexplicably still facing. I don’t really have a question here, but the state of womanhood has been weighing heavily for the past while.

Baggott: Some of the best work done to combat the Republicans has been wit and humor. Stewart and Colbert—honestly I don’t know how I’d survive without them. Facebook and Twitter, as you know, give a whole new edge. I also believe that one of the most damning things about our culture is the adage to never talk religion and politics. Because we don’t model this discourse at the dinner table and at Thanksgiving, we don’t know how to do it well and we’re not teaching our children about the world and about how to discuss it. We have to be armed with facts when talking to family and friends — be prepared to be calm and organized. And we also need to use humor and wit to take down what is so seriously backward and insane. Women are constantly underestimated in our power, our reach, our collective pull. (The fact is there are many women who nod politely, even agree openly within their male-dominated often highly educated cultures, but vote their own minds.) We have to speak for ourselves and for those of us who have no voice.

Rumpus: Pure, your latest novel, feels very timely and is nothing if not a cautionary tale about the dangers of nuclear weapons. How did the idea for this trilogy come about?

Baggott: My childhood was marked by the great fear of nuclear holocaust. We practiced our Civil Defense Drills, lining up in hallways, curled to the floor, but we knew we’d die or, worse, survive only to suffer radiation and slow death. Pure comes from that deep well of fear—a renewed fear these days. Later in the drafting, I started doing research on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When people say that Pure is too bleak for them, I refuse to apologize. What we’ve done to our fellow man is far more horrific than anything I wrote. That said, Pure isn’t about the apocalypse. It is about what endures—hope, faith, love.

Rumpus: I read that you wrote Pure for your daughter. Do you always write books toward someone in your life? How does that shape your writing?

Baggott: You want the greatest trick for writing a novel? Here it is: imagine urgently whispering your story into one person’s ear—and only one. This one visualization will clarify every word choice you make.

Rumpus: What does it take to write a dark story? Do you ever fear darkness in your work?

Baggott: I don’t know when I’m writing dark. I don’t know when I’m writing funny or even heartbreaking. I’m always just trying to write it true. After, though, sometimes when reading aloud to my husband, I’ll start crying. It completely stuns me. As if the words in my body and on the page—in relation to each other — are cocooned against my own feelings about what I’m writing until they’re loosed in the air and become their own. Then I realize what I may or may not have done.

Rumpus: I have encountered that same stunned feeling with my writing, too, where I make myself cry when I read my work back to myself, or someone else. In that moment, I realize, yes, now we are getting somewhere.

The role of women is significant in Pure. I was particularly moved by the mothers carrying their fused children, and how with The Good Mother, they referred to men as Deaths, which, even within our culture, is not necessarily inaccurate. Would you consider Pure a feminist text and if so was that a deliberate choice?

Baggott: Funny, The New York Times Book Review’s take on Pure was so positive (and I was so deeply relieved) that I really didn’t think about this one line until someone pointed it out to me weeks later. “…‘Pure’ does not concern itself with a political context for its apocalypse.” The conditions pre-apocalypse are hugely political. In a museum erected when the country’s been overtaken by the sinister forces that would eventually detonate the world, they have displays of the old days—when feminism didn’t encourage femininity, when the media was hostile to government instead of working toward a greater good, before the impressive prison system was built, before people with dangerous ideas were properly identified, back when government had to ask permission to protect its good citizens from the evils of the world and from the evils among us, before the gates had gone up around neighborhoods—with a buzzer system and a friendly man at the gatehouse who knew everyone by name. Once these things—like real feminism, freedom of the press, and civil rights—were wiped away, the world was poised for destruction. That said, the novel isn’t born from political ideas. I never was trying to force an agenda. I had to explain who was in power, what ripe conditions allowed for this massive destruction, and I answered those questions from my own perspective. So, yes, Pure is a feminist text—as all of my books are, I assume—not because I’m trying to further a cause, but because there’s no way around those themes for me. They rise up organically because of the way I see the world. My work is to know the characters intimately and to tell their story.

Rumpus: One of the things that makes Pressia so compelling is that she’s not perfect. She doesn’t automatically know what to do at every turn. She’s a girl who has been thrust into an extraordinary set of circumstances–circumstances that demand she rise to the occasion, that she move beyond herself. Most of the characters in Pure have to move beyond themselves in some way and I thought that demonstrated a lot of faith in humanity on your part, faith in the notion that people can do extraordinary things when such is demanded of them. Are you a person of faith?

Baggott: I have faith in human beings. I struggle with that faith. I believe we’re brutes, but then, miraculously, there are those among us who stand up against that brutishness and remind us of the goodness we’re capable of.

Also, more specifically, I’m a writer of faith. I was raised Catholic, and I have a deeply Catholic imagination. I’ve left the Church—for many reasons that I’ve written about publicly—but it’s still a large part of my identity, and I still have my faith, if not my Church.

Rumpus: There are a few twists in Pure that really thrilled me and made me start reading super fast because I wanted to see where you were going. What struck me most in reading this book was not that Pure was bleak, but that it was very well plotted. At the same time, we hear, now and again, that contemporary fiction has lost sight of plot. Has plot ever been something you’ve struggled with? How do you ensure that your stories have a strong plot? How do you think about plot when you know you’re crafting a trilogy?

Baggott: I try not to divide plot and character. I get to know a character by what they want and fear and how those internal forces play out in their lives. That said, the plotting in Pure is on a level I’d never thought I’d ever attempt. It felt hugely ambitious and entailed using some narrative parts of my brain that I’d never used before. The intricacy of plotting a thriller is akin to writing formal poetry. I’m not sure how else to explain it.

Rumpus: What do you love most about your writing?

[ed. note: I always leave that question open to author interpretation.]

Baggott: Hmm. I think you mean process here. (Because if you mean what do I love about my own writing, I’d have to say that one of the reasons I write in different genres is that I get to have the feeling—even fleetingly—that I’m not just writing like Baggott again. I can escape myself. I get so very tired of writing like Baggott. Different genres allow me to not feel so hemmed in by my own voice, tics, style.) So, process. Right now, I’m about to start something new. I’m waiting to be whelmed. The whelming as you start something new is quite something.

No related posts…

The Trouble With Prince Charming or He Who Trespassed Against Us

Roxane Gay — Wed, 09 May 2012 21:41:12 +0000

We all know the common fairy tale. There’s a man and a woman—rarely, if ever, do we see stories about a woman and a woman or a man and a man—who must overcome some obstacle to reach happily ever after. There is always a happily ever after.

I enjoy fairy tales because I need to believe, despite my cynicism, that there is a happy ending for everyone, for me. The older I get, though, the more I realize how fairy tales demand a great deal from the woman. The man in most fairy tales, Prince Charming in all his iterations, really isn’t that interesting. In most fairy tales, he is blandly attractive and rarely seems to demonstrate much personality, taste, or intelligence. We’re supposed to believe this is totally fine because he is Prince Charming. His charm is supposed to be enough.

The Disney versions of fairy tales, the ones with which we are probably most familiar, don’t offer much in the way of Prince Charming. In The Little Mermaid, Prince Eric has a great woman right in front of him but is so obsessed with this pretty voice he once heard he can’t appreciate what he has. In his ignorance, he nearly lets the right one go. In Snow White, the prince doesn’t even find Snow White until she is already dead; he is so lacking in imagination he simply falls in love with a corpse. In Rapunzel, the prince lacks the ambition to find a better way for Rapunzel to escape her tower like, I don’t know, building a ladder. Belle is given away by her father in Beauty and the Beast, to the Beast himself, and then must endure the attentions of a man who essentially views her as chattel. Only through sacrificing herself, and loving a beast of a man can she finally learn that he is, in fact, a handsome prince.

The thing about fairy tales is that the princess finds her prince, but there’s generally a price to pay. A compromise of some kind is required for happily ever after. The woman in the fairy tale is generally the one who pays the price, which is such a rotten deal. This seems to be the nature of sacrifice in most matters.

Look at Twilight. The four books of the series are about vampires and werewolves and the sweeping love story between Bella, a young girl and Edward, an old vampire. Really, though, the Twilight series is a new kind of fairy tale. Is there anything particularly compelling about Edward Cullen? He sparkles. He’s theoretically attractive but only seems to have one interest: loving Bella and controlling every decision she makes. We’re supposed to believe his obsessive control and devotion are somehow appealing. We’re supposed to believe he is Prince Charming, albeit flawed because he needs to drink blood to survive. Accepting Edward’s controlling obsession and vampirism is the compromise required of Bella. Eventually, becoming a vampire, becoming undead, is the price Bella must pay for her happily ever after. We’re supposed to believe she’s fine with that. We’re supposed to believe Edward is worth that sacrifice.

It really is insulting, what we are supposed to believe about love and happiness; but there’s no denying that there is something satisfying about fairy tales, about the fantasy of the perfect hero, the Prince Charming who offers a woman a perfect life no matter the price she must pay.

***

Fifty Shades of Grey, Fifty Shades Darker, and Fifty Shades Freed by E.L. James, are a modern fairy tale with a dark, erotic twist. The trilogy began as fan fiction—fiction written by fans of an original series without actually being a part of it—inspired by Twilight. While grounded in the fairy tale tradition and rising out of fan fiction, Fifty Shades of Grey is also one of the few books that could be categorized as erotica and that has been embraced by the mainstream, if you forget, of course, Anne Rice’s The Sleeping Beauty trilogy.

Fan fiction and erotica are not new but there is something about Fifty Shades of Grey that has piqued the popular imagination. The books are erotic, amusing in their absurdity, and disturbing in their cultural implications about just how much trouble Prince Charming can be.

***

In Fifty Shades of Grey, a bright, young college student, Anastasia Steele, is forced to take the place of her student reporter best friend Kate who has fallen ill. Anastasia, or Ana, travels to Seattle to interview Christian Grey, a handsome, reclusive, and enigmatic billionaire, for the student paper. Of course. During their initial meeting, Ana stammers her way through an uncomfortable interview, distracted by Christian’s extraordinary good looks. Of course. He encourages her to come work for him. They banter. True love is born but there is a catch. There has to be a catch, an obstacle. This is the way of fairy tales.

Over three books, Ana and Christian try to have a relationship but they are impeded by Christian’s abiding interest in BDSM, or at least E.L. James’s fantasy version of BDSM, his unwillingness to engage in a “normal” relationship, and Ana’s desire for a “normal” relationship. There is all kinds of drama, and with each book, that drama becomes increasingly absurd but strangely addictive. A crazy former submissive! An older former lover and mistress who earns the nickname Mrs. Robinson! A sexually harassing boss with a chip on his shoulder! Family drama! Helicopter crashes! Arson! Oh my!

Ana is, conveniently, a 21-year-old virgin who has never even masturbated when she meets Christian. Of course. He gets to show Ana the ropes, so to speak, in a very dramatic scene where he grabs her by the wrist, and leads her to his bedroom to properly deflower her. The kinkiness can wait but her vagina cannot. As he sweeps Ana off her feet, Christian says, “We’re going to rectify the situation right now,” which is surely what every woman wants to hear when she has sex for the first time. The virginity situation—it must be rectified. In a seemingly never-ending scene, Christian makes their first lovemaking encounter all about Ana. He makes her come by stimulating her nipples. They fool around some more and finally, Christian can no longer control himself. He takes off his boxers and tears open a condom wrapper while Ana stares at his enormous cock, bewildered because she is so innocent and pure. Of course. Christian says, “Don’t worry… You expand too.” You haven’t lived until you’ve read prose like this. Before long, Christian “rips through” Ana’s virginity, they both come, and her virginity situation is, indeed, rectified, pleasantly for all involved.

The books quickly devolve into passionate(ish) sex scenes interrupted by arguments about their different desires, Christian’s recalcitrance for normalcy, and the ridiculous drama, both within the relationship and beyond.

Fairy tales aren’t what they used to be.

***

Whenever women do something in significant numbers, the media immediately becomes frenzied as they try to understand this new mystery of womanhood. If that something involves female desire (as if female desire is universal), the frenzy takes on a sharper pitch. Women openly expressing their sexual desires is so damn heretical. Nearly every major publication has written at least one “think” piece about Fifty Shades of Grey. The books have been labeled with the condescending term “mommy porn,” because the trilogy has found a great deal of success with a certain demographic. Once that happens, we have to call it a trend and then we need to write trend pieces that exhaustively analyze something that probably isn’t very worthy of analysis. Is it really newsworthy that a number of women have finally found something that turns them on or is the response to Fifty Shades of Grey a depressing commentary on the state of modern desire?

A great deal of the conversation about these books focuses on the erotic elements—there is so much explicit, highly implausible sex to be found in Fifty Shades of Grey and it always ends in the most amazing orgasms ever. Ana and Christian have sex on an airplane and in an elevator and in a car. They have sex in several different beds and they have sex in Christian’s play room which Ana calls the Red Room of Pain—a dungeon so outlandishly equipped, when she first sees it, Ana thinks, “It feels like I’ve time-traveled back to the sixteenth century and the Spanish inquisition.” Inside, she finds deep burgundy walls, a large wooden cross, an iron grid hanging from the ceiling, lots of ropes and chains and paddles and whips and crops and other toys as if real BDSM is borne solely of the extravagant display of toys.

This analogy might help illustrate the difference between BDSM in the real world, and BDSM in the world of E.L. James—Fifty Shades of Grey : BDSM :: McDonalds : Food.

I understand why these books are so popular, beyond the underlying fairy tale. There are hot moments. Chances are you will be turned on by something in these books. The trilogy tries valiantly to make the reader believe female pleasure is the most important part of a sexual experience despite Christian Grey’s dominant proclivities. In nearly all of the sex scenes, Christian is meticulous about pleasuring Ana. He lavishes her body with all manner of sexual attention. The book is generous in detailing lady orgasms that make it clearly Christian Grey is the best lover ever. It’s a nice little fantasy.

When you look deeper, though, which is challenging in a trilogy with the depth of a murky wading pool, these books are really about Ana trying to change/save Christian from his demons— she is the virginal, good girl who can lead the dark bad boy to salvation as if, historically, trying to change a man has ever worked out well. At one point during their courtship, Ana thinks, “This man, whom I once thought of as a romantic hero, a brave shining white knight—or the dark knight as he said. He’s not a hero; he’s a man with serious, deep emotional flaws, and he’s dragging me into the dark. Can I not guide him into the light?” I wanted to take Ana aside and say, “Girl, you cannot lead this man into the light. Let that dream go.”

After all the trials this couple faces, and after all the hot sex, we’re supposed to think this trilogy is about a young woman and her happily ever after. It’s not. Ana’s sexual awakening is a convenient vehicle for the awakening of Christian’s humanity. Fifty Shades of Grey is about a man finding peace and happiness because he finally finds a woman willing to tolerate his bullshit for long enough.

***

Fifty Shades of Grey is engaging in that simplistic, formulaic manner of romance novels or fairy tales but the books are terribly written in really delightful ways. I embraced the absurdity with open arms and laughed and laughed and laughed.

Ana has no gag reflex, which is so very convenient. On those rare occasions she goes down on Christian, Ana has no problem orally accommodating Christian’s girth. She even swallows, so she’s obviously a keeper.

Christian is one of those chatty lovers who, throughout all three books, spends a great deal of time narrating what he is doing, wants to do, and/or will do to Ana, adding at least an extra ten thousand words to each book.

In one of the books, Ana asks for a glass of “white Pinot Grigio.” Whenever I reconsider that phrase, I die laughing because it is the laziest mistake possible. There is product placement by Audi—Christian drives an Audi, gives his favorite submissives Audis and gives Ana, over the course of their relationship, two Audis. His generosity truly knows no bounds. Christian gives Ana expensive clothes, La Perla underwear, a MacBook, an iPad, a Blackberry, expensive rare books, a honeymoon on a yacht, and on and on. If you have a materialistic fantasy, this book will curb that edge.

Swaths of the story are told via reproduced e-mail exchanges. That is, we literally see the e-mails Ana and Christian exchange with all the annoying banter you might expect from a couple falling in love and much more. These e-mails, alone, are worth the price of admission.

In the first book, when Christian is trying to introduce Ana to his lifestyle, James reproduces Christian’s Dominant/Submissive contract three or four times, as if we couldn’t get the gist the first time. The contract is clearly something James found hanging around the Internet. It dictates all manner of supposedly submissive behaviors including personal grooming, sleep hygiene, wardrobe, diet, comportment, and sexual activity. An exhaustive amount of the first book is given over to Ana and Christian negotiating this contract, what they each will or won’t do, only Ana never signs the contract so mostly this is a device to show us how different the lovers are, over and over.

Ana says or thinks, “Jeez,” more times than I can count. There are so many repetitive tics, this trilogy would be ideal for a drinking game where the aim is to destroy someone’s liver. Drink every time Ana thinks, “Jeez.” Drink every time Ana bites her lower lip, which, by the way, makes Christian want to ravish her. Drink every time the palm of Christian’s hand twitches because he wants to spank Ana. Drink every time Ana thinks of Christian as enigmatic or mercurial. Drink every time Ana reflects on his extraordinary good looks. Drink every time Ana gets possessive of Christian because every single human woman in the world eyes him lustily and becomes instantly tongue-tied. Drink every time the narrative continuity goes wildly off track. The game goes on and on.

To hold all this nonsense together, Ana has two little friends throughout the books—her subconscious and her inner goddess, both personified. These ladies glare at Ana. They peer at her over their glasses. They twirl and swoon and sigh and grin and nod and otherwise reflect Ana’s state of mind. For example, toward the end of the first book, Christian and Ana are about to get freaky and there’s this gift: “My subconscious is frantically fanning herself, and my inner goddess is swaying and writing to some primal carnal rhythm. She’s so ready.”

I live for this kind of terrible. Like Ana’s inner goddess, I was so ready for these books.

***

There are times when Fifty Shades of Grey is amusing because the writing is terrible and fun and then there are times when the book is terrible and infuriating in its irresponsibility and wrongness.

As Prince Charming, Christian fits the bill. He is ridiculously wealthy and handsome but utterly lacking in imagination. E.L. James decides to complicate her Prince Charming. She gives the reader a little something more than the average dullard we generally have to yearn for in fairy tales—Christian has a tormented past. His mother is a crackhead, you see, which he casually discloses after a night of kinky passion. Ana is falling asleep next to him and he says, “The woman who brought me into this world was a crack whore, Anastasia. Go to sleep.” He seems to expect his confession will satisfy Ana’s curiosity but eventually he begins to disclose his dark past—abuse by his mothers’ boyfriends, neglect, hunger. There’s a lot of trauma there and he wears it openly. As you might expect, Christian’s past shapes his present in significant ways and provides a great deal of the incessant drama throughout the books. Forgive my indelicacy, but Christian Grey is a man who loves to run the fuck and he’s not afraid to show it. His need to be a Dominant rises out of his need for control.

In the second book we learn Christian Grey enjoys dominating women, always beautiful brunettes, because they remind him of his mother. He’s working on it with his therapist, Dr. Flynn, who makes the occasional appearance in the book in ways that contradict the tenets of modern psychotherapy. There are any number of reasons why people engage in BDSM but for James to so flagrantly pathologize the BDSM lifestyle as strictly a way for fucked up people to work out their emotional issues, is beyond the pale. It is not an accurate portrayal of the community. It sends a wrong and unfair message about kink.

The Fifty Shades of Grey books have also opened the door for pundits, including Ellen Degeneres, to treat the BDSM lifestyle with derision, mockery, and outright ignorance. Whips and chains are so very funny, or they are freaky and weird. For those who don’t understand different expressions of sexuality, humor seems to be the easiest coping mechanism unless, of course, you are critic Katie Roiphe who concludes that the popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey merely proves that independent women today secretly yearn to be dominated by men but are afraid to admit their submissive desires. Roiphe takes her typical anti-feminist stance by supporting her argument with an odd range of vaguely related texts. Take Secretary and The Story of O and a few other texts et voila: irrefutable proof that women want to surrender sexually. At no time does Roiphe actually speak to submissive women about their desires. At no time does she try to understand the complexity of submissive sexual desire, instead making a tenuous connection between a popular, highly fictional series of books and the state of modern female sexuality.

Very little of the conversation about Fifty Shades of Grey has included people who actually participate in the BDSM lifestyle and can speak intelligently and ethically on the subject even though these people exist and are easy to find. Instead, people who know not of what they speak have made wild, lazy, insulting, or inaccurate conjectures about BDSM all because a writer, who is not terribly familiar with the lifestyle (she did a lot of online research, don’t you know), thought kink would be a nice hook to hang her Twilight fan fiction on.

***

My amusement with Fifty Shades of Grey only goes so far. The books are, essentially, a detailed primer for how to successfully engage in a controlling, abusive relationship. The trilogy represents the darkest kind of fairy tale, one where controlling, obsessive, and borderline abusive tendencies are made to seem intensely desirable by offering the reader big heaping spoonfuls of sweet, sweet sex sugar to make the medicine go down.

We can certainly credit the source material. Twilight offers similar instruction. Edward goes to absurd lengths to control Bella, all in the name of love. In Fifty Shades of Grey, there are no limits to Christian’s need to control Ana’s life, her decisions, and their relationship. Even before they date he conducts a background check. He tracks her movements via her cell phone in a way that is never quite explained but that we’re supposed to go along with because he is wealthy and stalking people electronically is simply what wealthy people do. He tries to control when and how much Ana eats, the kind of alcohol she drinks, how she behaves around him, who she allows in her life, how she travels and we’re supposed to believe this is all fine because he has issues, because he loves her.

In addition to the highly restrictive contract Christian wants Ana to sign, he also makes all his submissives sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement limiting what Ana is even legally allowed to share with her friends and loved ones about her life with Christian. Ana inexplicably signs this agreement because, as she tells Christian, she wouldn’t have said anything anyway. She’s a good girl. That’s a common tactic of abusers—isolating their victims, but we’re supposed to think the way Christian isolates Ana in luxury is romantic. A prison is still a prison when the sheets are 1200 thread count.

In the first book, Ana decides to visit her mother in Georgia. Christian offers to travel with Ana but she refuses because she, understandably, needs a little time and space to clear her head so she can decide if the BDSM lifestyle is one she can handle. Christian has to have some control over the situation so he upgrades her to first class. We’re supposed to think this is romantic but mostly it’s creepy because he has gone to the trouble of figuring out her itinerary and changing it without consulting her. Then he simply flies down to Georgia to join Ana because he cannot bear to be apart from her. He’s a man who knows what he wants; his needs are the only needs that matter.

As the story proceeds, Christian is jealous when Ana is merely in the presence of another man. He gets angry or pouts when she won’t pay enough attention to him. During a visit to his family’s home, Ana defies Christian in some obscure way so he drags Ana off to the boathouse to punish her. Her first instinct is to whisper, “Please don’t hit me.” This fear of being hit will come up more than once throughout the trilogy. He hires a security detail for her after one of his “crazy” (read: heartbroken) former submissives has a mental breakdown after her boyfriend dies, but mostly it’s an opportunity for him to control the boundaries of Ana’s world in every possible way. When Ana gets a job, Christian buys the company where she works to “protect” her. In the third book, on their honeymoon, Ana decides to sunbathe topless at a nude beach. Christian, of course, does not appreciate his woman revealing herself to the world. She’s not his submissive, but by God, she is his wife. He makes a scene. Later, they are making love in their hotel room and he leaves hickeys all over her breasts so she cannot wear a bikini top for the duration of their honeymoon. He literally marks his territory like a sixteen-year-old boy.

Christian Grey uses sex as a weapon. He is more than willing to throw a punishment fuck at Ana and he takes real pleasure in fucking her into submission when he cannot otherwise will her into submission. Nearly every sexual encounter between the young couple ends with Ana drowsy and unable to move, her limbs heavy and satiated with pleasure. In a consensual BDSM relationship this dynamic would be fine, welcome even, but the overarching premise of the trilogy is that Ana doesn’t want a BDSM relationship, at least not the kind Christian wants. She certainly enjoys their kinky sexual relationship but she consistently clarifies her overall disinterest in serving as Christian’s submissive. Their relationship is beyond refractory; Ana is, like Bella in Twilight, the vanquished, the undead, and Christian Grey is the proud vanquisher.

After each instance of abusive, controlling behavior, Ana gets righteously indignant but never for long. Time and again, she chooses to sacrifice what she really wants for the opportunity to be loved by her half-assed Prince Charming. We’re supposed to believe Ana is independent because she “defies” Christian by having very reasonable expectations and boundaries. He willfully ignores these boundaries, though, and she allows him to. She forgives all his trespasses.

The trilogy also relies heavily on the trope of the imperiled woman—in each book, Ana faces some kind of danger, either innocuous or quite serious, that allows us to remember she is a woman, and therefore in need of rescue by her Prince Charming. After each crisis, Christian clutches Ana desperately and says he doesn’t know what he would do if anything happened to her. If you look up the word codependent in the dictionary, this couple’s picture will be featured prominently.

I’m all for reading for pleasure. I’m a fan of dirty books and kink. I am down with female submission. By the end of Fifty Shades Freed, however, where Ana acknowledges that Christian is as controlling as ever even though they have found a happily ever after, his pattern of abusive, petty, and at times childish behavior is exhausting and far too familiar. This Prince Charming has lost all his charm.

When considering the overwhelming popularity of this trilogy, we cannot simply dismiss the flaws because the books are fun and the sex is hot. The damaging tone has too broad a reach. That tone reinforces pervasive cultural messages women are already swallowing about what they should tolerate in romantic relationships, about what they should tolerate to be loved by their Prince Charming (see: Chris Brown).

Fifty Shades of Grey is a fairy tale. There’s a man and a woman, and an obstacle that eventually they are able to overcome. There is a happily ever after, but the price exacted is terribly high. It is frightening to consider how many women might be willing to pay that price.

Girls Girls Girls

Roxane Gay — Thu, 03 May 2012 15:15:42 +0000

A television show about my twenties would follow the life of a girl who is lost, literally and figuratively. There wouldn’t be a laugh track. The show would open deep in my lost year—the year I drop out of college and disappear. With no ability to cope, and no way to ask for help, the main character—my character, me—is completely crazy. She makes a spectacular mess.

A lot happens in the pilot. About ten days before the start of Junior year, my character gets on a plane and abandons everything. She runs away to Arizona by way of a trip to San Francisco with a much older man she has only corresponded with via the Internet. We’re talking about the old-fashioned Internet, in 1994—a 2400-baud modem or some such. It is a small miracle she isn’t killed. She cuts off all contact with her family, her friends, or anyone who thought they knew her. She has no money, no plan, a suitcase, and a complete lack of self-regard. It is real drama.

The rest of that first season is equally dramatic. Before long, she finds a seedy job doing about the only thing she’s qualified to do, working from midnight to eight in a nondescript office building. She sits in a little, windowless booth and talks to strangers on the phone. She drinks diet soda from a plastic cup, sometimes with vodka, and does crossword puzzles. It is so easy to talk to strangers. She loves the job until she doesn’t.

There is an interesting cast. Her coworkers are girls who are also messy. They are different races, from different places, but all lost together. They give themselves names like China and Bubbles and Misty and at the end of a long shift they hardly remember who belongs to which name. My character has many different names. She wakes up and says, “Tonight, I’m Delilah, Morgan, Becky.” She wants to be anyone else.

This is late-night television. Cable. China does heroin in the bathroom at work. Sometimes, she leaves a burnt strip of tinfoil on the counter. The manager calls them all into her office and yells. The girls will never rat China out. Bubbles has baby daddy problems. Sometimes, her man drops her off at work and the girls smoking in the parking lot watch as Bubbles and her man yell at each other, terrible things. In another episode, the baby daddy drops Bubbles off and they practically fuck in the front seat. Misty has been on her own since she was sixteen. She is very skinny and has scabs all over her arms and never seems to wash her hair. After most shifts, the girls go to Jack in the Box and then lay out by the pool of the house where my character is staying. The girls tell my character how lucky she is to live in a house with air conditioning. They have swamp coolers and live in crappy apartments. My character stares up at the sun from the diving board where she loves to stretch out and think, bitterly, “Yes, I am so fucking lucky.” She is too young to realize that, compared to them, she is lucky. She ran away but still has something to run back to when she is ready. My character doesn’t come to this realization until the season finale.

Every woman has a series of episodes about her twenties, her girlhood, and how she came out of it. Rarely are those episodes so neatly encapsulated as an episode of, say, Friends or a romantic comedy about boy meeting girl.

Girls have been written and represented in popular culture in many different ways. Most of these representations have been largely unsatisfying because they never get girlhood quite right. It is not possible for girlhood to be represented wholly—girlhood is too vast and too individual an experience. We can only try to represent girlhood in ways that are varied and recognizable. All too often, however, this doesn’t happen.

We put a lot of responsibility on popular culture, particularly when some pop artifact somehow distinguishes itself as not terrible. In the months and weeks leading up to the release of Bridesmaids, for example, there was a great deal of breathless talk about the new ground the movie was breaking, how yes, indeed, women are funny. Can you believe it? There was a lot of pressure on that movie. Bridesmaids had to be good if any other women-driven comedies had any hope of being produced. This is the state of affairs for women in entertainment—everything hangs in the balance all the time.

Bridesmaids could not afford to fail, and didn’t. The movie received a positive critical reception (the New York Times referred to the movie as “unexpectedly funny”) and did well at the box office. Critics lauded the cast for their fresh performances. Some people even used the word “revolution” for the change the movie would bring for women in comedy.

A revolution is a sudden, radical, or complete change—a fundamental change in the way of thinking about or visualizing something. Could one movie really be responsible for a revolution? Bridesmaids was a good movie, one I really enjoyed—smart humor, good acting, a relatable plot, a somewhat realistic portrayal of women in a cinematic wasteland where representations of women are generally appalling. Bridesmaids wasn’t perfect, but given the unfair responsibility placed on the movie, the burden was shouldered well. At the same time, the movie did not bring about radical change, particularly when, as Michelle Dean noted in her review of the movie, many of the familiar tropes we see in comedies and in the portrayals of women were present in Bridesmaids. She notes that the portrayal of Melissa McCarthy’s character Megan, in particular, treads familiar ground. “Almost every joke was designed to rest on her presumed hideousness, and her ribald but unmistakably ‘butch’ sexuality was grounded primarily in her body type and an aversion to makeup.” Within this context, considering Bridesmaids revolutionary is a bit much.

Why do we put so much responsibility on movies like Bridesmaids? How do we get to a place where a movie, one movie, can be considered revolutionary for women?

There’s another woman-oriented pop artifact being asked to shoulder a great deal of responsibility these days—Lena Dunham’s Girls, a new television series on HBO. In the past several weeks, we’ve seen a lot of hype about this show. Critics have almost universally embraced Dunham’s vision and the way she chronicles the lives of four twenty-something girls navigating that interstitial time between graduating from college and growing up.

I am not the target audience for Girls. I was not particularly enthralled by the first three episodes but the show gave me a great deal to think about which counts for something. The writing is often smart and clever. I loved the moment when Hannah (Dunham) is in her parents’ hotel room, and they’re reading her memoir manuscript. Her father says, “You’re a very funny girl,” and she says, “Thank you, Papa.” I thought, “I see what you did, there, Dunham.” I laughed a few times during each episode and recognize the ways in which this show is breaking new ground. I admire how Hannah Horvath doesn’t have the typical body we normally see on television. There is some solidity to her. We see her eat, enthusiastically. We see her fuck. We see her endure the petty humiliations so many young women have to endure. We see the life of one kind of real girl and that is important.

It’s awesome that a twenty-five year old woman gets to write, direct, and star in her own show for a network like HBO. It’s just as sad that this is so revolutionary it deserves mention.

At times, I find Girls and the overall premise to be forced. Amid all the cleverness, I want the show to have a stronger emotional tone. I want to feel something genuine and rarely has the show given me that opportunity. Too many of the characters seem like caricatures, where more nuance would better serve both the characters and their storylines. Hannah’s not-boyfriend, Adam, for example, is a depressing, disgusting composite of every asshole every woman in her twenties has ever dated. We would get the point if he were even half the asshole. The pedophile fantasy Adam shares at the beginning of the second episode is cringe worthy. The ironic rape joke Hannah makes during her job interview in that same episode is cringe worthy. It all feels very, “Look at me! I am edgy!” Maybe that’s the point. I cannot be sure. More often than not, the show is trying too hard to do too much but that’s okay. This show should not have to be perfect. Everything should not have to hang in the balance.

Girls reminds me of how terrible my twenties were—being lost and awkward, the terrible sex with terrible people, being perpetually broke. I am not nostalgic for that time. I ate a lot of ramen during my twenties. I had no money and no hope. Like the girls in Girls, I was never really on the verge of destitution but I lived a generally crappy life. There was nothing romantic about the experience. I understand why many young women find the show so relatable, but watching each episode makes me slightly nauseous and exceptionally grateful to be in my thirties.

Every girl or once-was-girl has a show that would be best for her. I’m more interested in a show called Grown Women about a group of friends who finally have great jobs and pay all their bills in a timely manner but don’t have any savings and still deal with messy love lives and hangovers on Monday morning at work. Until that show comes along or I decide to write it, we have to deal with what we have.

As you might expect, the discourse surrounding Girls has been remarkably extensive and vigorous—nepotism, privilege, race. Dunham has given us a veritable trifecta of reasons to dissect her show.

Lena Dunham is, indeed, the daughter of a well-known artist and the principal cast is comprised of the daughters of other well-known figures like Brian Williams and David Mamet. People resent nepotism because it reminds us that sometimes success really is who you know. This nepotism is mildly annoying but it is not new or remarkable. Many people in Hollywood make entire careers out of hiring their friends for every single project. Adam Sandler has done it for years. Judd Apatow does it with such regularity you don’t need to consult IMDB to know who he will cast in his projects. The cast’s parentage is largely beside the point.

Girls also represents a very privileged existence—one where young women’s New York lifestyles can be subsidized by their parents, where these young women can think about art and internships and finding themselves and writing memoirs at twenty-four. Many people are privileged and, again, it’s easy to resent that because the level of privilege expressed in the show reminds us that sometimes, success really starts with where you come from. Girls is a fine example of someone writing what they know and the painful limitations of doing so.

One of the most significant critiques of Girls is the relative absence of race. The New York where Girls takes place is much like the New York where Sex and the City took place—one completely void of the rich diversity of the city. The critique is legitimate and people across many publications have written deeply felt essays about why it is problematic for a show like Girls to completely negate certain experiences and realities.

I say again: Every girl or once-was-girl has a show that would be best for her.

In Girls we finally have a television show about girls who are awkward and say terribly inappropriate things, are ill-equipped to set boundaries for themselves and have no idea who they’re going to be in a few years. We have so many expectations for this show because Girls is a significant shift in what we normally see about girls and women. While critics, in their lavish attention, have said Dunham’s show is speaking to an entire generation of girls, there are many of us who would say the show is only speaking to a narrow demographic within an entire generation.

Maybe the narrowness of Girls is fine. Maybe it’s also fine that Dunham’s vision of coming of age is limited to the kinds of girls she knows. Maybe, though, Dunham is a product of the artistic culture that created her—one that is largely myopic and unwilling to think about diversity critically.

We all have ideas about the way the world should be and sometimes, we forget how the world is. The absence of race in Girls is an uncomfortable reminder of how many people lead lives segregated by race and class. The stark whiteness of the cast, their upper middle class milieu, and the New York where they live, forces us to interrogate our own lives and the diversity, or lack thereof, in our social, artistic, and professional circles.

Don’t get me wrong. The stark whiteness of Girls disturbs and disappoints me. I wonder why Hannah and her friends don’t have at least one blipster friend or why Hannah’s boss at the publishing house or one or more of the girls’ love interests couldn’t be an actor of color. The show is so damn literal. Still, Girls is not the first show to commit this transgression, and it certainly won’t be the last. It is unreasonable to expect that Lena Dunham would have somehow solved the race and representation problem on television while crafting her twenty-something witticisms and appalling us with sex scenes so uncomfortable they defy imagination.

In recent years, I have enjoyed looking at pictures from literary events, across the country, wondering if I will see a person of color. It’s a game I play and I generally win. Whether the event takes place in Los Angeles or New York or Austin or Portland, more often than not, the audiences at these events are completely white. Sometimes, there will be one or two black people, perhaps an Asian. At the events I attend, I am generally the only spot of color, even at a large writer’s conference like AWP. It’s not that people of color are deliberately excluded but that they are not included because most communities, literary or otherwise, are largely insular and populated by people who know the people they know. This is the uncomfortable truth of our community and it is disingenuous to be pointing the finger at Girls when the show is a pretty accurate reflection of many artistic communities. Do we have any right to critique Girls when there’s so little diversity in a community that should know better and claims to do better?

There’s more, though, to this intense focus on privilege and race and Girls. Why is this show being held to the higher standard when there are so many television shows that have long ignored race and class or have flagrantly transgressed in these areas?

A generation is a group of individuals born and living contemporaneously. In the pilot, Dunham’s character, Hannah Horvath, is explaining to her parents why she needs them to keep supporting her financially. She says, “I think I might be the voice of my generation. Or at least a voice. Of a generation.” We have so many expectations; we’re so thirsty for authentic representations of girls that we only hear the first half of that statement. We hear that Girls is supposed to speak for all of us.

There are so many terrible shows on television, representing women in sexist, stupid, silly ways. Movies are even worse. Movies take one or two anemic ideas about women, caricature them, and shove those caricatures down our throats. The moment we see a pop artifact offering even a sliver of something different, say, a woman who isn’t a size zero or who doesn’t treat a man as the center of the universe, we cling to it desperately because that representation is all we have. There are all kinds of television shows and movies about women, but how many of them make women recognizable?

There are few opportunities for people of color to recognize themselves in literature, in theater, on television, and in movies. It’s depressingly easy for women of color to feel entirely left out when watching a show like Girls. It is rare that we ever see ourselves as anything but the sassy black friend or the nanny or the secretary or the district attorney or the Magical Negro—roles relegated to the background and completely lacking in authenticity, depth or complexity.

One of the few equivalents to Girls we’ve ever had was Girlfriends, created by Mara Brock Akil. Girlfriends debuted in 2000, and ran for 172 episodes. It followed the lives and close friendships of four black women in Los Angeles—Joan (Tracy Ellis Ross), Maya (Golden Brooks), Lynn (Persia White), and Toni (Jill Marie Jones). I particularly admire how the show rarely made race its focal point. Joan, Maya, Lynn and Toni simply lived their lives. They were all professionals (a lawyer, a writer and secretary, a real estate agent, and an artist/actress/whimsy of the week), who dealt with job stresses, romantic troubles, romantic successes, new adventures, and tried to become better women. It took me years to appreciate Girlfriends and I’m not sure why, but once I fell in love with the show, I fell hard. Finally, I was able to recognize something about myself in popular culture. The writing was smart, funny, and the show did a good job of depicting the lives of women of color in their late twenties and thirties. The show wasn’t perfect but the women were human and they were portrayed humanely. Girlfriends is a show that never received the critical attention or audience it deserved but it lasted for eight seasons and still has a very dedicated fanbase of women who remain so relieved to see themselves in some small way.

What I understand about Girls is that there is a community of girls and women who are just as relieved to see themselves in some small way. Unfortunately, that community doesn’t include everyone who needs that relief. Realistically, it can’t but the fact remains that for many of us who watched Girls, who had high expectations, no matter how unfair those expectations were, it was disappointing to see yet another “smart” television show where our experiences were completely ignored.

Women of color come of age and have the same experiences Dunham depicts in her shows but we rarely see those stories because they don’t fit the popular imagination’s rendering of Other girlhood, which is generally nonexistent in popular culture. At least there have been a few shows for black women to recognize themselves—the aforementioned Girlfriends, Living Single, A Different World, The Cosby Show. What about other women of color? For Hispanic and Latina women, Indian women, Middle Eastern women, Asian women, their absence in popular culture is even more pronounced, their need for relief, just as palpable and desperate.

The incredible problem Girls faces is that all we want is everything from each movie or television show or book that promises to offer a new voice, a relatable voice, an important voice. We want, and rightly so, to believe our lives deserve to be new, relatable, and important. We want to see more complex, nuanced depictions of what it really means to be whoever we are or were or hope to be. We just want so much. We just need so much.

The desire for authentic representations of girlhood is like searching for water in a desert. It is a matter of survival, and also faith. We’ll die without water, but we know it’s there, even if we are surrounded by a billion grains of dry sand that all look the same. We know we’ll find a cactus plant or an oasis or that the skies will open with rain or that you can dig deep enough to find a small pool of water to quench an unbearable thirst. For some women, Girls is that pool of water in a dry desert of flawed representations of girlhood. For the rest of us, we’re still stumbling through the desert beneath the burning sun. We’re waiting. We don’t have much faith left.

No related posts…

What We Hunger For

Roxane Gay — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 16:28:25 +0000

I am always interested in the representations of strength in women, where that strength comes from, how it is called upon when it is needed most, and what it costs for a woman to be strong.

All too often, representations of a woman’s strength overlook that cost.

The Hunger Games, released in 2008, is the first book in a trilogy by Suzanne Collins. Catching Fire and Mockingjay, the next two books, were released in 2009 and 2010. The franchise was an instant success. More than 2.9 million copies of the books are in print. There are more than twenty foreign editions. The Hunger Games was on the New York Times bestseller list for 100 weeks. There are special editions. There is merchandise including a Katniss Barbie, which Katniss would absolutely hate. In March 2012, the movie was released and thus far has earned nearly $460 million worldwide. I am part of the problem. I have seen the movie four times and have plans to see it again.

The series tells the story about a young woman, Katniss Everdeen, who doesn’t know her own strength until she is confronted by her need for that strength. She is a young woman who is forced to become stronger in circumstances that might otherwise break her. She is a young woman who has no choice but to fight for survival—for herself, her family, her people.

I have found myself inexplicably drawn to these books, the complex world Collins has created, and the people she has placed in that world.

***

I am not the kind of person who becomes so invested in a book or movie or television show that my interest becomes a hobby or intense obsession, one where I start to declare allegiances, or otherwise demonstrate a serious level of commitment to something fictional I had no hand in creating.

Or, I wasn’t that kind of person.

Let me be clear: Team Peeta. I cannot even fathom how one could be on any other team. Gale? I can barely acknowledge him. Peeta, on the other hand, is everything. He frosts things and bakes bread and is unconditional and unwavering in his love and also he is very, very strong. He can throw a sack of flour, is what I am saying. Peeta is a place of solace and hope and he is a good kisser. My devotion to Peeta is so strong, so serious, I have made a Venn diagram detailing his best qualities, which are many.

***

In December 2011, I didn’t really know much about The Hunger Games. Given my abiding interest in pop culture, I’m not sure how I missed the books.

I do most of my leisure reading at the gym. I hate exercise. Yes, it’s good for you and weight loss and whatever, but normally, I work out and want to die. I really do. I knew I was in love with The Hunger Games when I did not want to get off the treadmill. The book captivated me from the first page. I wanted to keep walking so I could stay in the world Collins created. More than that, The Hunger Games moved me. There was so much at stake, so much drama and it was all so intriguing, so hypnotizing, so intense and dark. I particularly appreciated what the books got right about strength and endurance, suffering and survival. I found myself gasping and hissing and even bursting into tears, more than once. I looked insane but I did not care. I was completely without shame.

After finishing The Hunger Games, I quickly read the next two books in the trilogy—my obsession, at this point, was raging and white hot. I was so invested in the books I couldn’t stop talking about them. I daydreamed about Katniss, Peeta and I suppose, sometimes, stupid Gale as well as the other compelling characters—Cinna, Rue, Thresh, Haymitch, Finnick, Annie. I wanted the best for all of them even when all seemed hopeless, was hopeless.

This obsession intensified well before I realized the first movie would be released in March. That development took things to a whole new level.

I started counting down to the movie well before opening day. I could hardly contain myself. I attended the midnight showing even though I had to teach the next (same) morning. I warned my gentleman friend that he couldn’t mock me for how I reacted during the movie because I knew I was going to get close to the rapture and didn’t want to be judged for it. I live in a small town so I expected that there wouldn’t be many people attending the midnight opening, but AMC screened The Hunger Games on all ten screens and every screening was nearly sold out. My friends and I joked that we were probably some of the oldest people in the auditorium. It was no small relief when we saw some silver-haired folk among us. As we waited, the teenagers and tweens chattered energetically about the books and the casting and whatever else young people talk about these days. Nearly all of them were staring at electronic devices. I thought, “Don’t they have school tomorrow?”

As the movie began, I held my breath. I had so many expectations and I didn’t want those expectations, those hopes, destroyed by Hollywood, a known killer of dreams.

As a fan of The Hunger Games, I was not disappointed. I had feelings throughout the movie, true, mad, deep feelings. Had I been alone, I would have embarrassed myself with vulgar displays of enthusiasm. At times I wanted to spontaneously break into applause just to celebrate the thrill of seeing the book I’ve read so many times, playing out, ten feet high. There was just so much to look at—the set design, the costumes, the glittery cast. The movie was almost cerebral and meticulously faithful to the book when it needed to be. The production values were impeccable with only a few missteps (whatever the hell was going on with Katniss’s flaming outfits, for example). The actors acquitted themselves well. I became even more fervently a member of Team Peeta. I left the movie thrilled with the overall experience of the movie.

As a critic, I recognize the significant flaws, I do, but The Hunger Games was not a movie I am able to watch as a critic. The story means too much to me.

***

The Hunger Games books are not perfect. While the writing is engaging and well paced, the quality of the prose weakens with each successive book. Many of the secondary characters aren’t well developed and at times the plot strains credulity. The third book is rather rushed and some of Collins’s choices felt almost gratuitous, particularly with regard to the characters she chose to kill off. The complete erasure of sexuality is problematic. Intimacy is conveyed through a great deal of kissing to the point that it becomes laughable. It is disturbing that within the world of The Hunger Games, it is perfectly acceptable for teenagers to kill one another and die or otherwise suffer in really violent ways but it is not at all acceptable for them to act on their sexuality.

As I read the trilogy, I was struck, consistently, by the sheer brutality, and yet, the undeniable heart of the story, of the characters, of my dearest Peeta and his devotion for Katniss and how toward the end, even when it seemed hopeless, they found their way to one another. The books’ imperfections are easily forgiven because the best parts of the books are the truest.

***

I am fascinated by strength in women.

People tend to think I’m strong. I’m not. And yet. I identify with Katniss because throughout the trilogy, the people around Katniss expected her to be strong and she did her best to meet those expectations, even when it cost her a great deal.

I come from a loving, tight-knit, imperfect but great family. My parents have always been involved in my life even when I pushed them away. I have wanted for little. One of my biggest weaknesses, one that has always shamed me, is that I have always been lonely. I’ve struggled to make friends because I can be socially awkward, because I’m weird, because I live in my head. When I was young, we moved around a lot so there was rarely any time to get to know a new place, let alone new people. Loneliness was the one familiar thing, making me this bottomless pit of need, open and gaping and desperate for anything to fill me up.

I should not be this way but I am.

When I was young—old enough to like a boy but young enough to have no clue what that meant—there was a boy who I thought was my boyfriend and who said he was my boyfriend but who also completely ignored me at school. It’s a sad, silly story that lots of girls like me know. It was fine because when we were together, he made me feel like he could fill that gaping void inside of me. He was terrible but he was also charming and persuasive. I was nerdy and friendless, all lanky limbs and crazy hair and he was beautiful and popular so I accepted the state of affairs between us.

When we were together, he’d tell me what he wanted to do to me. He wasn’t asking permission. I was not an unwilling participant. I was not a willing participant. I felt nothing one way or the other. I wanted him to love me. I wanted to make him happy. If doing things to my body made him happy, I would let him do anything to my body. My body was nothing to me. It was just meat and bones around that void he filled by touching me. Technically, we didn’t have sex but we did everything else. The more I gave, the more he took. At school, he continued looking right through me. I was dying but I was happy. I was happy because he was happy, because if I gave enough, he might love me. As an adult, I don’t understand how I allowed him to treat me like that. I don’t understand how he could be so terrible. I don’t understand how desperately I sacrificed myself. I was young.

I was always a good girl. I was a straight-A student, top of my class. I did as I was told. I was polite to my elders. I was good to my siblings. I went to church. It was very easy to hide how very bad I was becoming to my family, to everyone. Being good is the best way to be bad.

It never crossed my mind to say no or that I should say no, that I could say no. He started pressuring me to have sex with him. I didn’t say no but I didn’t say yes and I did not want to say yes. I wanted to say no but could not because then I would lose him and I would be nothing again.

One day we were riding our bikes in the woods. About a mile deep, there was an abandoned hunting cabin often used by teenagers to do the things teenagers do when they’re hiding out in the woods. It was disgusting—small, a dirt floor littered with empty beer cans and used condom rappers and discarded cigarette packs. There was a small bench. The glass in the windows was broken, brown with age. Several of his friends from school where there. I didn’t know them well, had mostly seen them in the halls. They were all popular, handsome. They would never have reason to know a girl like me, quiet, shy, awkward.

I did not understand, not at first. I was very naïve despite all the things I thought I knew. Once I realized what was going on, I assumed that this boy wanted me to give his friends blowjobs. I did not want to do that, to share what I thought was private between this boy and I, but I would have. I could have, if only to make him happy. I told him I wanted us to leave, to continue on our bike ride. I did that. I did try to save myself. I did understand I was not safe. They were all so much bigger than me and I finally felt something. I felt fear but I didn’t know how to say no. I tried to leave, to run out of that cabin but they grabbed me just past the threshold. I screamed. I opened my mouth and I screamed and my voice echoed through the woods and no one came for me. Not one person heard me. We were too far deep.

The boy who I thought was my boyfriend pushed me to the ground. He took my clothes off and I lay there with no body to speak of, just a flat board of skin and girl bones. I tried to cover myself with my arms but I couldn’t, not really. The boys stared at me while they drank beer and laughed and said things I didn’t understand because I knew things but I knew nothing about what a group of boys could do to kill a girl.

I was a good girl who went to church. I had faith. I believed in God then so I prayed. I prayed for God to save me because I could not save me. I whispered Our Father because it was the only prayer I knew by heart. I went to church but spent most of my time daydreaming. I begged God to change those boys’ minds. He didn’t. And then I did say no, I found my voice, and it didn’t matter and I had wasted my first love, my first everything on a boy who thought so very little of me.

They kept me there for hours. It was as bad as you might expect. The repercussions linger. I walked home alone pushing my stupid bike, hating myself for ever thinking this boy loved me. I was a good girl so that’s what my parents saw when I came home a completely different person and went to my room and tried to pull myself together well enough to be the girl everyone knew me to be. I knew I had to hide what happened because I didn’t want to get in trouble, because my parents were strict, because you’re not allowed to have sex before marriage, because I was a good girl, so that’s what I did. I swallowed the truth, which only made that gaping void of need inside me yawn wider.

Just because you survive something does not mean you are strong.

The worst of it was going to school the next day. I didn’t want to but I had no choice. I was a good girl. I went to French class and sat in the second to last row. It was uncomfortable in every way you can imagine. Just as class was about to begin, the boy behind me grabbed my shoulder and I felt a surge of adrenaline and then terror. He stood and leaned into me. He said, “You’re a slut,” and everyone heard and they snickered. Everyone started calling me a slut. When the teacher came in and stood at the front of the room she looked at me differently. If she could have, she would have called me a slut too. I was mortified and trapped. I sat perfectly still and tried to concentrate but all I could hear was the hiss of the word slut. That shame was one of the worst things I have ever known. Slut was my name for the rest of the school year because those boys went and told a very different story about what happened in the woods.

***

In June 2011, Meghan Cox Gurdon wrote an article, in The Wall Street Journal, about how Young Adult fiction has taken too dark a turn, has unnecessarily exposed young readers to complex, difficult situations before they are mature enough to make sense of those situations. She wrote, “If books show us the world, teen fiction can be like a hall of fun-house mirrors, constantly reflecting back hideously distorted portrayals of what life is. There are of course exceptions, but a careless young reader—or one who seeks out depravity—will find himself surrounded by images not of joy or beauty but of damage, brutality and losses of the most horrendous kinds.” She is correct in noting that there is darkness in some Young Adult fiction but she largely ignores the diversity of the genre, and the countless titles that aren’t grounded in damage, brutality, or loss. More troubling, though, is the suggestion that somehow reality should be sanitized for teen readers.

The critical response to Gurdon’s article was swift and passionate from writers and readers alike. Sherman Alexie wrote, “…there are millions of teens who read because they are sad and lonely and enraged. They read because they live in an often-terrible world. They read because they believe, despite the callow protestations of certain adults, that books—especially the dark and dangerous ones—will save them.”

I learned a long time ago that life often introduces young people to situations they are in no way prepared for, even good girls, lucky girls who want for nothing. Sometimes, when you least expect it, you become the girl in the woods. You lose your name because another one is forced on you. You think you are alone until you find books about girls like you. Salvation is certainly among the reasons I read. Reading and writing have always pulled me out of the darkest experiences in my life. Stories have given me a place in which to lose myself. They have allowed me to remember. They have allowed me to forget. They have allowed me to imagine different endings and better possible worlds.

Perhaps I loved the Hunger Games trilogy because the books were, in their own way, a fairy tale and I am always, always in search of a fairy tale.

As I read The Hunger Games, I thought of Gurdon’s article, because I was struck, more than once, by the intensity of the traumas the characters were put through, the relentlessness of that trauma, and the visible effects. At times, I thought, “This is too much,” but I know something of the world now, and there are rarely limits to suffering. In these books, suffering has few limits, and suffering has consequences which, all too often, we forget when narratives neatly imply that everything turns out okay, when narratives imply that it gets better without demonstrating what it takes to get to better. In The Hunger Games, it takes everything.

My love for these books, at its purest, is not really about Peeta or anything silly (though, still). I love that a young woman character is fierce and strong but human in ways I find believable, relatable. Katniss was clearly a heroine, but a heroine with issues. She intrigued me because she never seemed to know her own strength. She wasn’t blandly insecure the way girls are often forced to be in fiction. She was brave but flawed. She was a heroine, but she was also a girl who loved two boys and couldn’t choose which boy she loved best. She was not sure she was up to the task of leading a revolution but she did her best, even when she doubted herself.

Throughout the books, Katniss endures the unendurable. She is damaged and it shows. At times, it might seem like her suffering is gratuitous but life often presents unendurable circumstances people manage to survive. Only the details differ. The Hunger Games trilogy is dark and brutal but in the end, the books also offer hope—for a better world and a better people and for one woman, a better life for herself—a life she can share with a man who understands her strength and doesn’t expect her to compromise that strength, a man who can hold her weak places and love her through the darkest of her memories, the worst of her damage. Of course I love these books. The trilogy offers the kind of tempered hope everyone who survives something unendurable hungers for.

Beyond the Measure of Men

Roxane Gay — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 11:30:18 +0000

Here we are again.

In the New York Times Book Review, Meg Wolitzer takes up the matter of “women’s fiction,” in her essay, “The Second Shelf.” She does a fine job of addressing the ongoing, fraught conversation about men, women, the books we write and the disparity in the consideration these books receive.

It is a shame that I can point to any number of essays that take up the issues of gender, literary credibility and the relative lack of critical acceptance and attention women receive from the (male) literary establishment, with equal skill and precision. It is absurd that talented writers continue to have to spend their valuable time demonstrating just how serious, pervasive, and far reaching this problem is instead of writing about more interesting topics.

When we look beyond publishing, when we see that we’re in a country where we’re having an incomprehensible debate about contraception and reproductive freedom, it becomes clear women are dealing with trickle down misogyny. What starts with the legislature reaches everywhere. Just this week, the co-creator of Two and a Half Men flippantly said, with regard to women-oriented television, “Enough, ladies. I get it. You have periods,” and, “…we’re approaching peak vagina on television, the point of labia saturation.” The 2012 National Magazine Award finalists have been announced and there are no women included in several categories—reporting, feature writing, profile writing, essays and criticism, and columns and commentary. Every single day there’s a new instance of gender trouble. Some men aren’t interested in the concerns of women, not in society, not on television, not in publishing, not anywhere.

The time for outrage over things we already know is over. The call and response of this debate has grown tightly choreographed and tedious. A woman dares to acknowledge the gender problem. Some people say, “Yes, you’re right,” but do nothing to change the status quo. Some people say, “I’m not part of the problem,” and offer up some tired example as to why this is all no big deal, why this is all being blown out of proportion. Some people offer up submission queue ratios and other excuses as if that absolves responsibility. Some people say, “Give me more proof,” or, “I want more numbers,” or, “Things are so much better,” or, “You are wrong.” Some people say, “Stop complaining.” Some people say, “Enough talking about the problem. Let’s talk about solutions.” Another woman dares to acknowledge this gender problem. Rinse. Repeat.

The solutions are obvious. Stop making excuses. Stop saying women run publishing. Seriously. Stop justifying the lack of parity in prominent publications that have the resources to address gender inequity. Stop parroting the weak notion that you’re simply publishing the best writing, regardless. There is ample evidence of the excellence of women writers. You aren’t compromising anything by attempting to achieve gender parity. Publish more women writers. If women aren’t submitting to your publication or press, ask yourself why, deal with the answers even if those answers make you uncomfortable, and then reach out to women writers. If women don’t respond to your solicitations, go find other women. Keep doing that, issue after issue after issue. Read more widely. Create more inclusive measures of excellence. Ensure that books by men and women are being reviewed in equal numbers. Ensure gender parity in the critics reviewing those books. Nominate more deserving women for the important awards. Deal with your resentment. Deal with your biases. Vigorously resist the urge to dismiss the gender problem. Make the effort and make the effort and make the effort until you no longer need to, until we don’t need to keep having this conversation.

Change requires intent and effort. It really is that simple.

***

The term “women’s fiction” is so wildly vague as to be mostly useless. “Women’s fiction,” is a label designed to sell a certain kind of book to a certain kind of reader. As writers, we have little control over how our books are marketed. And let’s be clear—“women’s fiction,” is a marketing term meant to either encompass the subject matter of a book or its author, or both. These conversations are so difficult because we are forced to deal in gross generalizations like, “women’s fiction.” We are beholden to these arbitrary categories that are, in many ways, insulting to men, women, and writing.

There are books written by women. There are books written by men. Somehow, though, it is only books by women, or books about certain topics, that require this special “women’s fiction,” designation, particularly when those books have the audacity to explore, in some manner, the female experience which, apparently, includes the topics of marriage, suburban existence, and parenthood, as if women act alone in these endeavors, immaculately conceiving children and the like. Women’s fiction is often considered small fiction, a more intimate brand of storytelling that doesn’t tackle the big issues found in men’s fiction. Anyone who reads well knows this isn’t the case but that misperception lingers. As Ruth Franklin notes, “The underlying problem is that while women read books by male writers about male characters, men tend not to do the reverse. Men’s novels about suburbia (Franzen) are about society; women’s novels about suburbia (Wolitzer) are about women.”

Narratives about certain experiences are somehow legitimized when mediated through a man’s perspective.

Consider the work of John Updike or Richard Yates. Most of their fiction is grounded in domestic themes that, in the hands of a woman, would render the work “women’s fiction.” While these books may be tagged as “women’s fiction,” on Amazon.com, they are also categorized as literary fiction. They receive the accolades. They garner the respect. These books are allowed to be more than what they are by virtue of the writer’s gender while similar books by women are forced to be less than what they are, forced into narrow, often inaccurate categories that diminish the content of the book.

I recently read James Salter’s excellent short story collection Last Night, a book filled with stories about men and women and marriage and the infinite ways people can fail each other. It is a gorgeous book, one that is often concerned with the experiences of women. In one story, a wife demands her husband ends an affair with his gay lover and the muted agony of the situation is palpable for all involved. In another story, a group of friends catch up on their lives and at the end, we learn that one of them is dying, doesn’t know how to share that news, and so she tells a stranger, her cab driver, who in the wake of her confession, frankly assesses her appearance. A woman meets a poet at a party and becomes fixated on his dog, starts behaving strangely. These stories are not so radically different from stories by, say, Joan Didion.

I continue to find that there are more similarities between the writing of men and women than there are differences. Aren’t we all just trying to tell stories? How do we keep losing sight of this?

***

When did men become the measure? When did we collectively decide writing was more worthy if men embraced it? I suppose it was the “literary establishment” that made this decision when, for too long, men dominated the canon, and it was men whose work was elevated as worthy, who received the majority of the prestigious literary prizes and critical attention.

Male readership shouldn’t be the measure to which we aspire. Excellence should be the measure and if men and the establishment can’t (or won’t) recognize that excellence, we should leave the culpability with them instead of bearing it ourselves. As long as we keep considering male readership the goal, we’re not going to get anywhere. We’re going to remain trapped in the same terrible place where we measure women’s writing against an artificial, historically compromised standard.

***

The label “women’s fiction,” is often used with such disdain. I hate how woman has become a bad word. I hate how some women writers twist themselves into knots to distance themselves from, “women’s fiction,” as if we have anything to be ashamed of as women who write what we want to write.

I don’t care if my fiction is labeled as women’s fiction. I know what my writing is and what it isn’t. Someone else’s arbitrary designation can’t change that. I don’t care if men don’t read my books. Don’t get me wrong. I very much want men to read my books. I want everyone to read my books but I’m not going to desperately pine for readers who aren’t interested in what I’m writing.

If men discount certain topics as unworthy of their attention, if men are going to judge a book by it’s cover, or feel excluded from a certain kind of book because the cover is, say, pink, the failure is with the reader, not the writer. To read narrowly and shallowly is to read from a place of ignorance and women writers can’t fix that ignorance no matter what kind of books we write or how those books are marketed.

This is where we should start focusing this conversation—how men (as readers, critics, and editors) can start to bear the responsibility for becoming better, broader readers.

***

Reading remains one of the purest things I do. As anyone who follows me on Twitter knows, I derive a great deal of joy from reading—high brow, low brow, I’m into all of it. Nearly every day I chatter happily about the books I’m reading to my Twitter feed and it’s great to be able to talk about books without worrying about all the problems of publishing. It’s great to always remember that reading is my first love.

I don’t want us to lose sight of the joy of reading because we’re all too focused on the bitter realities of how our reading material finds its way into the world and struggles to have a fighting chance.

Two of the best books I’ve read this year have reminded me that when we spend more time talking about publishing than we talk about books themselves, we’re forgetting what matters most.

In Forgotten Country, Catherine Chung tells an inexpressibly beautiful story about a Korean family with a complex history, a family with secrets, a father who is dying, a sister, Hannah, who has disappeared, and a sister, Janie, who dutifully stays with her parents, who follows them back to Korea to watch over her dying father and who must, reluctantly, try to bring her family back together before it is too late. The story builds quietly, meticulously, and Chung does a masterful job of weaving the past with the present, incorporating mythology and memory in ways that both captivate and haunt.

I became so immersed in the sensuous, powerful writing, I found myself holding my breath over and over because I wanted nothing to interrupt my reading experience. The way Chung uses language is lyrical and entrancing. More than once I was moved to tears by the simplicity and the poignancy of how Chung detailed the intimacies of this family. After the narrator, Janie, is injured in an incident at school, she and her family by “unspoken consensus” sleep in the same bed, find solace in one another. After they say goodnight, and all is quiet, there is this: “I listened to my family breathe, steady and warm. I fell asleep quickly, shielded by the fortress of their bodies, their fragile bones.” Time and again, Chung crafts these lovely phrases that reveal such moments, such moving juxtapositions.

Forgotten Country is also about the difficulties of the world that force people to leave the only home they know. The novel is an immigrant story about trying to find home in more than one place and the price the search for home can exact. When the narrator, Janie, reflects on her family first leaving Korea, she says, “My mother did not want to go to America: this much I knew. I knew it by the way she became distracted and impatient with my sister, by the way she stopped tucking us into bed at night. I knew it from watching her feet, which began to shuffle after my father announced the move, as though they threw down invisible roots that needed to be pulled out with each step.” As her family tries to plant roots in their new homes, Janie realizes, “I had always retained a keen sense of what had been denied our family, of what we had lost.” In this regard, Forgotten Country is also about a family trying to recapture what they have lost, trying to find their forgotten country.

This is a novel of layers, where each layer reaches toward the novel’s satisfying conclusion. There is the mystery of why Hannah has removed herself from her family. At first you don’t even realize how that mystery is unfolding and then, suddenly, you do realize the immensity of what has happened. That moment takes your breath away while it breaks your heart. In its own way, Forgotten Country is about the unfortunate things that happen to girls and young women and the far reaching effects. Throughout the story, we also see how sisters can be cruel to one another before they can understand the magnitude of that cruelty. We see the burdens sisters carry for one another and how certain bonds are indelible. The novel seems quiet but when you consider the complexity of the novel, the intricacy of the layers Chung has crafted, Forgotten Country is anything but quiet. If you read one novel this spring, let it be Forgotten Country. I cannot overstate the joy this book brings.

The twelve stories in Megan Mayhew Bergman’s Birds of a Lesser Paradise, are, at first glance, stories that reflect anxieties about motherhood, marriage, and mortality. In many of the stories, women are more willing to commit to themselves than the men in their lives and in that these stories reveal women who possess both vulnerability and a fierce, uncompromising independence. This makes for a refreshing combination. The stories are deceptive, though, because each story also engages the natural world in some way and reveals the natural world for the violent, uncontrollable place it often is. Each story reveals how we are all animals surrounded by animals, how we can barely manage to be tame together.

At first, you don’t realize what has befallen the narrator in, “Saving Face.” Lila, a veterinarian, has two things to accomplish—a visit to a prison farm and dinner with her fiancé, Clay. And then we learn that a wolf hybrid “had taken most of her lip.” She was beautiful and then she wasn’t and in the aftermath of the accident, Lila has to make sense of moving through the world with her new face and she had to make sense of her relationship with Clay when she no longer looks like the woman with whom he fell in love. When Lila reflects on what happened with the wolf hybrid, she realizes, “There were no promises, no obligations between living things… Not even humans. Just raw need hidden by a game of make-believe.” This lack of promises or obligations between living things is revealed in some way in each of these stories. Birds of a Lesser Paradise is a fine example of writing that is both intimate and vast in cope. There is always more to each of these stories than meets the eye.

The collection explores not only the world as it is but the world as it might soon be. The year is 2050 in “The Artificial Heart,” and the place is South Florida, the Keys. Through subtle details we can see how the world has changed and not for the better. People mostly avoid the sun. There are few fish left in the polluted waters. And yet. While the environment suffers, a daughter is caring for her elderly father who is being kept alive by an artificial heart. He is looking for love even though he is losing his mind and his girlfriend is more interested in his daughter’s partner than her own boyfriend. It’s a story that reveals how no matter how the world might change or fall apart, some things will remain the same. The human heart won’t change.

In “Yesterday’s Whales,” Lauren learns she is pregnant and struggles with what to do. Her partner, Malachi, believes in the extinction of the human race, believes that through the extinction of mankind, nature can reclaim the earth. At the same time, he is a vegetarian who eats bacon. He is a man, it seems, who is selective about his unwavering principles. As Lauren tries to rationalize her pregnancy, she thinks, “Maybe the universe was making an example out of me: You are an animal. You are a mammal. This is what your body wants.” Lauren tries to figure out what she wants and how that fits with what she believes and what her partner believes. The tension of the story builds slowly with Malachi insistent about his most fundamental beliefs and Lauren realizing that perhaps her belief in herself, her body and the child it could produce, is the most fundamental thing of all. The story ends with Lauren facing Malachi to have the difficult conversation. “I looked down and saw the hope within my body as I began to explain, my raw and stupid hope.”

Despite the dark edge in these stories, an edge that reminds us of the baseness of the world, of the difficulty of having to share the world with other animals, the writing in Birds of a Lesser Paradise offers the reader so much, “raw and stupid hope.” This collection, in tone and content, reminds me of ecology, the study of how living organisms relate to each other and their environment. Within the book itself, Mayhew Bergman has created her own ecology. Each story belongs to the book as a whole and could not exist as successfully without the other stories, could not exist as successfully in a different ecology. Most impressive of all is how Mayhew Bergman’s writing is unflinching but tender. She allows that unexpected combination to coexist and in doing so, she has written one of the finest short story collections I’ve read.

***

Here we are again.

I have to believe we keep having these difficult conversations about gender and publishing, no matter where we stand, because we carry a raw and stupid hope that someday we will have acted with enough intent and effort, we will have created enough change, we will have created better measures. I have to believe we continue having these conversations so someday there is nothing left to talk about but the joy and complexity of the stories we write and read. I want that joy to be the only thing that matters.

Can you just imagine?

No related posts…

A Place Where We Are Everything

Roxane Gay — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 19:25:43 +0000

Oftentimes when having difficult conversations about complex topics, certain kinds of people (the small-minded, feeble-minded, profoundly ignorant, etc.) will try to derail the conversation. There are many strategies these people will try to use, all designed to shift focus from culpability and what really matters to lesser topics that are largely irrelevant or that miss the point entirely. Take rape, for example, and the use of victim blaming as a derailing strategy. When a woman is raped, she is interrogated about her choices that contributed to her rape–what she wore, her level of intoxication, her sexual history, and so on. These derailments serve to shift blame from the rapist to the victim because heaven forbid we ask the rapist what he was wearing or doing or thinking when he decided to commit a crime. Heaven forbid we place culpability where it belongs.

On February 26, 2012, Trayvon Martin, a 17 year old boy from Florida was found shot dead. He was killed by self-appointed neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman, 28 years old, who claimed he shot the young man in self-defense. Martin was not armed. He had a pack of Skittles and a bottle of iced tea. He had been talking to a friend before he died. We know now that he was an A and B student, a good boy, not that his nature must be qualified for his death to matter. When I first learned about Martin’s murder, I had nothing to say. There’s nothing that can really be said. It is a tragedy of staggering proportions. It is senseless. The saddest thing, for me, is that I am not shocked. I am not surprised. My initial reaction, if I may be frank, was, “Same shit, different decade.”

I don’t have children yet but I plan on it, one way or another. The idea of having a child, of raising a child, terrifies me for any number of reasons. I know too much about the world. I know too much about the ways in which the world is not safe for anyone. It is hard enough, believe you me, protecting a child inside your body let alone within the walls of your own home or out in the world. I worry because I know too much, have seen too much. I worry about relatively minor things like other kids teasing my child or my child being lonely or getting a cold. I worry about bigger things like doing it wrong or my child having serious medical problems. If I have a girl, I worry about the ways in which the world is dangerous for a girl child. If I have a boy, I worry about the ways in which the world is dangerous for a boy child. I carry all these worries before I even consider the challenges of raising a black child so that they are confident and comfortable in the world.

For much of my young life, I did not know race was something I needed to worry about. I did not know race marked me as different, as Other, as lesser in the eyes of too many. My parents sheltered my brothers and I as best they could. This is not to say we were ignorant about race, but rather, that we felt safe and loved. We were raised to be confident and proud. As we got older, we were taught to be excellent. We had to be excellent because we were different and to get half the consideration, we needed to be twice as good, but this instruction, albeit intense, was done lovingly. I don’t know how else to explain it. Our parents were protecting us by preparing us in the best way they knew how. I did not necessarily know it then but I surely know it now.

We always lived in the suburbs. We were always the only black family, or maybe, if we were lucky, one of two black families who we never seemed to connect with as if we were afraid to give the impression of a critical mass of negritude. I did not know race was something I needed to worry about because it was rarely part of the conversation. When you are the only one, you are more of an anomaly than a threat. My parents were aware of race. As I got older, they would share stories about real estate agents who wouldn’t show them homes in certain neighborhoods, or uncomfortable incidents in the workplace where people did not know how to handle the authority of a black man. We were also Haitian, and that’s what my parents focused on when we talked about difference. They told us about our ancestry and their country, a home they loved but a home they each, separately chose to leave, for reasons that were never fully explained. Some summers, they took us to Haiti. Those trips were a revelation because we weren’t the only anything. Everywhere we looked, we saw people who looked like us and talked like our parents. I understood or tried to understand the problems of that country but I also saw a place that could be something like home. The people around us spoke a language that felt more familiar on our tongues and more comforting to our ears. We saw the most dazzling spectrum of brown skins and we fit somewhere in the middle. I didn’t worry about race as a child because even when I started to understand I was different, I had that safe place to go back to, that fold I could fit myself into. When white people got on my nerves, or started to force their racial intolerance on me, I thought, “I come from a place where we are everything.” I realize now what a privilege it has been to have that. What I want for my children and your children is to have a place where they can feel like they are everything and still be surrounded by people who are different. That should be an inalienable right, too. That is not too much to want.

I rarely know how to write about race. I have no idea what to say. Race feels too big, too complex, but the danger in avoiding complex topics and complex conversations is that you give in, all too easily, to simple, woefully inadequate conversations. You give in, too easily to derailments.

When Trayvon Martin was killed, he was wearing a hoodie and somehow, this hoodie has become one of the focal points of the growing and necessary conversation about this young man’s death, the justice he deserves, and the racial climate in this country that makes a grown man with a gun perceive a 17 year old holding Skittles as a threat because of his skin color. I will admit to having not known that a hoodie was some kind of universal symbol for criminality. I teach on a college campus and I see probably five hundred hoodies a day on young men and women from all walks of life. In my world, a hoodie is a useful piece of clothing. That is a privilege, too, I suppose. When it comes to discussing Trayvon Martin and race, it is important to remember that the hoodie is beside the point. Discussing the hoodie is the same as discussing what a woman was wearing if she was raped. What was George Zimmerman wearing when he shot Trayvon Martin? Did his outfit contribute to his paranoia and vigilantism? Discussing the hoodie is as ridiculous as trying to come up with an answer to that question.

Geraldo Rivera has never been a man you can take seriously. I am old enough to remember his talk show in the late 80s and well into the 90s, Geraldo, that was some of the trashiest daytime television around. Geraldo hasn’t met a subject he is unwilling to exploit. He is an irresponsible hack and on those rare occasions I devote mental energy to him, I mostly feel sadness about the smallness of his mind and heart. It came as no surprise, none at all, that today on Fox News, Geraldo said, “I am urging the parents of black and Latino youngsters particularly to not let their children go out wearing hoodies. I think the hoodie is as much responsible for Trayvon Martin’s death as George Zimmerman was.” Geraldo Rivera can go straight to hell. He should be urging the parents of would be killers to avoid guns. A hoodie did not kill Trayvon Martin, a gun did.

Geraldo’s commentary is a classic example of derailment. Trayvon could have been wearing a My Little Pony t-shirt and George Zimmerman would have perceived the young man as a threat. We cannot center this discussion around clothing. We cannot allow a piece of clothing to bear the brunt of the responsibility that belongs to the murderer and to the society that created him. This is a discussion about race, about unchecked vigilantism, about a state that encourages vigilantism, about a police department that continues to allow the murderer of a child to remain free, about a country where the parents of black children have to worry about the George Zimmermans of the world each time they let their children leave their homes, and about the fact that Trayvon Martin is not the first nor will he be the last young black man who was killed because of his black skin. If we allow the conversation to be derailed, we do Trayvon Martin even more injustice than has already been done unto him.

The Alienable Rights of Women

Roxane Gay — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 17:06:02 +0000

Lately, I read the news and have to make sure I am not, in fact, reading The Onion. We are having a national debate about abortion, birth control and reproductive freedom, and men are directing that debate. That is the stuff of satire.

The politicians and their ilk who are hell bent on reintroducing reproductive freedom as a “campaign issue,” have short memories. Of course they have short memories. They only care about what is politically convenient or expedient.

Women do not have short memories. We cannot afford that luxury.

The politicians and their ilk forget that women, and to a certain extent men, have always done what they needed to do to protect female bodies from unwanted pregnancy. During ancient times, women used jellies, gums, and plants both for contraception and to abort unwanted pregnancies. These practices continued until the 1300s when Europe needed to repopulate and started to hunt “witches” and midwives who shared their valuable knowledge about these contraceptive methods.

Throughout history, whenever governments wanted to achieve some end, often involving population growth, they restricted access to birth control and/or criminalized birth control unless of course, the population growth concerned the poor, in which case, contraception was enthusiastically promoted. Historically, society has only wanted “the right kind of people,” to have a right to life. We shouldn’t forget that.

Here’s the thing about history—it repeats itself over and over and over. The witch hunts, and the demonization of contraception and abortion and the women who provided these services from the 14^th and 15^th centuries, is happening all over again. This time though, the witch hunt seems to be more of a cynical ploy to distract the populace from some of the truly pressing issues our society is facing like, oh I don’t know, the devastated economy and a Wall Street culture that remains unchecked even after the damage it has done, the raging class inequalities and widening gap between those who have and those who have not, the looming student loan and consumer debt crises, the fractured racial climate, the lack of civil rights for gay, lesbian, and transgender people, a healthcare system too many people don’t have access to, wars without cease, impending global threats and on and on and on.

Rather than solve the real problems the United States is facing, some politicians, mostly conservative, have decided to try and solve the “female problem,” by creating a smokescreen and reintroducing abortion and more inexplicably, birth control into a national debate.

Here’s the thing about history—it repeats itself over and over and over. Women were forced underground for contraception and pregnancy termination before and we will go underground again if we have to. We will risk our lives if these politicians, who so flagrantly demean women, force us to do so.

Thank goodness women do not have short memories.

***

Pregnancy is at once a private and public experience. Pregnancy is private because it is so very personal. It happens within the body. In a perfect world, pregnancy would be an intimate experience shared by a woman and her partner alone but for various reasons that is not possible.

Pregnancy is an experience that invites public intervention and forces the female body into the public discourse. In many ways, pregnancy is the least private experience of a woman’s life.

Public intervention can be fairly mild, more annoying than anything else—people wanting to touch your swollen belly, offering unsolicited advice about how to raise a not yet child, inquiring as to due dates or the gender of the not yet child as if they have a right to this information simply because you are pregnant. Once your pregnancy starts to show, you cannot avoid being part of this discourse whether you want to or not.

Public intervention can be necessary, because pregnant women must, generally, seek appropriate medical care. You cannot simply hide in a cave and hope for the best, however tempting that alternative may be. Pregnancy is many things including complicated and, at times, fraught. Medical intervention, if you’re lucky enough to have health insurance or otherwise afford such care, helps to ensure the pregnancy proceeds the way it should. It allows your fetus to be tested for abnormalities. It allows the mother’s health to be monitored for the number of conditions that can arise from a pregnancy. If things go wrong in a pregnancy, and they can go horribly, horribly wrong, medical intervention can save the life of the mother and, if you’re lucky, the life of fetus. Public intervention is also necessary when a woman delivers her child whether by the hands of a doctor, midwife, or doula.

It is only after a baby is born that a woman might finally have some privacy.

And then there’s the manner in which the legislature, in too many states, intervenes on pregnancy, time and again, particularly when a woman chooses to exercise her right to terminate. This choice increasingly feels heretical or at least that is how it is framed by the loudest voices carrying on this conversation.

***

Since 1973, women have had the right to choose to terminate a pregnancy. Women have had the right to choose not to be forced into unwanted motherhood. Since 1973 that right has been contested in many different ways but, because this is an election year, the contesting of reproductive freedom is flaring hotly.

Things have gotten complicated, in too many states, for women who want to exercise their right to choose. Legislatures across the United States have worked very hard to shape and control the abortion experience in bizarre, insensitive ways that intervene on a personal, should-be-private experience in very public, painful ways.

In the past year, several states have introduced and/or passed legislation mandating women receive ultrasounds before they receive an abortion. There are now seven states requiring this procedure.

States like Virginia tried to pass a bill requiring women seeking an abortion to receive a medically unnecessary transvaginal ultrasounds but that bill failed. The Virginia legislature subsequently passed a bill requiring a regular ultrasound, in a bit of bait and switch lawmaking. This bill also requires that whether or not a woman chooses to see the ultrasound or listen to the fetal heartbeat, the information about her choice is entered into her medical record with or without her consent.

The conversation about transvaginal ultrasounds has been particularly heated, with some pro-choice advocates suggesting this procedure is akin to state-mandated rape. That is an irresponsible tactic at best. Rape is rape. This procedure and legislation requiring this procedure is something else entirely although, I can assure you—a transvaginal ultrasound is not a pleasant procedure primarily because there is very little that is pleasant about being half-naked, in front of strangers while being probed by a hard plastic object, at least, within a medical context. A transvaginal ultrasound is a medical procedure that sometimes must be done but we cannot even have a reasonable conversation about the procedure and its lack of medical necessity for women who want an abortion because the procedure is carelessly being thrown into the abortion conversation as yet another distraction tactic.

Restrictive abortion legislation, in whatever form it takes, is a rather transparent ploy. If these politicians can’t prevent women from having abortions, they are certainly going to punish them. They are going to punish these women severely, cruelly, unusually for daring to make choices about motherhood, their bodies and their futures.

In the race to see who can punish women the most for daring to make these choices, Texas has outdone itself, going so far as to require women to receive multiple sonograms, to be told about all the services available to encourage them to remain pregnant, and most diabolically, a woman seeking an abortion must listen to the doctor narrate the sonogram.

This legislation designed to control reproductive freedom is so craven as to make you question humanity. It is repulsive. Our legal system, which by virtue of the eighth amendment demands that no criminal punishment be cruel and unusual, affords more human rights to criminals than such legislation affords women. Just ask Carolyn Jones who suffered through this macabre ordeal in Texas when she and her husband decided to terminate her second pregnancy because their child would have been born into a lifetime of suffering and medical care. Her story is nearly unbearable to read which speaks to the magnitude of grief she must have experienced.

The governor of Pennsylvania, who supports legislation in his state that will require women to get an ultrasound before an abortion, recently suggested women simply close their eyes during the ultrasound. They will, apparently, let anyone run for office these days including men who believe that not seeing something happen will make it easier to endure.

Georgia State Representative Terry England suggested, in support of bill HB 954 which would ban abortion in that state after twenty weeks, that women should carry stillborn fetuses to term because calves and pigs do it too. Then he tried to backtrack and say that’s not what he meant. Women and animals are not much different for this man or for most of the men who are trying to control the conversation and legislation regarding reproductive freedom.

Thirty-five states require women to receive counseling before an abortion to varying degrees of specificity. In twenty-six states women must also be offered or given written material. The restrictions go on and on. If you think you’re free from these restrictions, think again. In 2011, 55% of all women of reproductive age in the United States lived in states hostile to abortion rights and reproductive freedom.

Waiting periods, counseling, ultrasounds, transvaginal ultrasounds, sonogram storytelling, all of these legislative moves are invasive, insulting, and condescending because they are deeply misguided attempts to pressure women into changing their minds, to pressure women into not terminating their pregnancies, as if women are so easily swayed that such petty and cruel stall tactics will work. These politicians do not understand that once a woman has made up her mind about terminating a pregnancy, very little will sway her. It is not a decision taken lightly and if a woman does take the decision lightly, that is her right. A woman should always have the right to choose what she does with her body. It is frustrating that this needs to be said, repeatedly. On the scale of relevance, public approval or disapproval of a woman’s choices should not merit measure.

***

And what of medical doctors who take an oath to serve the best interests of their patients? What responsibility do they bear in this? If medical practitioners banded together and refused to participate in some of these restrictions, would that make any difference?

***

This debate is a smokescreen but it is a very deliberate and dangerous smokescreen. It is dangerous because this current debate shows us that reproductive freedom is negotiable. Reproductive freedom is a talking point. Reproductive freedom is a campaign issue. Reproductive freedom can be repealed or restricted. Reproductive freedom is not an inalienable right even though it should be.

The United States as we know it was founded on the principle of inalienable rights, this idea that some rights are so sacrosanct not even a government can take them away. Of course, this country’s founding fathers were only thinking of wealthy white men when they codified this principle, but still, it’s a nice idea, that there are some freedoms that cannot be taken away.

What this debate shows us is that even in this day and age, the rights of women are not inalienable. Our rights can be and are, with alarming regularity, stripped away.

I struggle to accept that my body is a legislative matter. The truth of this makes it difficult for me to breathe. I don’t feel like I have inalienable rights.

I don’t feel free.

There is no freedom in any circumstance where the body is legislated, none at all. In her article, “Legislating the Female Body: Reproductive Technology and the Reconstructed Woman,” Isabel Karpin argues that, “in the process of regulating the female body, the law legislates its shape, lineaments, and its boundaries.”

Right now, too many politicians and cultural moralists are trying to define the shape and boundaries of the female body when women should be defining these things for ourselves. We should have that freedom and that freedom should be sacrosanct.

***

Then, of course, there is the problem of those women who want to, perhaps, avoid the pregnancy question altogether by availing themselves of birth control with the privacy and dignity and affordability that should also be inalienable.

Or, according to some, whores.

Margaret Sanger would be horrified to see how 96 years after she opened the first birth control clinic, we’re essentially fighting the same fight. The woman was by no means perfect but she forever altered the course of reproductive freedom. It is a shame to see what is happening to her legacy because we are now seemingly forced to argue that birth control should be affordable and freely available and there are people who disagree.

In the early 1900s, Sanger and others were fighting for reproductive freedom because they knew a woman’s quality of life could only be enhanced by unfettered access to contraception. Sanger knew women were performing abortions on themselves or receiving back alley abortions that put their lives at risk or rendered them infertile. She wanted to do something about that. Sanger and other birth control pioneers fought this good fight because they knew what women have always known, what women have never allowed themselves to forget—more often than not, the burden of having and rearing children falls primarily on the backs of women. Certainly, in my lifetime, men have assumed a more equal role in parenting but women are the only ones who can get pregnant and women then have to survive the pregnancy, which is not always as easy as it seems. Birth control allows women to choose when they assume that responsibility. The majority of women have used at least one contraceptive method in their lifetime so this is clearly a choice women do not want to lose.

The year is 2012 and here we are, having inexplicable conversations about birth control, conversations where women must justify why they are taking birth control, conversations where a congressional hearing on birth control includes no women because the men in power know women don’t need to be included in the conversation. We don’t have inalienable rights the way men do.

Arizona has introduced legislation that would allow an employer to fire a woman for using birth control. Mitt Romney, a supposedly viable candidate for president, declared he would do away with Planned Parenthood, the majority of whose work is to provide affordable healthcare for women.

A mediocre, morally bankrupt radio personality like Rush Limbaugh publically shames a young woman, Sandra Fluke, for having the nerve to advocate for subsidized birth control because birth control can be so expensive. He calls her a slut and a prostitute because in his miniscule mind, these are bad things.

What is more troubling than this oddly timed debate about birth control is the vehemence with which I have seen women needing to justify or explain why they take birth control—health reasons, to regulate periods, you know, as if there’s anything wrong with taking birth control simply because you want to have sex without that sex resulting in pregnancy. In certain circles, birth control is being framed as whore medicine so we are now dealing with a bizarre new morality where a woman cannot simply say, in one way or another, “I’m on the pill because I like dick.” It’s extremely regressive for women to feel like they need to make it seem like they are using birth control for reasons other than what birth control was originally designed for—to control birth.

***

I cannot help but think of the Greek play Lysistrata.

***

What often goes unspoken in this conversation is how debates about birth control and reproductive freedom continually force the female body into being a legislative matter because men refuse to assume their fair share of responsibility for birth control. Men refuse to allow their bodies to become a legislative matter because they have that (inalienable) right. The drug industry has no real motivation to develop a reversible method of male birth control because forcing this burden on women is so damn profitable. Americans spent $5 billion on birth control in 2011. There are exceptions, bright shining exceptions, but men don’t want the responsibility of birth control. Why would they? They see what the responsibility continues to cost women publicly and privately.

The truth is that birth control is a pain in the ass. It’s a medical marvel but it is also an imperfect marvel. Most of the time, women have to put something into their bodies that alters their bodies’ natural functions just so they can have a sexual life and prevent unwanted pregnancies. Birth control is expensive. Birth control can wreak havoc on your hormones, your state of mind, and your physical well being because depending on the method, there are side effects and the side effects can be ridiculous. If you’re on the pill, you have to remember to take it, or else. If you use an IUD, you have to worry about it growing into your body and becoming a permanent part of you. Okay, that one is just me. There’s no sexy way to insert a diaphragm in the heat of the moment. Condoms break. Pulling out is only reasonable in high school. Sometimes, birth control doesn’t work. I know lots of pill babies. We use birth control because however much it is a pain in the ass, it is infinitely better than the alternative.

If I told you my birth control method of choice, which I kind of swear by, you’d look at me like I was slightly insane. Suffice it to say, I will take a pill every day when men have that same option. We should all be in this together, right? One of my favorite moments is when a guy, at that certain point in a relationship, says something desperately hopeful like, “Are you on the pill?” I simply say, “No, are you?”

***

Reproductive freedom has been on my mind a great deal lately. How could it not be? I’m a woman of reproductive age.

The other day, I was fuming after reading the news. With shocking clarity, I thought, I want to start an underground birth control network. Of course, I also thought, “That’s crazy. These smokescreens are just that. Things are going to be fine,” and I made a joke about starting an underground birth control railroad on Twitter. Later, I realized, the belief, however fleeting, that women might need to go underground for reproductive freedom is not as crazy as the current climate. I was, in my way, quite serious about creating some kind of underground network to ensure that a woman’s right to safely maintain her reproductive health is, in some way, forever inalienable.

When I started imagining this underground network, I had a feeling, in my gut, that women, and the men who love (having sex with) us are going to need to prepare for the worst. There is ample evidence that the worst, where reproductive freedom is concerned, is not behind us. The worst is all around us, breathing down our necks, in relentless pursuit. Either these politicians are serious or they’re trying to misdirect national conversations. Either alternative continues to expose the fragility of women’s rights.

An underground railroad worked once before. It could work again. We could stockpile various methods of birth control and information about where women might go for safe, ethical reproductive healthcare in every state—contraception, abortion, education, all of it. We could create a network of reproductive healthcare providers and abortionists who would treat women humanely because the government does not and we could make sure that every woman who needed to make a choice had all the help she needed.

I spent hours thinking about this underground network and what it would take to make sure women don’t ever have to revert to a time when they put themselves at serious risk to terminate a pregnancy.

It surprises me, though it shouldn’t, how short the memories of these politicians are. They forget the brutal lengths women have gone to in order to terminate pregnancies when abortion was illegal or when abortion is unaffordable. Women have thrown themselves down stairs and otherwise tried to physically harm themselves to force a miscarriage. Dr. Waldo Fielding noted in the New York Times, “Almost any implement you can imagine had been and was used to start an abortion — darning needles, crochet hooks, cut-glass salt shakers, soda bottles, sometimes intact, sometimes with the top broken off.” Women have tried to use soap and bleach, catheters, natural remedies. Women have historically resorted to any means necessary. Women will do this again, if we are backed back into that terrible corner. This is the responsibility our society has forced on women for hundreds of years.

It is a small miracle women do not have short memories about our rights that have always, shamefully, been alienable.

A Round Up of Kony 2012 Links

Roxane Gay — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 21:39:24 +0000

Yesterday I clicked on a link from my Twitter feed that took me to a YouTube video about a man named Jason Russell and his son and then I realized that the video was in fact about Joseph Kony and a decades old conflict in Uganda only Kony is no longer in Uganda and the conflict has been going on for decades. I also learned about the nonprofit foundation Invisible Children and by the end, I wasn’t sure if I appreciated or hated what I had just seen but I went to the Kony 2012 website and was prepared to contribute some money because I’m opposed to child kidnapping, murder, torture and the other atrocities Kony has committed over the years. I was also inspired by the enthusiasm of the people in the video who seemed committed to creating change even if their approach struck me as somewhat shallow and improbable.

The website is quite slick and the Kony 2012 campaign is quite slick but as I was entering my credit card information I paused because something kept nagging me.

So much of the video was about empowering young people here in the United States to participate in this campaign to make Joseph Kony famous more than it was about educating people in a meaningful way about Kony, the atrocities he has committed, and what it would actually take to find and try him in an international court of law.

So much of the video was about the filmmakers rather than Uganda, her people, and where they are today.

So much of the approach seemed very well-intentioned but completely divorced from the complex of realities of global conflict which assuredly cannot be solved through posters, Facebook updates, and wristbands. I was also curious about where the money was going because everything was so slick that a lot of money had to have gone into the production. When I contribute to nonprofits, I like some sense of what they might do with my money. I’d prefer they don’t spend it on say, more address labels for potential donors.

I took to Google and Twitter and quickly found a strong, negative response to Kony 2012 that addressed all of the things that were making me so uncomfortable about the campaign. Some of those links are below.

At Foreign Policy, Michael Wilkerson addresses many of the troubling issues surrounding this campaign, however well-intentioned it may be.

At The Atlantic, there’s an article that looks at the arrogance of trying to solve a global conflict with wristbands and a media campaign. Also at The Atlantic, an article about the good to be found in the backlash against this online activism.

On Twitter, Teju Cole composed a series of incisive tweets about the White Savior Industrial Complex.

Vice walks you through whether or not you should donate your money to Kony 2012.

At Boing Boing, there is a nice roundup of African journalists and activists responding to Kony 2012.

The Visible Children Tumblr compiles critical responses worth reading.

Joseph Acaye, one of the child abductees featured in the Kony 2012 film defends the filmmakers.

Kony 2012 has responded to some of the criticism.

No related posts…

The Rumpus.net » Roxane Gay

Peculiar Benefits

Related Posts:

Today’s Required Reading

Related Posts:

The Rumpus Interview With Julianna Baggott

Related Posts:

The Trouble With Prince Charming or He Who Trespassed Against Us

Related Posts:

Girls Girls Girls

Related Posts:

What We Hunger For

Related Posts:

Beyond the Measure of Men

Related Posts:

A Place Where We Are Everything

Related Posts:

The Alienable Rights of Women

Related Posts:

A Round Up of Kony 2012 Links

Related Posts: