And to think it all started on Twitter…

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I am a Twitter newcomer, basically. So new, in fact, that I stayed up late to watch the royal wedding partly because I’d seen the other two live and mostly because I had a feeling that it was an event that would lend itself to the whole “live blogging” thing everyone seemed to have such fun with, and it was as fun to be awake and aTwitter as I had imagined it would be. So I knew what live blogging would look like when I encountered it the next time, which happened to be at an event that I know only by its hashtag: #tca11, which might be code for Television Critics Association or somesuch, and I know about it because I follow the Monkey See blog from NPR, and saw an awful lot of tweets come through my feed last week, ranging from Gloria Steinem’s refusal to comment on slutty clothing all the way to ascerbic remarks about a couple new show scheduled for fall, like The Playboy Club and The New Girl.

It was quite a feed.

The chatter about The Playboy Club particularly caught my interest, and as I had hoped it resulted in a full-on article by Linda Holmes about the contents of the program and how it was pitched to the audience by network executives, “The Bizarre Pitch for ‘The Playboy Club’: It’s All about Female Empowerment?”

But the pilot does end with the curious line, recited by Hefner, “Bunnies were some of the only women in the world who could be anything they wanted.” Given the fact that the Bunnies in the show have to ask permission to wear a coat when it’s cold outside and they’re working the door — permission that, in the pilot, is denied by the man to whom they direct the request — it’s a little hard to understand what kind of freedom that line is supposed to be talking about.

When someone at the TCA press tour session about the show asked about that, executive producer Chad Hodge said, in part, “Really, the show is all about empowering, and who these women can be, and how they can use their position to get what they want.”

Long story short–and don’t take my word for it; please click through to the article and read for yourself–the show is being explained as about empowerment even though the content contains no scenes of women actually being empowered. Later tweets from a different day shared how nobody wanted to talk with Zooey Deschanel about her actual show but rather focused on just how adorable she was. And then there was the string of reports on the Last Man Standing presentation, a show about how Tim Allen–a white man–is being drummed out of his own life because women have, well, taken over everything.

I don’t know if I want to use the word “lauded,” exactly, but much earlier this year, I heard more than one television critic comment on the unusual prevalence of female leads and woman-created shows in the 2011-2012 season of network television (I listen to television critics more than I actually watch TV). Beneath the buzz I sensed (or perhaps projected) some real enthusiasm for it, perhaps optimism that networks had decided that a) women were capable of being leaders and that b) women were a worthy audience all on their own (something book publishers figured out decades and decades ago). It is exciting to see new faces in the landscape, even if the plots and characters of these female-driven shows aren’t particularly groundbreaking or novel, or transformative or realistic or whatever else would elevate “Female TV” above “Usual Schlock” (not that I don’t enjoy schlock). It’s not like women have been waiting in the wings for their chance to do television “right.” They’ve just been waiting in the wings for the chance to do television. And now that they have, there’s all this weird baggage that comes with it.

I mean, it’s weird that instead of acknowledging that The Playboy Club is a silly, maybe even fun (haven’t seen it) show about women in the 1960s in sexy costumes that people will like to look at the network instead creates this elaborate ruse that it’s about women’s power. Why? Like Holmes says in her article, the network brought up the idea of “empowerment” in the first place. It’s not a pushy sell–it’s an out of left field sell. With all these new shows coming up that involve women that could be talked about in terms of “empowerment” far more understandably, why not talk about that? Is it because the networks think “women’s empowerment” is just a buzz term and they are trying to deliver a product they don’t personally care about? Is it because they don’t understand what “women’s empowerment” is? And in the midst of all this, why put out a Tim Allen show that portrays men as the real victims of society? As the ones with no power while women take over everything and boss everyone around? Who is that fooling? And is it a coincidence that this Last Man Standing show is premiering the same year that this rash of new shows by/about women appears? (As is Man Up  and Work It, shows about how men are too feminine and how it’s so hard for a man to get a job in a woman’s world respectively). Coincidence is probably the wrong word, but don’t you think the timing is interesting? Clearly there’s no small amount of social anxiety about what will happen to society if women get too much power, and by too much power I mean maybe six prime time shows.

So this is where I get to spin my conspiracy fantasies about how maybe the network executives are trying to sell the concept of Playboy Bunnies Is Empowerment so that women will spend more time trying to be like Playboy Bunnies and less time trying to be like network executives? Reminding men that it’s dangerous to let women have jobs and stuff because they disrupt the natural order of things (one of the crises on LMS is that Tim Allen’s wife gets a raise and makes more money than him)? Here’s a nice quote from ABC president Paul Lee at the TCA presentations about why Tim Allen’s show is important:

“We are a network that’s dominated, and certainly in terms of the value of our sales, with affluent women’s audiences. So to look at men in a women’s world was a very interesting take.”

Do you really think that ABC is a network dominated by women? Really? That men are floundering in this world? I guess that’s their story and I guess they’re sticking to it. I just don’t know who their intended audience is for that kind of rhetoric. It’s almost too confusing to be offensive. Almost.

Come on.

Have I kept you in suspense long enough? The story of how I learned about “transjacktivists” as a group, who they are, and how they are perceived by some radical feminists follows after the jump. Also after the jump is my long and tedious explanation of what I think the issues are that cause conflict between transgendered activists and radical feminists. Hint: “Transjacktivist” is not a compliment.

This is a link to the Feminist Friday hosting blog. Click it.

Again with the what seems like needless plugging, but I was messing with my new blog (see the sidebar!) and saw I’d picked up a subscriber. I followed the subscriber’s link to a different blog, and stumbled on the word “transjacktivist” there. Brand-new word, yadda yadda, see above. I haven’t really talked to anyone in the radical feminist sphere about it, and I know Google and blogs are only reliable to a point, but this is what I think I’ve pieced together.

The Gender Binary Construct

Humans are sexual creatures. There are males and there are females, and this is a thing that is so common in the animal kingdom that it barely warrants noticing, except to establish that there are two sexes. Male sex and female sex. Both sexes share genetic material; one sex–the female sex–has to actually grow offspring in her body. Pregnancy is not easy, and it can be dangerous, and it compromises a female’s ability to fully exploit her biological resources to maximize her growth and safety. It’s just one of those things. It isn’t fair, but it is life. These are sex differences.

On top of sex, however, humans have constructed (that is, invented) the concept of gender. I hesitate to give a definition of gender because I don’t really know what the scholarly definition entails, but best I can tell it’s a way of categorizing people by behavior. Societies choose how many types of genders they want (not consciously, but you know what I mean), and they assign certain behaviors to those genders. Because gender is kind of a behavior identity, you can’t tell by looking at people what gender they identify with. You can only start to guess at it when they act. The culture decides what behaviors go with which gender, and people who identify a preference for those behaviors end up getting assigned to those gender categories. Gender is not innate. Also, there is no biological reason to limit the number of genders to two, even though many cultures have done so (the gender binary). No biological reason at all! That many cultures on Earth have decided to model gender categories after sex categories–male sex, female sex, masculine gender, feminine gender–does not make it an issue of biology. That gender roles seem to roughly correspond to sex categories makes it confusing to talk about in English (because gender and sex categories share vocabulary) (and maybe other languages, but I don’t know any other languages well enough to surmise) but that is a limitation of language. Language isn’t biology, either.

Gender Performance and Transgendered People

Because gender is a set of behaviors, gender can be said to be a performance. Children are trained from birth about which behaviors are appropriate for which genders, and adults tend to try to track children into gender groups based on which sex they are born. Children’s behavior is reinforced according to the gender group they’ve been tracked into, and they reflect their acceptance of the gender roles by performing the behaviors that are expected of them. Sometimes. Not all people go along with this, and history and personal anecdotes are filled with examples of individuals who have refused to be trapped within the confines of arbitrary gender boundaries, and perform behaviors that they like regardless of what gender group people looking at them think they should be in.

I am about to get into the parts of my thinking that are new, and I’m not sure I have all aspects of the issue straight in my head yet. I really hope I can avoid mistakes. I am sorry if I say something hurtful and wrong.

The strategies people employ as they defy gender constraints are numerous. Some people are primarily dissatisfied with the gender categories that have been constructed, and decide to perform only behaviors that they want to perform regardless of masculinity or femininity (the binary genders) and regardless of their biological sex, and deal with the criticism that accompanies not “taking sides” and forming a personal identity outside of gender identity. I only know the word Androgynous for this situation; I don’t know if there is a political identity word for this group of people or not. Transgendered people find themselves at odds not with social constructions of gender so much as the alliance of sex and gender. The gender performance does not cause them grief; the behaviors and required actions associated with either maleness or femaleness are not contrary to their gender identity. They receive social criticism because the gender they identify with is the “wrong” gender for their sex. For example, if a person with female sex organs wears high heels, it’s acceptable because facial makeup is a behavior performed by the female gender, and people with female sex organs are expected to be feminine and people with male sex organs are not. If a person with male sex organs wears high heels, that person is not conforming to the “rules” of masculinity.

How This Relates to Feminism

There are many facets of feminism, including the fight to not be confined to artificial rules about gender. It has been a long fight, and it has not been that long since perfectly ordinary things (now) like “going to college” were included in the list of behaviors for the female gender. Every time a person undermines the alignment of sexual organs and gender expectations–either by refusing to stick to the behaviors of masculinity or femininity or by refusing to let your sexual organs determine your gender performance–it makes it easier for women (and men) to be accepted for doing the things they like rather than the things that are expected of them. Divorcing gender from sex liberates people. On the other hand…

There are real inequalities between the sexes. I will cite from the page at the blog No Anodyne that clarified the issue for me: “Feminism, sex, and gender“

Pregnancy for women is a completely life-changing event. The decision about getting pregnant (or when the decision is taken away through rape or accident), carrying a child, giving birth to a child, and raising a child falls on a girl or woman far harder because of her direct biological connection to the impregnation, the pregnancy, and the child. Women know all of this, they tell their daughters and young girls about it, and all live their lives with the constant awareness of it. Many societies seem to have tried very hard to downplay the nature of this and again, we have to ask, to whose benefit is it if society pretends that women do not have this unique and significant vulnerability? Conversely, who benefits if that vulnerability is highlighted?

The threat of that state of being is forever in women’s lives and both women and men know that from the time they learn the biological facts of their bodies. A boy is told: you can make a girl or woman be pregnant and the converse isn’t true. It’s a power that we completely take for granted on the surface, but pass on as a deep human superstition and ritual. Even when a female herself is not impregnable, the superstitions and social reactions related to that reality remain attached to any and all females. Rape is based in a social ritual of power-over that wouldn’t exist but for women’s reproductive biology. The current rush by male legislators to deny women the right to abort pregnancies (and even to prevent them from having access to birth control) is directly connected to women’s unique capacity for giving birth.

Regardless of whether you have a gender identity of masculinity or femininity or an amalgamation of the two, if you can become pregnant, you are vulnerable physically and politically. Thomas Beatie (the “pregnant man”) knows that, even if he benefits from his masculinity in other ways. Renee Richards, the tennis player who fought for the right to compete in women’s matches, never had to worry about unplanned pregnancy, or getting an abortion, or having access to female contraception–even though she probably experiences the general sexism that pervades society (even though she got to go through medical school in the 1960s as a man). For many feminists who campaign mostly on behalf of procuring legal and social protections for the impregnatable people, the confusion about the difference between sex and gender and the fight by transgendered people who claim a feminine identity for full status as legal women (by having their birth certificates altered, for example) serves to undermine their efforts. It is these people (the transgendered people) who have been labeled the “transjacktivists.”

Radical Feminist Opposition to Transgendered Activists

I’m not certain if the “jack” comes from the word “hijack” or from “Jack” as a term for Generic Fellow. The term, which is pejorative, does not include all transgendered people. It refers specifically to the transgendered people who were born with male sex organs but live as feminine women, and who are fighting for the legal right to be included in places that people with female sex organs have legally established as “women only.”

The feminist arguments against allowing people born to one sex being bestowed the rights and protections established for people born to the other sex include the following:

1. If “womanhood” is legally recognized as a self-selected identity, the social and political protective mechanisms codify the completely artificial and not related to biology constructions of gender. Gender is established by a community to perpetuate power structures and biases, and giving it legal sanction makes it very hard to overcome the enforcement of gender roles in people’s lives.
2. If legal protections are accorded by gender instead of by sex, the actual people who can actually become pregnant have no recourse for the discrimination that is sourced in this actual biological vulnerability.
3. By granting legal protections to women who are women not because of their sex organs (ie, vulnerability to pregnancy) but because they perform femininity, it legally conflates femaleness with femininity. Women who are vulnerable to pregnancy but who do not want to perform feminine gender behaviors end up being outside automatic protection. They are put in the position of having to perform gender behaviors they do not identify with in order to get their full rights, even though those rights were supposedly established to protect them, too.
4. People born with male sex organs grow up with access to male privilege. They have been exempt for most of their formative years from the discrimination and sexism that affects people born with female sex organs (although they received plenty of discrimination and forms of harassment for other reasons). They do not have to overcome the obstacles that people born with female sex organs have faced their whole lives, and the struggle of feminists for equality of women doesn’t apply to them in the same way. There are plenty of rights transgendered people do need very much to fight for, and these are parallel issues, but they are not the same issues. Rather than seeing transgendered activists as allies, this group of feminists sees them as men co-opting their movement.

These are not objections held by every feminist.  There is no universal source of conflict between people born as women and people who choose femininity. Furthermore, objecting to transgendered activism from a feminist activism standpoint is not the same thing as denying transgendered people civil rights and protections from things like job and housing discrimination, being denied health care and fearing for personal safety. It is a matter that focuses on the legal definition of womanhood being derived from sex organs and/or from gender identity, and the opponents of “transjacktivism” believe that the definition should be derived from sex organs only. What I have been unable to determine is the prevalence of the conflict: if the legal practice of defining womanhood by gender is a series of localized anomalies or a dangerous precedent with noticeable negative effects, if the “transjacktivists” generally act alone or if they are representatives of the transgendered community at large, and where the issue falls on the spectrum of paranoia to danger. There are some things you cannot learn from the Internet, and like I said above, I have no scholar friends or journal subscriptions to advise me, and my ability to read up on it in the college library is very limited.

As far as this group of radical feminists go, I do see their point. If pregnancy were a physical vulnerability but not a legal one (contraception always legal and available, abortion easily accessed, rape culture dismantled), would it matter if womanhood were defined by gender or by sex? Would there need to be legal protections for the impregnatable class beyond the laws that protected all people from having their physical vulnerabilities exploited? Right now in California–not sure about the other states–pregnant women can claim disability compensation; would disability laws work instead of gender and sex laws? People move in and out of disability status all the time; if gender is a performance and legal womanhood is based on gender, what happens if a woman stops performing feminine gender behavior? If that woman once had male sex organs, would that person get to reclaim masculine status? Would masculine people who become pregnant get access to women-only spaces until they gave birth? Would they get to keep that access afterward? These are hard questions that I could keep asking all night. I’ve got a million of them, but no answers at all. I so have no answers, in fact, I wonder if I should have brought it up in the first place.

I dunno. I throw up my hands. There’s a lot to think about, and this is all I’ve come up with in the week that has passed since I stumbled on this intersection of feminism and transgendered activism. I know there is so much more to educate myself on this topic, but I don’t even know where to start.

I never did find any nice pictures to break up the wall of text that this blog post became, but I helpfully bolded key terms so you can skim the damn thing and more or less catch the gist of it. Meanwhile, enjoy this video clip that I promise is relevant.

The beauty of this is its simplicity. Once a plan gets too complex, everything can go wrong.

Here are the sources for the Thought:

• Maybe a couple years ago I used to run into a lot of negative online nonsense about Rachael Ray, ranging from the usual (she’s so ugly and stupid and I hate her) to the misogynistic (she just cooks regular food like women do, not art or adventure food like men who are real chefs and have real personality). It puzzled me, because her whole dinner in 30 minutes schtick seemed handy, and she never really used a lot of pans.
• The first food snobs I ever encountered were bakers, who eschewed mixes. Sure, their cakes were delicious, but not having a palate to match my appetite for baked goods, I was always more impressed with their time invested and their skill than the deliciousness of their products. These baking snobs were people I knew though, and had an admired hobby and their houses smelled good. I’ve run into some online snobs more recently with my sudden interest in learning how to frost cakes properly. I’d finally bought (and kept!) two six-inch layer cake pans because they were so cute and I totally wanted them (I’d bought and returned them before) and my search for how much cake mix to use to make a tiny layer cake put me in a den of obnoxious and mean people who were self-congratulatory about how easy they found it to bake cakes perfectly from scratch, and how people who claimed cake mixes were faster were totally stupid and/or smoking crack, and they could prove with their free-standing mixer that they had money to buy and enough counter space to store how much faster it was to make a real cake from organic ingredients. (Yeah, it touched a nerve.) (And the base model for those things starts at $500. Do you know how many cake mixes you have to buy before that thing pays for itself even if you account for “time saved”?)
• As a participant in the diet and the sit-down restaurant industries myself, I have a perception bias for news that combine the two. But doesn’t it seem like all the conversations about national obesity get around to fast food and restaurants eventually? And then sodium, portion size, free refills, that kind of thing?
• Participating in online communities has brought me into contact with more non-Americans than probably average, and I do hear a lot about how Americans work too much and drive too much. They eat terrible food and have no style. Yeah, it’s true. People do work a lot, and you mostly have to drive to get there. Fast food is easy to bring home. We have long days.
• Within the past month, maybe past two weeks, I read an article that I should have bookmarked and cannot find now to save my life, about how people cook less and less these days not because they are lazy but because they are intimidated. I’m 70% sure I read it at the Pharyngula blog, but even Google isn’t revealing it. Maybe it was in a dream. Too bad, because I would have linked to it.
• I had this fabulous dinner the other night with a really well-grilled steak, a basic tomato salad, and a boxed gnocchi side dish (Archer Farm’s Finest!). It took one pan and one bowl and one plate to transport the steak, and it was so easy to clean up.

Here are the threads of the Thought, all discombobulated because, you know, it’s not actual data and my paragraphs are getting too long. It’s also a collection of pressures that are probably unique to me, along the lines of Stuff White People Like with class issues to boot, but I’ve personally been bogged down in the kitchen with the prepping and the monitoring and the cleaning up after. Plus buying the ingredients for everything makes grocery lists complicated and shopping trips too long.

• Food multiculturalism–So many delicious cuisines! Of course, the ones we all want to make at home are the ones we learn about in restaurants, with all the sauces and the sou chefs and the small amounts each of lots of different ingredients. A restaurant can get this food to you in eight minutes; you (I mean me) have to chop for hours before you can cook it all together for three minutes.
• Food multiculturalism–Of course the foods we know best from other countries are the fancy occasion food people showcase, not the plain old boiled eggs and beef jerky. The one time I had the Chinese equivalent of yogurt for breakfast it came with a ginger sauce and it was the best thing ever, but it was ordered for me by a Chinese person and I don’t even know it’s name. I would eat that every day if I could, and could probably make batches of it, but I don’t even know where to start. I don’t even remember the name of the restaurant we were at.
• Psychological Fulfillment–Perhaps it’s just the flip side of the conversation about why people eat so much, as a way to defend food for its emotional and social benefits when people who eat too much are being criticized as slovenly and gross (fat shaming is the word you are looking for). There are lots and lots of reassurances about how food is valuable, and meals with friends reinforce bonds, and how people who lose their sense of smell and/or taste can become depressed.
• DIY Gone Wild–Everybody is supposed to want to know how to do everything now, all by themselves. I don’t know when this all started, exactly, but what began in home improvement has spilled over to every possible activity that used to be considered a non-event. Remember how people used to just put photos in albums? Now they have to self-edit digital videos or make scrapbooks. And you have to worry about reusing trash and not throwing small things into the trash if there might be some way to incorporate it in a future craft. How does this relate to food? Have you ever seen a phrase along the lines of “Grilled Cheese for Grownups?” Grilled cheese for grownups requires artisan bread and two cheeses, and three extra ingredients (at least two of which spoil in a few days) and a panini machine. Grownups who throw Home Pride and pre-sliced cheese onto a frying pan are disrespecting their souls, even if they butter the outsides of the bread before burning it.
• Glorified Television (Male) Chefdom–So the Ace of Cakes goes dimensional apparently overnight, and you are bitching about making extra frosting for a crumb coat and planning far enough ahead and clearing out food to make space to let it chill in the refrigerator for half an hour before putting the real coat of frosting on? On your single layer 9 x 13″ cake shaped like a rectangle? And some guy can take a boat and a prop plane and make a gourmet meal from local ingredients in Viet Nam, but you can’t be bothered to peel your tomato before making ratatouille? Even though you have access to ice? Truly, Americans are lazy.
• Foodies Chiming In–Maybe I can’t do math, but it does not seem to take just as much time to open a packet, add water, and boil food as it does to find recipes, collect the ingredients, mix stuff, and adjust to taste. It’s very rarely cheaper. Children aren’t as helpful at they claim. Everything foodies say about how much better the food is I probably agree with, but there’s no way the taste differential is anywhere near the effort differential.

As the immortal Walter Sobchak once said, Fuck it, Dude. Let’s go bowling. But by go bowling I mean go out to eat, where I can feed my stomach and my soul with rich flavors that aren’t bad for me, where I can meet my friends halfway as they come home from work and we can spend time talking face to face instead of me in the kitchen hollering above the noise of the saute. We can walk away from the mess and promise ourselves that we’ll only eat half and have the leftovers for lunch the next day. The days are too tiring to do all those dishes after the kids go to bed, and sitting down to relax that evening only means that you’ll have to spend time cleaning the kitchen the next day before you can mess it up again. And, yes, you eat more and pay more at restaurants than you would eating simple food at home. But if “simple food” is categorized as “not for adults,” and people shit on chefs like Rachael Ray but watch avidly as adventure chefs one-up each other, well, frankly, you have to pick your poison. Do you want Americans eating foodie food because it is worldly and shows a global consciousness, which is most easily accomplished in restaurants that will probably make them fat, or do you want them to infantalize themselves with boring food that demonstrates how uncultured they are? If you reject this false dichotomy and make the claim that food doesn’t have to be boring to be tasty and healthy, well, put more one-pan, five-ingredient recipes on TV. And stop shaming the people who just don’t want to put up with the crap of gourmet cooking and go out to eat with all that crap about oh, oh fat people and socialized medicine and obese children should be removed from parents and American women are so lazy and entitled that they don’t want to come home and cook. Just let them make reservations for dinner if they want to. Who cares?

I like to frame restaurant patronage now as a quiet rebellion of people with disposal income against people with disposable time. So there! It’s probably really just a capitalist scheme that exploits labor, but I have to wrap up this glurge somewhere. And they always refill your Diet Coke before you ask.

Mostly I’m stuck with what to serve for dinner tonight, and chose to write about it instead of act.

A few weeks ago, as friends do, we were talking about this and that and somehow a conversation got onto the topic of medieval England (probably via Game of Thrones, which she hasn’t watched), which led to The House on the Strand, a book we shared as roommates and read at least more than once each. Determined to be wowed all over again, and relive the glory days when we were hip girls about town living on the beach next to some really noisy people who were pathologically uncomfortable being alone (I’m looking at you, Kristen and Jeff from Felspar Street! You’re the one who really liked Dave Matthews and I’m the one with that ceramic candle holder that had two faces on it that were always staring at you…), I borrowed it from the library. When I went to retrieve it, another Du Maurier book I’d missed along the way–Mary Anne–was sitting right next to it on the shelf.

Yay!

Which was soon replaced by Huh.

And then followed by Really?

And then wrapped up with Ugh.

For a book that I remember being this fantastic historical novel meets time travel tale I was really disappointed. First of all, I was so not very interested at all in the intrigues of the 14th century. I really did not care for the protagonist, Dick Young, and I know the wife was probably written to be obnoxious and a character to despise (as an impediment to Dick and Magnus’s Grand Adventure) but Dick was really intolerable to her face and then even worse in his mind where only the reader could see it. Because I liked him so little, I particularly disliked him spying on the people in the earlier time and all his wink-wink-nudge-nudging with his buddy about medieval Joanna. Magnus seemed like a colossally stupid and irresponsible researcher, but maybe I’m judging the 1960s too harshly from my non-scientific, 2010s perspective. The 14th century story did improve as the book went along, but I was thoroughly disgusted with Dick and the end of the book couldn’t come soon enough. I haven’t made up my mind yet if I recommend against reading the book. It really does draw you in, and the ideas within it are intriguing.

So that dispatched with, I turned to Mary Anne, a book that had only a red library binding and about which I knew absolutely nothing.

It’s exciting to read a book about which I know absolutely nothing. Most books have cover art and jacket descriptions, or a friend recommends them or you have to read summaries in order to choose the best book for book club, or you read a book review or you find out it’s being turned into a television series, et cetera. Stories reveal themselves in advance of you reading them, and that’s not something I really worry about (I reread tons of stuff as it is), but the novelty of an unknown book is, well, exciting. And remember that I had library binding… there was no teaser text on the front of my copy like there is in this picture of the book.

Within the first five or six pages there’s an abbreviated family tree that starts with Mary Anne Clarke and ends in Daphne Du Maurier. That’s pretty awesome; turns out Mary Anne Clarke is an ancestress of hers with a bona fide portrait in the National Portrait Gallery in the UK, and who was once the mistress of a Duke.

Mary Anne Clarke, nee Thompson by Adam Buck, 1803

Then the first chapter was the reminisces of three different men about the intriguing woman who had affected them all, and that was a little cliche, but they were very different men and I thought it would be cool to learn how this woman–described in such a lovely way by the author as mostly smile and expression, and I’d copy it out for you but it’s already back at the library–have moved between them, and it was, for a while. After that end-of-life remembering by those three old guys, it jumped to start-of-life living with Mary Anne and her family in the crowded alleys of London. It was pretty standard fare gutter-to-glamour by the virtue of wit and charm, and I really, really liked it for a long time, despite that unexpectedly racist and strange page (pg. 115) that may have reflected a realistic 18th century view of black people but that sounded very 2oth century. It was jarring. I mean, she called people “chocolate.” But aside from that…

The novel stays readable but the characters become less believable in the sense that they seem to become more two-dimensional as the plot takes over the story, and the characterization they did get at the beginning of the novel is not sufficient to hold you over through the end of it (at times she reminds me of a dumb version of Scarlett O’Hara). There is a scandal and a court case at the center of the book, and you can see once you arrive at it how everything else was just sort of killing time until you got there, which makes you understand why some not particularly understandable relationships were given so much story time. And then the court case is a snoozer. Fifty pages of barristers asking Mary Anne Clarke questions and her answering them. Honestly, I do not know why this much detail was provided in the book. I do not know. It could be that maybe these words are Actual Historical Dialogue and Du Maurier wanted to be as realistic as possible, but it killed the pace of the story. And then the last chapter was so beautiful and interesting it felt like it had wandered in from another novel. It was almost a short story unto itself.

As far as recommending this book to others, it could go either way. I’ve read better historical romance–even from the 1950s, before the excess of the romance novel of the 1950s–and I don’t have any particular interest in the late 18th century scandals of the British upper class or the comings and goings of the Duke of York. If I did, however, and I wanted to learn more about the people of that time and place, this would probably be a good story to learn about them from. Plus you find out that during her lifetime, Mary Anne Clarke published her own memoirs and was the subject of political satire while she was alive, and suddenly it’s this gem of art meets history for the right student. And that last chapter really is worth reading. It’s just too bad Du Maurier subverted her story to suit the facts. I don’t get the impression that Mary Anne Clarke would have minded terribly to have been embellished and/or edited for drama.

1. I read Clash of Kings, the second installment of the Game of Thrones series by George R. R. Martin. I liked it while I was reading it, and I honest to goodness cannot tell you why or what I liked about it and I’d forgotten all about having read it. I had been really excited about more Danaerys because she was such a favorite character in the first book (and the first season of the HBO series), and I was very, very disappointed in her appearances. Also, there were like forty extra pages of appendix and excerpt material at the end of the book, and I was really sad when the book ended about forty pages earlier than I thought. I’d sort of hunkered down in a cozy place to finish out the book, and although it wasn’t a terrible ending, I was not prepared for my cozy reading evening to be interrupted like that.

2. I totally got tools out of the garage and busted into a bedroom that had locked and shut itself and drilled right right through the doorknob to get the damn thing opened. Nobody really knows when the door was locked on account of it having been latched into an open position, and unlatching the door to vacuum behind it set it free. While we were out, a cross breeze did us in. It wasn’t even one of those locks you could pop open from the outside with a tiny screwdriver or anything; this had tumblers and pins for some unfathomable reason). I mean, I can fathom why a door lock had tumblers and pins; I cannot fathom why a lock of this caliber had been installed on this door in the first place. It’s the other bedroom that has the wet bar in it. I cannot fathom why we didn’t replace this door knob when we replaced the door knob on the bathroom after the baby locked himself in it. (He played happily with the toilet paper the whole time I was removing the door knob.) I suppose we’d gotten used to the door being latched open (I was so sick of that door slamming shut in a room that had no need for privacy) that we’d just forgotten about it.

I had intended just to pick the lock with a bobby pin and a tiny screwdriver, and dutifully followed the instructions of the guy on YouTube who was only filmed from the neck down, but I couldn’t make it work. Calling a locksmith seemed like using a hammer to remove a fly from my friend’s forehead, as the cool kids like to say. (The cool kids do still say that, right?) Plus we didn’t really have time to wait around for the locksmith because we had big plans to swim and the bathing suits were behind that locked door. Drilling was my only option.

I learned how hot drill bits could get in the process, and I broke off a drill bit (the 3/16th) in the lock, but a needlenose pliers reached in and enabled me to unscrew it from the lock and proceed with a sturdier bit. It made some fierce noises, and it took longer than I thought, but I did remember to lay out a towel to catch the metal filings that flung themselves out of the way of the drill and I did wear safety goggles. I don’t think I’m going to bother to replace the door knob for a while (see above about latched in an open position) and good fun was had by all.

3. I totally snatched a fruit fly out of the air with my bare hand, but when I opened my hand to see if I caught it the fly flew away. But then I got it by clapping my hands around it and squished it on my palm. Little fly, thy summer’s play and all that. The rest of the fruit flies buzzing around the computer screen have not taken that message seriously. They came in on the pineapple, which has since been consumed and they don’t know what to do with themselves.

4. I finally had the kitchen in a state of preparedness to spread out and then assemble a 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzle, and then I didn’t do it. I’m sort of annoyed that I let the chance slide by, but you know. It would have made breakfast more difficult. And I don’t think I can assemble it in time for dinner tomorrow, even though I have a card table to catch the overflow. I might still risk it.

5. We finally upgraded Little Miss to a twin bed from the toddler/crib mattress she’s been sleeping on that she really, really didn’t fit in. It’s a Fjellse, which is Swedish for “The Best IKEA Has to Offer.” We went with a local mattress and Grandma is making a quilt for it*, and we spent the day out and about. The kids got left at aforementioned Grandma’s house while we went and picked up the mattress and brought it home, and there were only a few moments of weepy disappointment when they realized that Daddy stayed at home to assemble the bed while I went to bring them home. Little Miss was transported asleep from the car to my bed while Fella came to terms with the fact that he could only help with laying the slats on the bed frame, placing the mattress, finding a stud in the wall, attaching the dresser to the wall, drilling holes for the lamps and then mounting the lamps and putting the new sheets on the bed. Little Miss was transported still asleep from my bed into her new one, and I expect she’ll wake up either terrified at the wildly disorienting changes or gleeful that she’s a Big Girl now. Either way, I’m sure we’ll hear all about it, probably right at the best part of my dream. They are good, my dreams.** It’s a shame to interrupt one.

*Not shown

**Not like that, you perv.

I guess when you take the time to sit and list things like that, it does seem like I’ve done something with my time. That’s always nice, isn’t it?

Why I Chose This Book

Book club book! But this time it’s one that we didn’t read for book club (we read Water for Elephants instead, which I reviewed already). It was my first choice, however, and so I put my name on the reserve list at the library for it. It was a long list, so it was just as well that I didn’t have a deadline, because it’s not a book I retrospectively would have been especially happy to own. If I have to own books, I want them big and fat and epic and take me at least a week to reread. This one does not fit those requirements.

Why I Chose Right Now to Review This Book

Book club is tonight, which means that we’re going to discuss some other title and then move our brains onto the next one, and I can already feel my thoughts about this one slipping away. It gets worse when they go back to the library before I write about them, too. Plus the kids are playing Legos and watching Dora and because book club is tonight thinking about dinner is not my problem, and I can take a shower later. Today, I write!

Nutshell Review of the Book

I liked it fine. How’s that? The three main characters (Sarah, Little Bee, Lawrence) were sympathetic enough, and the two secondary characters (Andrew and Charlie) did their job of being people triggering events that gave the main characters something to do. The locations were vivid in a way I don’t usually notice in books, and I won’t tell you what amazing secret the blurb on the cover begs readers not to spoil for others, but it was a dumb thing to say. It’s not a dumb secret, but it’s hardly some big reveal that upends your understanding of the whole book to that point. Kaiser Sose it ain’t. Actually, I’m not even sure what event in the book it’s supposed to refer to. Regardless, it’s a pretty good guarantee that readers will finish the book.

Detailed Review of the Book

The book is a very compelling story of a political refuge/illegal immigrant (Little Bee), unexpectedly released into the United Kingdom from a detention center with no guidance or paperwork. When the book bounces between what is happening to her in the present day and what has happened to her to make her flee Nigeria, it is at its best. The time she spends with other released refugees, or trying to find a place to stay, is the best part of the book. The government employee who is clandestinely romantically involved with Sarah (Lawrence) does everything he’s supposed to do with absolutely no charisma as a character or a person: He objects in a perfectly reasonable way to Sarah harboring Little Bee and repeats all the right state arguments about why it’s dangerous to let illegal immigrants into your home and makes good points in Sarah’s case, and serves not so much as the mouthpiece of the author’s beliefs but as the prevailing attitude of the culture, I guess, that Cleave’s book stands as an argument against. That he is also a scumbag cheating on his wife while there are small children at home is necessary, I guess, to give Little Bee some leverage in their disputes about who as a right to be where. Sarah is just a tragic figure who has done a brave thing and needs rescuing by a black girl (Little Bee) much wiser than her chronological age, with an overly precious child (Charlie) who needs a friend (also Little Bee)–a tired trope that I’ve linked to before and will link to again:

Magical Negro

Even though Sarah has also been cheating on her husband (Andrew) with a small child at home, she is not a scumbag because 1) Andrew was difficult to live with and 2) Andrew wasn’t worthy enough. She also has an awesome job that… I am stopping describing Sarah because the more I do the less I like her, particularly now that the Magicalness of Little Bee has stuck itself in my head. She didn’t really bug me in the book while I was reading, because the problems she encountered seemed realistic and she was helping Little Bee. Now when I think about her in the context of the structure… eh. Although she got the best line in the whole novel, I think: Someone asks Sarah why “the child” (Charlie, who is four) is wearing a Batman costume. Sarah answers that “the child thinks he has superpowers.” I laughed out loud. (The other line of the story that has stuck with me was when the Nigerian soldier tells Sarah that he studied mechanical engineering in the UK.)

The author explains in the Q&A at the back of the book (which is also on the website I linked to with the author’s name) that he was moved by the plight of immigrants in his country, particularly the ones processed through the detention center and asylum system. Little Bee is the character who endures that process, and it’s her story that rises above the other two. I don’t really think she needed to be framed as a guardian angel/consciousness raiser for an oblivious white woman who lives in uncomfortable stasis between the time the two women met in Nigeria and then met again in the UK. There was a lot more to learn about Little Bee and the other immigrants she encountered (I’m thinking about you, Yvette, and Girl with the Yellow Sari), and the drama with the middle class white people didn’t really bring much new to the table. And how it ended, with Sarah “seeing the light” and resolving to be the person that brings Little Bee’s message to the world (rather than Little Bee herself)… eh. Again, see Magical Negro linked to above.

I’m not telling you to skip the book. I’m telling to you skip to Little Bee’s parts of the story, and read that one part where Sarah talks about her vacation with Andrew.

What’s On Deck

A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry (TABLED–there are library books with due dates to get to)

Woman on the Edge of Time by (Marge?) Piercy–FINISHED AND AWAITS REVIEW

House on the Strand by Daphne DuMaurier–IN PROGRESS

Mary Anne by Daphne DuMaurier

Something by Anna Shreve about a man obsessed with his wife.

I’ve started a blog to list strategies skeptics can employ to increase the number of women within the ranks. Each day I will post one recommendation that will hopefully provide insight into a woman’s experience within the skeptical movement and a suggestion for a behavior (either to engage in or refrain from) that skeptics can perform if they want more women working for their cause. I have found that it’s always easier to have a productive discussion if it is limited in scope, which my blog is. If all goes according to plan, it will be a space in which people can discuss a woman’s experience without hyperbole and derailment, and maybe open a few minds. I welcome comment and suggestions, especially from people who have experience recruiting members to organizations.

I used to listen to the Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast, which is a weekly program presented by a panel of skeptics about topics within scientific skepticism. A recent upswelling of in-group sexism (ElevatorGate with Rebecca Watson and Richard Dawkins that you can look up) was addressed on the most recent episode (#312). (Archives here). By addressed I mean Rebecca shared what had happened to her and what Richard Dawkins had said that generated so much controversy, and then the panel discussed “sexism within skepticism” by saying that yes, there were not enough women in skepticism but that they didn’t want to discuss sexism too often because it might become boring, and that once a year was enough to bring it up.

Controversy about sexism in skepticism erupted on the podcast discussion board when it erupted everywhere else, but since the topic was mentioned on the podcast all threads about sexism in skepticism have been restricted to members only. (There are a few exceptions if you want to take the time to scroll through the General Discussion topic list page by page, but you can only perform a site search if you are a member.) These threads have been pulled–for technical reasons because the sudden onslaught of traffic was disrupting the usability of the site–out of the general discussion threads and hidden in a sub-forum that no person browsing the website looking for information about how the Skeptics Guide community is addressing the problem would even be able to see. This has the unintended effect of sweeping the community’s dirt under the rug, and suggesting to the public that sexism is not a problem. It also communicates to the public that people looking for ways to decrease the amount of sexism within the community are not invited to participate in the discussion. This is a profound disappointment, but it is the stance that the panel* and the website moderators have decided to take, and there’s not much I can do about it. So instead of making myself miserable over it, I decided to tackle the problem myself.  Hence the aforementioned blog.

*Panelist Rebecca Watson runs her own blog, Skepchick, where she and other bloggers address many topics within skepticism including sexism, particularly of late.

I think it’s pretty disingenuous, actually, to suggest that the topic of sexism in skepticism is boring to members of the skeptical community. Sexism is one topic guaranteed to bring out of the woodwork people who have dropped out of the skeptical conversation because they get it already that vaccines are good, creationism in the schools harms science programs, and Bigfoot doesn’t exist. I was only a participant of the SGU boards (not a moderator), but even I could see that board traffic had decreased since I’d started posting there. It was addressed explicitly once a few years ago by one of the moderators, and I noticed that recently another hidden thread**–the Games thread–had been opened up for public viewing for exposing more people passing by to the Mafia games (which are fun). I was surprised to see it go public, and I’ve been wondering ever since if it was a strategy to increase board membership because conversations were dropping off. It’s clear to me that skepticism in general–and this board is no exception–that people in the skeptical community are tired of talking about skepticism as a process, and have learned the critical thinking skills required to analyze claims about the world from within a skeptical framework. We get it already. People are ready to talk about the social dynamics within the group that is keeping it from being accepted as a serious movement. That’s why the topic triggers so much excitement. Shutting down and hiding the conversation about sexism is why it becomes so hysterical when it does break through. There are a year’s worth of frustration and confusion pent up to express. Plus it’s always the same stupid misunderstandings about and strawman arguments against feminism waste so much time–no one has the chance to learn anything at a leisurely pace, and because it’s all locked up behind closed doors it is very difficult for new voices to lend their insights to the discussion. But if there were a forum in which tiny topics could be discussed one at a time, well… visit my blog and see if you can contribute and/or learn something. I would appreciate the effort.

There really are so few women involved (for that matter, there is almost no diversity at all) that it negatively impacts the skeptical movement as an agent of change. It’s not outrageous to assume that the middle class white men who participate in skepticism now are basically all the middle class white men actually interested in participating. If skepticism wants to grow, it needs new members from new groups. Alienating women and arguing about your right to alienate women within your ranks is counterproductive. Half the people in the world yadda yadda (this is where a research paper would segue to classism and racism, too, but I’m already approaching TL;DR)… Do you really want to change the world or are you just in love with the sound of your own voice and always being right?

**There is also a Politics thread hidden because it was deemed that political discussions turned people into hotheads, which is true, and an Explicit thread where people can post pictures of what they like naked women to look like and what kind of sex they like to have and use lots and lots of curse words. It’s maintained so people can have a little fun without having to leave the discussion board; in essence, they pipe naked women in so they can have skepticism and porn in the same place, and they hide it from view so the public thinks it’s just an intellectual space for discussion. This is an unpopular interpretation of the purpose of the Explicit thread, but hey–it’s my blog. I will say that it seems tamer than it used to be, but then again all the threads are.

So here I am with a self-imposed deadline of one hour and I desire to knock out some post on Feminist Friday instead of on Sunday, and because I’ve been caught up in “ElevatorGate” (Team Rebecca!), it seems like a good topic. But I don’t want to get into this whole big thing where I explain the situation again, or where I list my reasons for joining Team Rebecca (as far as I know, there’s not a real Team Rebecca–I’m just saying that), but I have spotted a point of confusion amongst the chatter and diatribes, and I want to clarify it. The skeptic and atheist communities are involved in a conversation that includes a description of said communities as sexist. It is distressing to many people within the communities that sexism is a possibility, including people on the receiving end of sexism and people who don’t want to think that their preferred behaviors are sexist even if they don’t intend them to be. The dialogue has included a lot of goofy assertions, too, and one whine in particular is repeated often:

So now feminists are telling men that it’s sexist to ask women out on dates. (Wah is unstated but implied.)

No, feminists are not telling men that it’s sexist to ask women on dates. It’s not sexist to ask women on dates. Find out why below!

If you don’t know what “ElevatorGate” is, it doesn’t matter. This post will still make sense. If you’re curious and must know now what all the hullabaloo is, set aside a couple of hours and search Rebecca Watson, Richard Dawkins, ElevatorGate, Boycott. Much of the drama is embedded in comment sections on blogs. On with the show.

Not Sexist
A person approaches a stranger and asks for sex without ever having said anything to their target before is being a creep. A person who follows said stranger out of a public place to a private place (in this case, from a hotel bar to an elevator) and waits until they are alone to ask for sex without ever having said anything to their target before is being a scary aggressive creep. But not sexist.

Not Sexist
The person so followed says aloud (or blogs, or makes a video) that the stranger is a creep for asking sex without before they’ve exchanged any other words. The person may even suggest not doing it if you don’t want to be thought of as a creep.

Sexist
People hear that a woman is criticizing the behavior of a man and freak out. They accuse her of being overemotional and blame her for bringing it on herself, or suggest that her concerns are not real concerns and she’d spend her time better discussing global issues if she was really trying to help women.

Sexist
People defend a man’s right to ask strange women for sex without being labeled as creeps (at best) and potential rapists (at worst), and explain why a woman should not call a guy a creep for doing something justifiable: She’s just so pretty! Men like sex! Some guys are just socially awkward and need a break! It’s not like she was actually raped! He backed off when she said no! If men never asked women for sex, the species would die out! They say women need to understand what’s going on in men’s heads before they are so quick to judge them, even as they ignore what was going on in women’s heads when women try to explain it. As a final jab, people might concede that the woman did the right thing by pointing out the creepy behavior, but remark that she should have been nicer about it.

Sexist and Misogynist
The culture (the skeptic and atheist culture, say, but Western culture at large, too) defends a man’s right to ask women for sex whenever they want to. It does this by assuming women who use a personal anecdote to describe creepy behavior are exaggerating or lying for attention, by arguing that if the woman doesn’t give the creepy man a platform to explain himself she is being biased, by equating “a guy did this” to “she publicly humiliated a man for no reason” (even though she never even said his name). Sympathies align with the poor guy who was just tryin’ to get a little sumpinsumpin off some chick he fancied instead of aligning with the woman who announced she was tired and wanted to go to bed and was harassed alone in an elevator by a stalker.

Sexist and Misogynist
The culture values a man’s right to ask strange women for sex at any time and in any place without censure more than it values women’s feelings about being so approached. If a women who has, say, been invited to be a featured speaker at an atheist conference objects to the idea that she is a walking vagina first and a valued contributor to the shared goals of the community that invited her to teach them something second, the woman is the one being antisocial. Society is supposed to work like that. Men expect women to be sexually available to them. She ought to be grateful she’s living in a country that didn’t cut up her genitals and that lets her drive a car.

An Analogy
Let’s say you’d been talking to a bunch of people in a crowded hotel bar and finally said that you were tired, it was late, and you were going back to your room to sleep. Let’s say that someone who had never talked to you before followed you out of the bar, waited until you were alone in an elevator together, and asked for your scarf. You said no. Let’s say that later you mentioned that people who don’t want to be thought of as creepy shouldn’t follow strangers into elevators and ask for their accessories. Would you get angry? Would you agree? Would you explain that maybe the guy was just a really, really bad dresser and really, really liked your scarf, and it’s not like he took it from you. You weren’t actually robbed. What’s the problem? And maybe if you understood how sensitive that guy was about his inability to put an ensemble together, and how hard it is to find good clothes, you wouldn’t be acting like such a petty bitch about it. After all, there are people in the world who have no new clothes; you should be grateful you even get to have a scarf. Besides, it’s a compliment, really–you should be flattered he found your scarf so pretty. Can’t you take a compliment? Because if people couldn’t come to atheist conferences to learn how to dress better, why would they come at all?

The Moral of the Story
If you want more women to participate in your community, don’t side against them with the stalkers and then tell women to put up with it or get out. It will not give you the results you are looking for.

(And it turns out that even though the Transatlantic Blonde is on vacation, she did put a Feminist Friday post together! You can read more posts about other topics in feminism by clicking the picture below.)

Why I Chose This Book

Book club book! It’s the one I voted for, actually, because I already had a copy of Dead Until Dark lying around the house that I know I’ll get to one day, and I didn’t really want to read The Distant Land of My Father because, well, I thought it was a memoir and was not in a memoir mood. I’ve since become more intrigued by it, but what can you do now?

Why I Chose Right Now to Review This Book

I started this review about a week ago, when I’d finished the book, but got distracted. Now I find out my book club friend hasn’t even gotten a hold of the book yet, and I’m loaning it to her tomorrow, and I figured I’d better write out my notes while I still had it around for reference, in case I needed to look up names and things. So much easier to open a book than dig info out of the Internet.

Nutshell Review of the Book

The story was pretty good to OK, but shines as an artifact. It was written in the 1930s as a historical novel set in the 19teens (right before WWI), in a specific geographic location: the intersection of Asia and Europe, in a town unsure of which continent was its primary influence. I was impressed with the diversity of locations and lifestyles presented in the book, and the style of the novel was easy to follow. The main character, Ali (a Muslim boy), was quite well fleshed-out, although everyone else was less so. It is called a “great romance” by the book cover blurbs, but, eh. Ali certainly has great love for Nino (a Christian girl), but we only get glimpses of her from his point of view. There is enough to suggest that she is a fully fledged person, but the reader doesn’t really experience her as a fully fledged character. She speaks up for herself often enough, but always to Ali, so what you get of her comes through his filter. You kind of have to trust him for why he’s so in love with her (besides the fact that he’s a young, rich son in love with his pretty, rich high school sweetheart whose parents consider them old enough to marry, which is the perfect set up for instant romance). And he does a lot of courageous things to be with her, so he’s really, really sincere, and he does think a lot about how she’ll react to plans he makes for them, which lets you know she speaks up for herself, but she’s not really in the book with us.

Long story short, your enjoyment of the novel will likely depend on your interest in this guy’s point of view, and your interest in the historical portrayal of a Eurasia populated by Muslims and Christians on the verge of war. Personally, I think the historical part is what the book has going for it. I did get pretty tired of Ali by the end.

Detailed Review of the Book (And Here There Be Spoilers)

The most shocking thing about this book was its portrayal of Islam the Religion. Islam the Culture was presented as diverse and specific to the groups of people who populated the novel, from remote mountain towns to wealthy urban harems to wealthy urban not-harems. There is no one “right” way of living an Islamic life, and the characters frequently discuss the benefits of the different environments they inhabit. But Islam the Religion does not come off well. There is a character who discusses with Ali at great length how women don’t have souls, so it doesn’t matter who he marries so long as his sons are raised in Islam. There is a serious discussion of an honor killing, among educated urbanites, regarding the fate of a woman who was sent to the opera with her fiance’s companion by her fiance, who was later that evening accused of running off with the companion (while the companion was accused of kidnapping her). The woman herself acknowledges that she deserves to die. I realize that these (fictional) events take place more than a century ago, when thoughts about women and men were different than they are in Westernized nations today, but honor killings are pretty extreme. Claiming women have no souls is pretty extreme. It’s one thing to take Nino in context when she says all she wants to do is keep house for her husband and have his babies, but to see honor killings presented as reasonable solutions among reasonable people who are basically living in a Europeans city is disturbing. Christian (and other religions, but Nino is Christian) religious rhetoric about how women are men’s “helpmeets” and obeying the head of the household and all that never dismisses the idea that women have souls. Reading about beliefs like this held by the characters of the book–for all that Ali questions them he doesn’t actually reject them–definitely undermines my interest in the main character. That said…

What I know about novels is that the author’s perspective is not reliably a realistic perspective. JUST BECAUSE Kurban Said paints Islam as claiming that women have no souls does not make it a tenet of Islam. Just because Ali and his buddies entertain the thought of an honor killing doesn’t mean that they are acting in accordance with the beliefs of their families and communities. I’m not sure if the author* is ill-informed, has an agenda, or what. I am not particularly informed about what Islam means today, much less 100 years ago, and I am not–sadly, I guess–that interested in doing a lot of research to find out the social customs of honor killing among urban upper-middle class Eurasians during the Edwardian age, but at least I know I am not accepting it as fact. Nonetheless, it colors my perspective on Ali, as a person and as a partner for Nino, and impaired my ability to root for a happy ending for them.

*Kurban Said is a pseudonym. There is a debate about who actually wrote the book, which is answered relatively definitively at the end of my edition (Nussimbaum) but which seems to be much more open on the Wikipedia page. You know Wikipedia and can make your own decisions about its reliability here. The book’s version seems “truthier,” but I’m not going to do any extra research on this, either.

I also found interesting how the novel skipped around the edges of the Armenian genocide. There’s an Armenian character in the book who is very concerned about how his friends might protect him from Turks, and there is reference to people who have died, but there’s nothing in there that outright says “massacre” or “genocide” to people who don’t know about it already. I wonder why that is. Is it because the author didn’t want to sidetrack the narrative? Is it because the author didn’t care? (But then why include an Armenian?) Is it because not much was known about the genocide in the 1930s, when the book was written? Is it because so much was known about the genocide in the 1930s that the author didn’t need to make more than allusions to it for the audience to see the import? Again, it’s interesting and my knowledge is incomplete, and it’s a free term paper topic to anyone who needs one. It just struck me as odd–a 21st century reader–to have an Armenian in a book who is afraid of being killed for being an Armenian, and not expand on it.

Finally… and this is a side note… I thought the novel presented very succinctly how the oppressions of religion are so tied up with economic and political power. To see how within a single religion men and women interacted with each other in a tiny mountain town in relative poverty contrasted to how women are corralled and controlled in the harems of the wealthy, sophisticated, technological Tehran is amazing. (Hint: A good case could be made that the impoverished women have better lives, even if they see doctors less often.) But it’s this kind of geo/political/social complexity within the books that kept me turning the pages, and it’s why I do recommend the book to others.

What’s On Deck

Little Bee by Chris Cleave (There’s a waitlist and I won’t be able to renew, so I’ll hop to it tomorrow.)

A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry (TABLED–there are library books with due dates to get to)

Woman on the Edge of Time by (Marge?) Piercy–FINISHED AND AWAITS REVIEW

House on the Strand by Daphne DuMaurier

Mary Anne by Daphne DuMaurier

Something by Anna Shreve about a man obsessed with his wife.

Can't Help Being Creepy

At the end of this post is the wordy explanation for what convoluted path through the Internet inspired me to write today. Long story short, I am interested today in the simultaneous denial and justification of creepy behavior of men towards women, which is a topic I feel lends itself towards a numbered list.

We’ll start with a handy definition from a respectable dictionary:

Merriam-Webster
creep (noun)
5. an unpleasant or obnoxious person

And here’s a follow-up from a less respectable dictionary:

Urban Dictionary
creep (noun)
3. a dude that trys way to hard with chicks, usually younger chicks. Also usually waits till the chicks are fucked up to take advantage of them

The Numbered List
1. If the very first thing you say to a stranger is something in the category of “I would like to isolate you,” you are being creepy (no matter where you are or what time it is). Examples from the category I Would Like to Isolate You include “Come to my hotel room for coffee” and “You wanna go out sometime?”

2. If the very first thing you say to a stranger is that you would like to isolate him or her and you say it when the two of you are alone, you are being creepy and aggressive.

3. If you both are alone and the person has no immediate avenue of escape, you are being creepy and aggressive and scary.

4. If your modus operandi has been to be creepy and yet you still have gotten results, you have been lucky enough to encounter people whose tolerance for creepy is very high, for any number of possible reasons that honestly you can’t know unless you asked. It doesn’t mean retroactively that you weren’t being creepy because the person didn’t call you out for it at the time.

5. If you perceive that the risk of being labeled “creepy” is outweighed by the benefits of possibly meeting someone via creepy tactics, at least gracefully accept the label of “creepy” when it is used to describe something you have done. If you don’t care about the opinions of the people who call you creepy, then don’t worry about it and don’t complain when they use the term. If you do care about the opinions of the people who call you “creepy” and if “creepy” is not a description that matches up with your self-image, reevaluate what you are doing. Ask the people whose opinions you care about for advice. Change your behavior.

In Conclusion
That’s it! That’s all I have to say about that. Thank you for reading.

(The Explanation of My Inspiration for This Post)
It all started a few weeks ago at the Skepchick blog, with this post: “About Mythbusters, Robot Eyes, Feminism, and Jokes.” Skepchick Rebecca Watson described an experience she had as a speaker at a conference in which she was cornered alone in a hotel elevator by a guy she’d never talked to before, who invited her up to his room. Stef McGraw of the UNI Freethinkers and Inquirers blog, addressed the Watson video here: “Fursdays wif Stef #32.” Rebecca Watson then mentioned McGraw by name and critiqued her blog post during a presentation at the CFI Student Leadership conference; Watson wrote about it here: “On Naming Names at the CFI Student Leadership Conference.” Discussion of this name naming has appeared in a lot of other places, too, and it was the Pharyngula (PZ Myers) blog post “Always Name Names!” that led to the blog post “The Decent Human Beings’ Guide to Getting Laid at Atheist Conferences” that led to me signing up and commenting there, and then posting about it here.

Although the conversation about whether or not it is appropriate to use keynote addresses to continue an Internet discussion is the primary topic among the bloggers writing about it, the conversation among the commenters of the various blog posts consistently devolves to whether it was appropriate for some stranger to hit on some other stranger in an elevator at 4:00 AM in the morning, and whether Watson is overreacting by sharing that anecdote in the first place. And there’s an awful lot of defense of anonymous Elevator Guy for being creepy, and a lot of denial that hitting on strangers in enclosed spaces is creepy, and a lot of accusations that feminists object to men being men and that if people can’t get dates the species will die out. There are the usual declarations of Bitches Be Hysterical and American Women Are Uptight and Shy Guys Have No Other Choice, and the requisite derailing and exceptions to the ruling and all kinds of other complications, and it is being argued as a case far more complicated than it is.

Part of what is complicating the discussion is that Feminist 102 topics of misogyny and rape culture are being misunderstood by people who do not comprehend Feminism 101 topics, and so even though the background of misogyny and rape culture are very, very relevant to the discussion of creepy behavior (from men towards women), I kept it simple and focused only on creepy behavior from one person to another. Yes, anyone can be a creep. But usually, it is men who are creepy, because it is men–thanks to aforementioned misogyny and rape culture–who move through life with the unacknowledged expectation that women owe them attention, and that they should not be criticized for asking for attention from any women at any time.