Entrekin

Via Nick Mamatas, whom I’ve mentioned a few times this week in discussing Amazon and POD, I found this pamphlet on the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy (warning: opens a .pdf in a new tab), featuring multiple soldiers talking about their experiences being gay in the military.

I think it’s well worth reading. It’s affiliated with the Servicemember’s Legal Defense Network (SLDN), which apparently exists, at least partially, to “Lift the Ban.”

When I was in college, I took a sociology class for which I had to maintain a journal reflecting on the class’ readings, many of which had to do with equality; my thesis, for my journal, ultimately became that I didn’t care about equality–I simply wanted the best qualified, most able person performing every job. The “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy had just become a hot topic back then, and my position during the class was simply that I didn’t care about anything besides function. Male, female, gay, straight, black, white, whatever–my ideal is that the people best able to perform any particular job do so.

I still feel that way. I think it’s why I’m against the Orange prize, and also, more important, why I support Barack Obama for the presidency–not because he’s black, or because it would break the status quo, but rather because, quite simply, I think he is far and away the most able candidate to do the job. It has little to do with who he is or whom he loves and everything to do with what I believe he can do.

Tags: army, barack obama, black, civil rights, equality, female, gay, gay rights, homosexuality, male, mamatas, marines, military, orange prize, servicemembers legal defense network, sociology, soldiers, straight, white

Yesterday’s post concerning the Orange prize was just the start, and the nice thing is that a couple of comments segue directly into what I’d planned to address next.

Lisa said:

they shout: “Hey ladies, if you wear my perfume or eat my yogurt you’ll look like me; a size one beauty queen with airbrushed skin and perky breasts.”

concerning half-naked (or fully naked) women on billboards.

Alma noted:

What kills me, though, is how women try to demonize men for things that women do. Don’t get me wrong…sexism *is* alive and well–just like racism. And, yes, women *have* been oppressed. But, I wonder, how much of that oppression–both then and now–has come from women themselves.

I think both are very apt, and I’m also very glad that two spectacular women made the point before I did, because I think part of the problem with discussion about feminism is that demonization of men, when a lot of men don’t really deserve it. Though some say that one can’t draw analogs between sexism and racism, there is, I think, some connection there. Black people cannot simply blame white people for millennia of oppression, because you can’t blame people for something it’s impossible for them to have had anything to do with. We all, together, as a society can try to ameliorate past injustice, but trying to place blame is not the way to do it. Slavery sucked, but fuck, I didn’t have anything to do with it, and I don’t think any of my ancestors did, either; why blame me for something other people’s great-great-grandfathers did? Oppression of women sucks, and is awful, but why blame me for something previous generations created when I’m actively trying to help further equality in the world?

The thing those two comments bears out, though, is that men sometimes have little to do with it. The demographic of half-naked women billboards is not men–it’s women. I’ll admit, I think this is a troublesome spot, mainly because I think that marketing is a completely different question all together, but I do think they cater to women’s perceived needs, as women perceive them. Walking down the aisles in my mental Target–how many different kinds of shampoo/conditioner/hair styling products can really be necessary?

Does makeup make a difference to a man, or do women wear it because they fear judgement from other women? Because I’ll be honest, I’ve seen lots of ads for mascara but have never, even once, looked at a woman and thought, “Wow, now those’re some eyelashes” (that’s what mascara’s for, right?), and most of my friends will tell you I’m just the sort of aesthetics-driven man that would notice something like that. Concerning heels: I was talking, last week, to someone going on interviews who was lamenting the idea of wearing heels. When I suggested she not, she called it “unprofessional” not to. Mind you, this is a girl who firmly believes in separating herself from others based on her talents and qualifications; that she worried her shoes might make her unprofessional was a revelation. My thought was: to whom? If I were a guy conducting an interview (and the old argument is still that men run corporate America and have all the power positions, except the fact that I’ve only ever been interviewed by women, ever [and I've worked in advertising, education, personal training, and publishing]), I’d never hire-or-not an applicant based on her shoes.

In fact, when I worked at a publishing company, I worked in a department as the only man among 12 women, all of whom were the executive or managing editors of their publications. Or editorial director was a woman. And the VP positions in the company were split pretty evenly male/female.

I’m not saying biases don’t still exist. I’m not trying to make the argument that we live in shiny happy utopia with no racism or sexism. I’m just asking questions about that gender bias, and wondering, who’s really against women?

I read a post the other week on Book Addiction, in which the blogger posted a review of Jessica Valenti’s Full Frontal Feminsim. Now, I was interested in the book, at first; I studied gender when I was in college, even took a Women & Literature course in which I did a term paper on insanity as an escape in Victorian women’s literatures, and made the argument that insanity was actually sane considering the ‘normal’ conventions the female protagonists were rejecting. However, I clicked through to Valenti’s book, and read the first two pages, and found lots of weirdo stuff.

Her opening sentence is “What’s the worst thing you can call a woman? Don’t hold back now.” She enumerates several possibilities, among them ‘skank,’ ‘whore,’ and ‘cunt.’ Then she asks about men, and enumerates again: “Fag, girl, bitch, pussy,” because her argument is that the worst thing you can call a girl is a girl, and the worst thing you can call a guy is a girl. Which strikes me as a little inane, mainly because I’ve heard a lot of guys called assholes, and those are pretty gender non-specific. I’ve also heard men and women alike call guys ‘dicks,’ ‘cocks,’ and ‘pricks,’ and not just as metonymy.

The paragraph I really hated, though? Here:

Do you think it’s fair that a guy will make more money doing the same job as you? Does it piss you off and scare you when you find out about your friends getting raped? Do you ever feel like shit about your body? Do you ever feel like something is wrong with you because you don’t fit into this bizarre ideal of what girls are supposed to look like?

To answer all her questions: it’s not fair, of course it pisses me off, of course I’ve felt lie shit about my body, and I do sometimes feel like something is wrong with me because I sometimes don’t fit into this bizarre ideal of what [men are supposed to be like].

Of course, I question her: does she think only women get raped? (They don’t. Men get raped to. And sometimes not even by other men. Women can coerce men into sex they don’t want to have every bit so much as men can. Not all men are the sexually-starved slavering drool-fools we are made out to be.) Don’t we all have days when we dislike our body, or our hair? Aren’t men driven to some ideal to billboards and magazine advertisements? Just because the ideal is to play golf and have great hair and watch NFL on Sundays from the La-Z Boy doesn’t mean it’s not an ideal. We are inundated with airbrushed models in Calvin Kleins every bit as much as women are. What man ever had Marky Mark’s abs? Not even Marky Mark has Marky Mark’s abs anymore.

Valenti’s new book, out next month, is called He’s a Stud, She’s a Slut, and 49 Other Double Standards Women Need to Know, but she’s wrong, of course. Because men who indulge in casual sexual promiscuity are no longer held up to some ‘bizarre ideal’; that idea is as quaint and rooted to the 50s as the whole ‘slut’ thing; the men who grease their hair and permatan and use the tactics in The Game are “players,” and are called assholes or douchebags by pretty much everyone who knows better.

Tags: abs, asshole, bitch, body image, book addiction, cocks, cunt, dicks, douchebag, eyelashes, fag, feminism, full frontal feminism, heels, jessica valenti, literature, marky mark, metonymy, orange prize, permatan, pricks, pussy, racism, rape, sexism, the game, women

I’ve read a bit over the past week about the Orange Prize, which is a literary prize awarded to a woman and judged by a panel comprised exclusively of women, as a response to the literary subjugation of women in the literary world. There’s been a bit of a kerfuffle; A.S. Byatt (author of Possession) denounced it as a sexist prize, with which Tim Lott agrees. So one side of the camp (and the award’s organization) claims that it needs a prize because women have not received their proper due, whereas the other side of the camp argues it’s unnecessary. Various heated arguments have ensued, if by ‘heated’ we mean ‘various bloggers have contributed their free two cents.’

Lott makes a few good points, opening with:

Here is a selection of groups that have been consistently under-represented among the winners of the UK’s two major book prizes, the Booker and the Costa/Whitbread: the white working class (0); West Indians (1); black Africans (0); disabled writers (0).

No one has funded a prize for these groups. However the Orange Prize was set up in 1996 to give women their own prize – because of perceived under-representation in the Booker. Despite 12 years of consciousness-raising by the Orange, the Booker still doesn’t give women their just mathematical due – a 3:10 ratio remains. But given that women have won five out of the last six Whitbread/Costas, does the level of injustice remain enough to justify the Orange?

Although the idea of applying ‘mathematical dues’ and ‘ratios’ to anything concerning writing hurts my head.

It’s a post both The Girl Detective and We are in debt took umbrage with and argued with, to various degrees of efficacy. My students would be quick to point out that calling anyone “Neanderthals” outside of an anthropoligical/taxonomical context is immediately ad hominem (a phrase meaning “against the man,” which may be particularly appropriate in this context).

Which also probably describes my own thoughts on this, as well as the probable argument that I am not entitled to them. I should not think about such issues because, as an average white male, I have no right. That Debt blog notes that “there’s no such thing as a reverse -ism,” but I’d disagree with that, especially in consideration of a phrase later used: “Leave it to a man.” Right. Because all we white males believe precisely the same thing and act precisely the same way, and we’ve all subjugated and oppressed every woman we’ve ever met because to do otherwise threatens our alpha-supremacy in the world.

The author later notes “The author of this silly piece seems to think that women are a “dominant” group, like “whites” (wrong)” but I wonder if that’s truly the case. First, a quibble: technically, women are more numerous, as a gender, than men–isn’t the population split still, like, 52% to 55% (versus, wait, I can do this–48% and 45%, respectively) in favor of women? I get that the trouble spot is in the definition of “dominant,” and that to be more populous does not necessarily equate to dominance, but still it isn’t technically wrong to state that women are a dominant group, for most definitions of the term. Not to mention that simply calling an argument ‘silly,’ or ‘wrong-headed’ or whatever doesn’t actually forward any real argument, and, indeed, if nothing else, brings the debate down.

The argument seems to be whether the Orange prize is necessary, but I have to admit I have trouble believing any literary prize is actually necessary. I don’t really get them, any more than I really get the whole Oscars thing; what, exactly, is a best picture, and on what level was No Country for Old Men better than Zodiac (I can think of many ways it was worse, but few better)? Given a real ballot with nominees (of any medium or genre) of any actual merit, terms like “better” actually cease to exist, I think. And does it really denote anything? Looking over Wikipedia’s list of nominees and winners, the only book on it I’ve ever read is Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, which I thought was overrated. I’ve picked up books by the usual suspects (Zadie Smith, Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, etc.), but have felt the same way toward theirs; nothing to inspire me to read beyond the first ten pages.

Maybe bad writers need awards to get recognition in a marketplace of books by people who know how to tell stories? Who’s Booker, and why does their list matter so much? There was a recent blogbate over Zadie’s Smith’s decision, as judge and jury for the Willesden (sp?) Herald’s award, to not award anything because it wasn’t good enough; who, besides WH, decided Zadie Smith is some arbiter of quality? More important, one of the members of the Orange jury is Lily Allen. Of MySpace fame.

Has Lily Allen ever even read a book? Her comments on Radiohead’s ‘devaluation of art’ seem to demonstrate she is perfectly content to argue based on superficial preconception with neither basis nor experience to bear them up.

One of Girl Detective’s arguments is:

I’d love to see a society in which women’s needs are catered to in the marketplace – where, say, every billboard has a picture of a naked man on it – and products for men just don’t exist. I wouldn’t want to live there – I’d just like to poke around a bit.

Does this mean that products for women, in the current marketplace, “just don’t exist,” whereas men’s every need is catered to? Also, I wonder where GD lives; I live in Hollywood, and there are plenty of naked men on billboards. Plenty of giant images of sharply chiseled jaws like none of us really have, washboard abs like none of us will ever really manage to get… etc. What female needs aren’t catered to, exactly?

No, really, I’d love to know, because as I’ve learned in my marketing class, built-in need-based target markets are a fucking gold mine, and I’d love to not be a broke-ass grad student anymore.

Speaking of mines, I’m sure this is probably one, and I expect debate/discussion (though not all together much, because who really reads this blog yet?), but if we can refrain from calling me a whiny Neanderthal, that’d be awesome.

Because, I mean, come on, it’s kind of the obvious strategy, isn’t it?

Tags: a.s. byatt, booker, feminism, ian mcewan, life of pi, lily allen, margaret atwood, No country for old men, orange prize, oscars, possession, tim lott, willesden herald, yann martel, zadie smith, zodiac