Emily C.A. Snyder's Blog, page 2
January 28, 2018
The Greatest Showman and "The Other Woman"
A man and a woman meet.
He's tall, handsome, charismatic. Looks a lot like Hugh Jackman because, in fact, it is Hugh Jackman, decked out in top hat and tails and a thousand watt grin.
The woman, an opera singer swathed in silks, flutters her lashes and gazes up coyly. (She is a red-head after all. The universal signal of what her favorite scarlet letter must be.)
The movie is The Greatest Showman , the latest Hugh Jackman-headlined musical, very loosely based on the life of circus entrepreneur, P. T. Barnum. By the time of this scene, the story's plot has reached the mid-point, and since the script refuses to criticize Barnum, or show him warts and all, we are in desperate need of a villain.
Women: Every One A Temptress. Ammirite?
Jenny Lind (Rebecca Ferguson) and P. T. Barnum (Hugh Jackman)
from The Greatest Showman
Vixens or Victims?
Literature is full of femme fatales: seductive sirens and "other women" who exist solely to tempt the virtuous hero before being roundly rebuffed and sent packing.
After all, Queen Guinevere and her lady parts were the downfall of all those virtuous men of Camelot. Sir Lancelot, who single handedly defeated everything else, never stood a chance. Ditto Helen of Troy, forcing Paris to abduct her and imprison her in a foreign city while poor, defenseless, armor-clad warriors had to kill each day and rape priestesses each night.
Anne Boleyn: The Ultimate "Other Woman"
Definitely in charge of this situation...
Or, to look at only the "other women" trope, married Odysseus subdued Circe - presented as a predatory witch - slept with her, stayed with her voluntarily for a year, abandoned her, and for his "virtue" was rewarded with the 20-year fidelity of his clueless wife. Almost every recounting of the history of Henry VIII casts Anne Boleyn as the sole downfall of the most powerful man in England. Despite her having refused him the first several times. Nope: dem women. Sneaking around with nation-destroying boobies. Tellingly, later mythology around Anne accuses her, too, of "witchcraft."
Arthur Miller's The Crucible lays the Salem Witch trials solely and squarely on the shoulders of Abigail Williams, who was twelve years old in reality, but is a nubile and vengeful woman scorned in Miller's play. If not a witch herself, then certainly a hunter of one. And the married John Proctor, whose only fault was sleeping with a teenage girl - where have we heard that one before? - is sobbing over the loss of his "good name" by the end of the play.
Heck! Remember the 90's? We all laid the blame for Bill Clinton's affair on "other woman" Monica Lewinsky. A narrative that is finally being reckoned with today. Most damning, Lewinsky is on the record in Vanity Fair saying:
This is not to deny that in the case of an affair it takes, at minimum, three to tango. Nor is this to exonerate women from any responsibility they may bear in the particulars of a case. Women are fully capable of being villains as well as victims. As that ancient wisdom from The Muppets Take Manhattan said:
The MTV show, Decoded has an excellent breakdown of why we victim blame, pointing out the importance of grammar on the way that we tend to judge cases. Essentially, if we tell the story of a victim from her point of view, we tend to focus on what she could have done to avoid the situation. Conversely, if we told the story from the point of view of the predator, we would see how his actions were the ones that put the victim in an untenable position.
Narrative and Responsibility
This is what The Greatest Showman gets wrong in its story-telling.
Time and again, the narrative is framed in such a way that the protagonist, P. T. Barnum, remains that Winner Always Winning, rather than also taking responsibility for his selfish choices and actions. Other have pointed out how the movie whitewashes Barnum's exploitation of "circus freaks" for his own gain. But fewer have pointed out how the movie does a disservice to the historical person of Jenny Lind who - in the context of the movie - is a villainous "other woman," whereas in real life she was practically Mother Theresa.
Otto and Jenny: Power CoupleA few highlights: Lind was an international singing sensation through Europe, retiring at the age of 29. She rebuffed the romantic overtures of both Hans Christian Anderson and the married Felix Mendelssohn, while managing to remain friends and colleagues with them. She did not much care for P. T. Barnum or the way he marketed her in America, which led to her splitting from Barnum to continue the tour under her own management. She became the equivalent of a multi-millionaire from that tour, the profits of which she donated entirely to charity, including the foundation of free schools in her native Sweden. She then met and fell in love with her pianist, Otto Goldschmidt, a Jewish man and son of a notable woman's rights activist. Lind and Goldschmidt lived a long and happy life.
Framing the Narrative
Because The Greatest Showman can't bear for Barnum to take responsibility, and since the writers have decided on a possible affair as the last obstacle Barnum must overcome, we are treated to a musical sequence showing Lind's first concert in America where the camera frames the narrative for us in the following way:
Lind sings center stage to a sold out audienceCharity, Barnum's wife, watches from the box, worriedBarnum, watching from the wings, is clearly enthralled by Lind's performance - dangerously soConclusion: Lind is dangerous
But let's look again at the actions, rather than the point of view we're supposed to have:
Lind is singing to a sold-out audience. Her attention is completely and professionally on her performance.Charity, Barnum's wife, is suffering from a fear that her marriage is in danger. She clearly puts the blame on the woman singing on the stage, even though Lind's attention is on the audience, not on Barnum.Barnum, watching from the wings, grows increasingly enthralled by Lind's performance. He notices his wife, but is swept up with visions of the heights he can achieve by attaching himself to Lind - who is still not paying him any attention. By the end, he focuses all his intention on Lind, determined to travel alone with her on tour.Conclusion: Barnum is dangerous.Bio-pics about artistic and political figures often trade in the question of ambition. Which means that effectively the protagonist is also the antagonist. Think Macbeth's rise and fall. Or to look at musical examples, look no further than the falls of Hamilton in Hamilton and Mama Rose in Gypsy . It's a plot worthy of examination: that the very thing that drives our heroes are both their angels and their demons.
Compare this to Hamilton's trajectory: how his own ambitions help him gain influence in the founding of America, and how those same ambitions keep him from reaching the highest post in the land. He certainly has an affair with "the other woman," in this case a historically accurate con between a Mrs. Reynolds and her husband who extorted Hamilton by offering him sex at a cost. What makes the character of Hamilton, as written by Lin-Manuel Miranda, so excellent, though, is that the titular character takes full responsibility for his sordid affair in "The Reynolds Pamphlet," and suffers the rather public consequences of:
Washington: Take Note.Which is followed soon after by the grace-filled "It's Quiet Uptown" wherein because Hamilton took responsibility for his actions and suffered the consequence, he is granted the opportunity for forgiveness.
Plato, Puritans, and the Anti-Theatrical Tradition
There's an additional element to the demonization of Jenny Lind, which is:
Look at the annual pearl-clutching over who wore what on the red carpet. Look at the way we all shook our heads knowingly as Weinstein, Spacy, Franco, Ansari, etc. etc. etc. were finally outed. Look at how we still frame our responses, from feminists such as Joss Whedon to hyperconservatives like Stephen M. Krason, whose article I criticized lately.
At my Catholic college, theatre kids were looked at funny, as though the overly devout were thinking: "Aren't you in theatre? Don't you sometimes kiss people who aren't your husband?!??!" (Nevermind that those roles are few, that intimacy scenes are done under tight direction, and that I wasn't in those kissing roles anyway. Well, except that once.)
This point of view is called the "anti-theatrical" tradition, and can be traced as far back as Plato who, in his Republic, argued that if an actor took on the role of a murderous villain, then by the process of "mimesis" (imitation and repetition), that actor would also become a murderous villain. By transitive properties, a woman who kisses on-stage must kiss off-stage, too. And if she can do it, why anyone who goes near a stage must come out a raving sex fiend.
This argument has had various champions throughout the ages, including the likes of (alas) St. Augustine, the Puritan Commonwealth of England, and modern day Evangelicals who all looked at theatre artists and declared with Obi-Wan Kenobi:
On a personal note, as a theatre director I have often been viewed as "the other woman" by significant others of my lead actors. Of course, nothing whatsoever was going on - except that I was daring to be a woman of power in the arts. Wholly fictional narratives like The Greatest Showman only perpetuate ideas about women in the arts which I find unfortunate and destructive.
The Show Can't Go On
One of the reasons why I'm in theatre at all, and particularly as a playwright at present, is precisely because the way we shape our stories is the way we view the world. The Greatest Showman is a pleasant enough musical - although I have some beef with the music proper which I might save for another post - and Hugh Jackman is delightful as always. But The Greatest Showman could have been a great musical, closer to a Hamilton, if it had been brave enough to tell the truth about the man behind the con.
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He's tall, handsome, charismatic. Looks a lot like Hugh Jackman because, in fact, it is Hugh Jackman, decked out in top hat and tails and a thousand watt grin.
The woman, an opera singer swathed in silks, flutters her lashes and gazes up coyly. (She is a red-head after all. The universal signal of what her favorite scarlet letter must be.)
The movie is The Greatest Showman , the latest Hugh Jackman-headlined musical, very loosely based on the life of circus entrepreneur, P. T. Barnum. By the time of this scene, the story's plot has reached the mid-point, and since the script refuses to criticize Barnum, or show him warts and all, we are in desperate need of a villain.
Enter the other woman.
Women: Every One A Temptress. Ammirite?Jenny Lind (Rebecca Ferguson) and P. T. Barnum (Hugh Jackman)
from The Greatest Showman
Vixens or Victims?
Literature is full of femme fatales: seductive sirens and "other women" who exist solely to tempt the virtuous hero before being roundly rebuffed and sent packing.
After all, Queen Guinevere and her lady parts were the downfall of all those virtuous men of Camelot. Sir Lancelot, who single handedly defeated everything else, never stood a chance. Ditto Helen of Troy, forcing Paris to abduct her and imprison her in a foreign city while poor, defenseless, armor-clad warriors had to kill each day and rape priestesses each night.
Anne Boleyn: The Ultimate "Other Woman"Definitely in charge of this situation...
Or, to look at only the "other women" trope, married Odysseus subdued Circe - presented as a predatory witch - slept with her, stayed with her voluntarily for a year, abandoned her, and for his "virtue" was rewarded with the 20-year fidelity of his clueless wife. Almost every recounting of the history of Henry VIII casts Anne Boleyn as the sole downfall of the most powerful man in England. Despite her having refused him the first several times. Nope: dem women. Sneaking around with nation-destroying boobies. Tellingly, later mythology around Anne accuses her, too, of "witchcraft."
Arthur Miller's The Crucible lays the Salem Witch trials solely and squarely on the shoulders of Abigail Williams, who was twelve years old in reality, but is a nubile and vengeful woman scorned in Miller's play. If not a witch herself, then certainly a hunter of one. And the married John Proctor, whose only fault was sleeping with a teenage girl - where have we heard that one before? - is sobbing over the loss of his "good name" by the end of the play.
Heck! Remember the 90's? We all laid the blame for Bill Clinton's affair on "other woman" Monica Lewinsky. A narrative that is finally being reckoned with today. Most damning, Lewinsky is on the record in Vanity Fair saying:
I will always remain firm on this point: it was a consensual relationship. Any ‘abuse’ came in the aftermath, when I was made a scapegoat in order to protect his powerful position. (Emphasis mine.)An Affair to Remember
This is not to deny that in the case of an affair it takes, at minimum, three to tango. Nor is this to exonerate women from any responsibility they may bear in the particulars of a case. Women are fully capable of being villains as well as victims. As that ancient wisdom from The Muppets Take Manhattan said:
"Peoples is peoples. Is good peoples. Is bad peoples. Is peoples. Peoples is peoples."But it's important to recognize that the narratives we tell ourselves are powerful and affect how we view reality. For example, a 2017 study from the University of Cardiff found that when a woman cheats on a man, she is blamed for the infidelity. However, when a man cheats on a woman, "the other woman" is blamed while the philandering man gets off scot free. This is true even in cases, quite frequent, where the cheating man was lying to all parties, and keeping the news of his attachment secret from the woman he pursued.
The MTV show, Decoded has an excellent breakdown of why we victim blame, pointing out the importance of grammar on the way that we tend to judge cases. Essentially, if we tell the story of a victim from her point of view, we tend to focus on what she could have done to avoid the situation. Conversely, if we told the story from the point of view of the predator, we would see how his actions were the ones that put the victim in an untenable position.
Narrative and Responsibility
This is what The Greatest Showman gets wrong in its story-telling.
Time and again, the narrative is framed in such a way that the protagonist, P. T. Barnum, remains that Winner Always Winning, rather than also taking responsibility for his selfish choices and actions. Other have pointed out how the movie whitewashes Barnum's exploitation of "circus freaks" for his own gain. But fewer have pointed out how the movie does a disservice to the historical person of Jenny Lind who - in the context of the movie - is a villainous "other woman," whereas in real life she was practically Mother Theresa.
Otto and Jenny: Power CoupleA few highlights: Lind was an international singing sensation through Europe, retiring at the age of 29. She rebuffed the romantic overtures of both Hans Christian Anderson and the married Felix Mendelssohn, while managing to remain friends and colleagues with them. She did not much care for P. T. Barnum or the way he marketed her in America, which led to her splitting from Barnum to continue the tour under her own management. She became the equivalent of a multi-millionaire from that tour, the profits of which she donated entirely to charity, including the foundation of free schools in her native Sweden. She then met and fell in love with her pianist, Otto Goldschmidt, a Jewish man and son of a notable woman's rights activist. Lind and Goldschmidt lived a long and happy life. Nevertheless, in both musicalized versions of Barnum's story, The Greatest Showman and Barnum, Lind is branded "the other woman."But how? And why?
Framing the Narrative
Because The Greatest Showman can't bear for Barnum to take responsibility, and since the writers have decided on a possible affair as the last obstacle Barnum must overcome, we are treated to a musical sequence showing Lind's first concert in America where the camera frames the narrative for us in the following way:
Lind sings center stage to a sold out audienceCharity, Barnum's wife, watches from the box, worriedBarnum, watching from the wings, is clearly enthralled by Lind's performance - dangerously soConclusion: Lind is dangerous
But let's look again at the actions, rather than the point of view we're supposed to have:
Lind is singing to a sold-out audience. Her attention is completely and professionally on her performance.Charity, Barnum's wife, is suffering from a fear that her marriage is in danger. She clearly puts the blame on the woman singing on the stage, even though Lind's attention is on the audience, not on Barnum.Barnum, watching from the wings, grows increasingly enthralled by Lind's performance. He notices his wife, but is swept up with visions of the heights he can achieve by attaching himself to Lind - who is still not paying him any attention. By the end, he focuses all his intention on Lind, determined to travel alone with her on tour.Conclusion: Barnum is dangerous.Bio-pics about artistic and political figures often trade in the question of ambition. Which means that effectively the protagonist is also the antagonist. Think Macbeth's rise and fall. Or to look at musical examples, look no further than the falls of Hamilton in Hamilton and Mama Rose in Gypsy . It's a plot worthy of examination: that the very thing that drives our heroes are both their angels and their demons.
Stories of ambition are also stories of responsibility.The Greatest Showman had multiple opportunities for Barnum to take responsibility: for exploiting his circus performers, for exploiting Jenny Lind, but instead they put the blame on "the upper class" and "the other woman" and even on "the theatre critics" for failing to valorize Barnum sufficiently.
Compare this to Hamilton's trajectory: how his own ambitions help him gain influence in the founding of America, and how those same ambitions keep him from reaching the highest post in the land. He certainly has an affair with "the other woman," in this case a historically accurate con between a Mrs. Reynolds and her husband who extorted Hamilton by offering him sex at a cost. What makes the character of Hamilton, as written by Lin-Manuel Miranda, so excellent, though, is that the titular character takes full responsibility for his sordid affair in "The Reynolds Pamphlet," and suffers the rather public consequences of:
Washington: Take Note.Which is followed soon after by the grace-filled "It's Quiet Uptown" wherein because Hamilton took responsibility for his actions and suffered the consequence, he is granted the opportunity for forgiveness.We can't forgive Barnum, because he never admits wrong-doing. For forgiveness, there must be responsibility.
Plato, Puritans, and the Anti-Theatrical Tradition
There's an additional element to the demonization of Jenny Lind, which is:
The belief that people in the arts are by their nature promiscuous.
Look at the annual pearl-clutching over who wore what on the red carpet. Look at the way we all shook our heads knowingly as Weinstein, Spacy, Franco, Ansari, etc. etc. etc. were finally outed. Look at how we still frame our responses, from feminists such as Joss Whedon to hyperconservatives like Stephen M. Krason, whose article I criticized lately.
At my Catholic college, theatre kids were looked at funny, as though the overly devout were thinking: "Aren't you in theatre? Don't you sometimes kiss people who aren't your husband?!??!" (Nevermind that those roles are few, that intimacy scenes are done under tight direction, and that I wasn't in those kissing roles anyway. Well, except that once.)
This point of view is called the "anti-theatrical" tradition, and can be traced as far back as Plato who, in his Republic, argued that if an actor took on the role of a murderous villain, then by the process of "mimesis" (imitation and repetition), that actor would also become a murderous villain. By transitive properties, a woman who kisses on-stage must kiss off-stage, too. And if she can do it, why anyone who goes near a stage must come out a raving sex fiend.
This argument has had various champions throughout the ages, including the likes of (alas) St. Augustine, the Puritan Commonwealth of England, and modern day Evangelicals who all looked at theatre artists and declared with Obi-Wan Kenobi:
On a personal note, as a theatre director I have often been viewed as "the other woman" by significant others of my lead actors. Of course, nothing whatsoever was going on - except that I was daring to be a woman of power in the arts. Wholly fictional narratives like The Greatest Showman only perpetuate ideas about women in the arts which I find unfortunate and destructive.
The Show Can't Go On
One of the reasons why I'm in theatre at all, and particularly as a playwright at present, is precisely because the way we shape our stories is the way we view the world. The Greatest Showman is a pleasant enough musical - although I have some beef with the music proper which I might save for another post - and Hugh Jackman is delightful as always. But The Greatest Showman could have been a great musical, closer to a Hamilton, if it had been brave enough to tell the truth about the man behind the con.
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Become my patron on Patreon!
January 24, 2018
Wherein Our Heroine Suffers the Trials of a Day Job, and Writes Two Novels Instead
Available for
pre-order now
!Almost twenty years ago, I'd just graduated from college and was set adrift in the wide world of reality - which is, as anyone who's been there knows, a rather grim place to be.Since my job literally consisted of me coming in to my isolated cubicle, printing out my boss' emails in the morning and then again in the evening, and otherwise sitting for eight hours with almost nothing to do by a silent phone...I wrote.
At the time, there was a rather bustling community called the Republic of Pemberley : a series of several handsomely maintained chatboards for Jane Austen enthusiasts. Since I had watched Colin Firth jump into ponds religiously my senior year of college (Pride and Prejudice fitting in nicely with that hotbed of celibacy), and since members of the ROP were eager for stories about the continuing adventures of Jane Austen's characters, and since I had nothing to occupy my brain whatsoever, I wrote a considerable amount of Jane Austen paraliterature.
Which is to say, I wrote two novels (one of which is available, and one of which is forthcoming), and a heap of short stories. Not being a purist, my stories tended to fall into two categories: behind the scenes glimpses of her characters, and then outright silliness of the same. Which is to say, a sweet romance about the spinster Miss Bates' long lost love, juxtaposed with all of Austen's villains winding up in the same house on a dark and stormy night.
I'm positively thrilled to announce that this long-awaited collection, Letters of Love & Deception, is now available for pre-order for Kindle .
If you're a Patreon , there's an extra special treat: I've uploaded my favorite story in the book, "Pride and Paraliterature" for your enjoyment. It's maaaaybe (definitely) a send-up of all those Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Cyclops and Martians, Oh My novels.
It's nearly Galentine's Day! So grab your chocolate and your best tea cup and snuggle up with Letters of Love & Deception!
Available for pre-order now | Delivered Tuesday, February 13, 2018
~*~
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Read "Pride and Paraliterature" now!Can't wait? Need a fix of some frivolity and fast?
Nachtsturm Castle, a Gothic Austen Satire is available now in for Kindle and through Audible.
January 15, 2018
No Sleep 'Til Windsor!
Hibernation: I think we're doing it wrong...I've been what I call a "working playwright" for most of my life.
By which I mean that of the hundred or so plays I've written, all but a handful of them have been produced - which means that all but a handful of them have had really hard deadlines of dates when people were going to show up and start enacting your words whether you were ready or not, and soon after loads of other people were going to show up to watch them.
Now, I didn't think much about it when I was doing this in high school. Mostly, then, I just didn't want to do lousy camp counselor skits, and so I told everyone that I'd write something for them - which meant directing it - which meant taking a role or two myself. Ignorance is truly bliss. And five year olds aren't literary agents.
When I went back to high school, this time to teach, it was easier to just write a play to spec as well. Great! The Sophomore class has fourteen women and maaaaybe two men? Play can't be over an hour? I've got seven decent actors? I can work with that. I may have been less blissfully ignorant this time around, but still: not one parent in the audience reviewed for the New York Times.
Now - in fact, right now as I'm writing this - I'm working hard against a partially self-imposed deadline of finishing at least half of The Merry Widows of Windsor by Thursday. And then finishing the remainder for submission to the American Shakespeare Center's: Shakespeare's New Contemporaries contest by February 15th. With some of my professional theatre buddies generously giving of their time to read and enact the play, with me as one of the characters - ok, the lead character - in front of *gulp*...well, let's just say: five year olds, they ain't.
Actual footage of the writing experience.Many are called. Few survive.
Dread Pirate Roberts not included.So! I am procrastinating by writing this blog to explain to you, my dear readers, why there will probably be fewer blogs this week, since I need hibernate in order to write the play that I'm procrastinating, by writing this blog to you about the play that I...
And so forth.
Wish me luck! Here we go!
~*~
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January 14, 2018
Frilly Curtains in a Post-Apocalyptic World
With all the Sturm und Drang surrounding #MeToo, and with even Margaret Atwood being taken to task for being a "bad feminist" because she calls for justice rather than retribution (although reparation is never a bad thing, bravo to Dan Harmon and Mark Whalberg), and as we suss out new social norms that call for respect rather than exploitation (trigger warnings as I'm looking pointedly at you, James Franco and Aziz Ansari), I want to talk about what truly matters:
Hear me out:
The first moment I knew I couldn't trust The Matrix movies - well, ok, the umpteenth-million-time I knew - was at my first glimpse of the sole remaining human city, bearing the extremely subtle name of Zion. Which, to be frank, looked like pretty much every post-apocalyptic city Hollywood has ever dreamed up, which is to say: plain, drab, grey, angular and entirely without curtains.
"Ah well," I thought. "They are probably new refugees to this city. They've only just arrived."
But no, I was told by the movie in no uncertain terms, Zion had been around for at least a few generations.
"Ah," I thought, "perhaps Zion somehow has...no families? No children? No women? Perhaps everyone is a soldier, and Trinity is merely part of the Smurfette Principle?"
But no, the movie showed me, not only had Zion been around for a bit, but there were families who were more likely to staff the proverbial Death Star Canteen than man the battle stations.
"Then surely," I thought at the film, nearly rising from my chair with revolutionary zeal, my unfurled flag gripped firmly in anticipation of five-part, flash mob singing (which is the only proper way of declaring independence, as every student of popular culture knows). "Surely," I thought with growing fervor and the certainty of a thousand Pinterest boards. "SURELY, there must be curtains!
"After all," I declaimed silently at the screen, while all around me fanboys and girls slept in the velvet seats and dreamt dreams where they'd gone to see Lord of the Rings instead, "after all, although I - a woman - am not normally a nester by nature, yet even I, when confronted with the drab cement wall of the public school system; even I, who would rather stab my eye out with a needle than use one to mend a sock; even I who, when enslaved by the padded walls of the soul-sucking cubicle at least have colored push-pins; EVEN I, to whom Home and Gardens is anathema and kitch is cause for immediate ostracization; even I would have made a damn flower out of scattered bits of paper and put up SOMETHING CUTE.
"BY GOD!," I thought, with all the passion of Scarlett O'Hara in the ruins of Tara, or Carol Burnett in the curtains of the same, "should the world ever collapse, as every summer Hollywood promises it will, and man rebuilds again, if there is even one person of good will among them, there shall be curtains! Let one person but retain the memory of Maria von Trapp, and lo! There shall be curtains. At the first smell of apples and the thought of apple pie, there shall be curtains. Death shall come on his white horse, and he shall bear lacy, gently wafting curtains. And this shall be a sign to ye: that the world shall be recivilized, and behold: THERE SHALL BE CURTAINS!"
And so yea, and verily, and by all that is holy, and by everything true, I say unto those who cower in the thought of impending personal apocalypses for those who wallowed in the depths or shallows of sexual predation:
Look up! And be of good cheer! We bring great tidings of good news! For unto ye, there shall be curtains.
~*~
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In a post-apocalyptic world, there will be frilly curtains.
Hear me out:The first moment I knew I couldn't trust The Matrix movies - well, ok, the umpteenth-million-time I knew - was at my first glimpse of the sole remaining human city, bearing the extremely subtle name of Zion. Which, to be frank, looked like pretty much every post-apocalyptic city Hollywood has ever dreamed up, which is to say: plain, drab, grey, angular and entirely without curtains.
"Ah well," I thought. "They are probably new refugees to this city. They've only just arrived."
But no, I was told by the movie in no uncertain terms, Zion had been around for at least a few generations.
"Ah," I thought, "perhaps Zion somehow has...no families? No children? No women? Perhaps everyone is a soldier, and Trinity is merely part of the Smurfette Principle?"
But no, the movie showed me, not only had Zion been around for a bit, but there were families who were more likely to staff the proverbial Death Star Canteen than man the battle stations.
"Then surely," I thought at the film, nearly rising from my chair with revolutionary zeal, my unfurled flag gripped firmly in anticipation of five-part, flash mob singing (which is the only proper way of declaring independence, as every student of popular culture knows). "Surely," I thought with growing fervor and the certainty of a thousand Pinterest boards. "SURELY, there must be curtains!
"After all," I declaimed silently at the screen, while all around me fanboys and girls slept in the velvet seats and dreamt dreams where they'd gone to see Lord of the Rings instead, "after all, although I - a woman - am not normally a nester by nature, yet even I, when confronted with the drab cement wall of the public school system; even I, who would rather stab my eye out with a needle than use one to mend a sock; even I who, when enslaved by the padded walls of the soul-sucking cubicle at least have colored push-pins; EVEN I, to whom Home and Gardens is anathema and kitch is cause for immediate ostracization; even I would have made a damn flower out of scattered bits of paper and put up SOMETHING CUTE.
"BY GOD!," I thought, with all the passion of Scarlett O'Hara in the ruins of Tara, or Carol Burnett in the curtains of the same, "should the world ever collapse, as every summer Hollywood promises it will, and man rebuilds again, if there is even one person of good will among them, there shall be curtains! Let one person but retain the memory of Maria von Trapp, and lo! There shall be curtains. At the first smell of apples and the thought of apple pie, there shall be curtains. Death shall come on his white horse, and he shall bear lacy, gently wafting curtains. And this shall be a sign to ye: that the world shall be recivilized, and behold: THERE SHALL BE CURTAINS!"
And so yea, and verily, and by all that is holy, and by everything true, I say unto those who cower in the thought of impending personal apocalypses for those who wallowed in the depths or shallows of sexual predation:Look up! And be of good cheer! We bring great tidings of good news! For unto ye, there shall be curtains.
Because Mama's home, boys, and play Time's Up. Now go, and clean your room. Mama's making curtains.
~*~
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January 10, 2018
15 Minute Classroom: Let's Judge Hollywood! Or, Let's Heal Ourselves
Do you know why I wore my clothes today?Such an enigma.In the words of Inigo Montoya: "Lemme 'splain...no, there is too much. Let me sum up."
"Every judgement you make on someone else's intent, is actually going to be an invitation for you to look deeper into yourself."A brief vlog on reactions to women wearing gowns at this year's Golden Globes.
~*~
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January 7, 2018
What DO They Teach Them At Those Schools? Sexual Scandal at Catholic Universities
Warning: Long. But I shall provide silly pictures, and besides we shall all cheerily Errol Flynn our way through some truly fantastical BS.
"Cite your source!"
That was the constant refrain for four years of taking the Great Books Honors program at my alma mater, Franciscan University of Steubenville, OH (FUS).
"Cite your source!"
It was a great way to force the resident long-winded student who had actually done the a close reading of, say, the entirety of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, to give you enough time to skim the part he was going on about, glance at the bits you'd managed to underline, and formulate a thought sufficient to throw out to satisfy your professor.
Of course, as soon as you'd asserted something, someone else who was frantically looking for a quote themselves would cry out:
"Cite your source!"
And the game would continue.
However, it's a valuable lesson, particularly in this age when the majority of men I know are looking back at #metoo and yelling: "WITCH HUNT! Women can just run up behind you and git you now! Innocent men are falling left and right! Anything can happen!"
To which I would like to reply, calmly but seriously:
"Cite your source."
Just the Facts, Ma'am
A few days ago, Professor Stephen M. Krason, the director of Ethics in Public Life at the Vertias Center, which is housed at Franciscan University, published a controversial piece in Crisis Magazine, a Catholic publication with increasingly far-right politics. In What Sexual Harassment "Crisis"?, Krason essentially attempts to roll back any influence of #metoo, writing - without citation - in his third sentence:
What follows from there is the usual witch hunt rhetoric - including some tone-deaf support for Roy Moore, stating - once again without citation - that :
A Cover-Up of a Cover-Up
Unfortunately, in an equally tone-deaf move, FUS's official Facebook page reposted the article, and were then surprised when alumni took offense at the University's director of Ethics defending a man accused of statutory rape while blaming the victims for the traumas that led to #metoo. (A moment to shine a *ahem* Spotlight on the Church and her relation to pedophiles, etc. Yes, we've purged, thank God. Yes, we're rather sensitive .)
Alumni replied back, bringing up the case against a married professor still working at the university who has been known to solicit sex regularly from his undergraduate students at a local bar. Students have attempted to report him for harassment, and have been systematically silenced by the Title IX representatives at the University.
These accusations were silenced a second time when they were dead deleted from the Facebook thread, which had since removed the link and replaced it with the following note:
Fortunately, the deleted allegations were captured and made public - as reported by Mary Pezzulo of Steel Magnificat, who was prompted to ask the question: Is Franciscan University Scared of Speaking Plainly About Sexual Harassment?
The answer, as Rebecca Bratten Weiss of Suspended In Her Jar notes in her pithy rebuttal of Krason's article is, "Yes."
Challenge...Accepted!
What then is there to do? It breaks my heart that my beloved alma mater, where I learned so much, where I flourished under the positive mentorship of male professors, from whom I received such excellent and safe formation, is not immune to human nature. I am even now being made aware of similar incidents which happened during my blissful bubble years there.
In fact, the truth is that there is no one righteous, no, not one, and that evil can creep in anywhere.
However, as a happy Catholic myself - and as an employer and an educator - I truly believe that it is incumbent upon anyone claiming to be Catholic to hold themselves and their institutions to a higher degree of accountability.
Hence, in my small way, and armed with the rhetoric and debate I learned from Franciscan University of Steubenville, I can conceive of only one possible course of action. Sharpen your pencils, ladies and gentlemen, because it's time to...
For this section, I'll be largely quoting in order from the article and then rebutting. As Krason has not bothered to make his own case, I shall in some places be making his case for him. Because I am interested in actual facts and not just logical fallacies masquerading as debate. (Retracted. Poisoning the well.)
We will be taking his points in the following order:
Dissecting the suppositions and worldview presented in his second paragraph (first three sections), to whit:All men are innocent until proven guilty and allegations are not substantive reasons for action;Allegations made by women about trauma inflicted on women is invalid because of the gender of the accused;Allegations may lead to the potential ruination of all men (with implied dismissal of the actual ruination of the abused)Addressing a few of the themes from the remainder of his article (not exhaustive), including:Invoking the statue of limitation, and presuming the erasure of offense - both personal and cultural - through the passage of time;Appealing for "charity" (read: mercy, clemency, absolution) for the accused (who somehow require mercy despite being "innocent");General paranoia that the #metoo movement and feminists in general will make it impossible to touch a woman without her consent;Blaming women - particularly those in the arts - for being complicit in their own assaults with "self-gain" as the motive.With that table of contents, onward Christian soldiers!
But Moses Supposes Erroneously
In his second paragraph, after calling the repercussions of #metoo a "frenzy," Krason states:
Regardless, presumption of innocence is important for any judge and jury in a court of law. However, in order to get to the court of law, the defendant must be accused of a crime, which requires a presumption of guilt. If everyone in the world were presumed innocent no matter what, I'd be able to go out to my local bodega, smash through their window, and just grab a box of Triscuits right now. Because you must presume I'm innocent.
All of which is to say, "innocent until proven guilty" is only applicable to a trial proper - not a trial popular.
Dem Bitches Be Crazy!
Despite the numerous allegations which have been investigated and corroborated, Krason still dismisses them out of hand, with:
First, Krason presumes that allegations are not a necessary part of jurisprudence ("mere allegations"). Then he dismisses the allegations, first saying that they were made by "a" single person - when in most cases, there are multiple allegations with similar predatory patterning, which is more than sufficient proof for an employer to take action, much less to put before a court of law. (If that'll even happen. Rather than paying the predator millions and sending him on vacation.)
Rather more tellingly, Krason dismisses the allegations because they are made by women which, in cases of sexual harassment and assault against women...who else are they going to come from? This statement alone should disqualify Krason as a person capable of writing on the subject of male-on-female sexual harassment. (If his views on women's fashion weren't sufficient.)
However, to presume mere ignorance on Krason's part (which ignorance of recent events would be almost extraordinary), I shall point him towards the excellent and Pulitzer Prize worthy investigative journalism done by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey about Weinstein's sexual predation in the New York Times . Or if he must hear the same and from a man (whose own sister was similarly abused and silenced), he can read the corroborating exposé by Ronan Farrow in The New Yorker . Perhaps this is not enough. I haven't time to link every single article from the Fall of Powerful Predators, but here's a good start. (You've got to do some of your own homework, Krason.)
As to the point that these allegations came "out of the blue." No, no they really don't. They may seem "out of the blue" to you, because you weren't looking, weren't listening to what your sisters and your students were screaming at the top of their lungs - or whispering on shared Excel sheets - but that willful ignorance is on you - as even The Onion rightly noted.
Truly. It is the end times when The Onion is serious journalism.
And I Don't Give A Damn About My Bad Reputation
To finish off Krason's first major paragraph (so many fallacies, so little time), he writes:
Oh, at last! You lovely man.
YES! Thank you, YES! Women's careers and livelihoods are at stake! In fact, one of the great realizations to come out of the #metoo movement is just how damaging these sexual predators have been upon their female victims' careers. Women will leave a position where they are unsafe rather than stay, often leaving the field altogether. These women will then take jobs in "safe" (read: female dominated) careers which are paid even less than the usual salary discrepancy.
As for women's reputations being destroyed by sexual predators. Indeed they are. Whether being blacklisted within their chosen industry, shamed into silence, or sustaining multiple traumas which leave them in a broken life that no longer allow them sufficient credibility in the eyes of the people...there is, in fact, everything at stake.
Well said, sir. You are a true American hero.
[image error] Plot twist!
Oh. Wait. Wait.
You meant for men. You are worried about the men. Not the actual victims who are suffering; but potential "victims" who are of your gender. Just like it's standard practice in emergency rooms not to deal with the person bleeding out in front of you, but to tell them to wait just in case the president comes in with an ear ache.
Alright, well I'll throw you a bone - and cite your sources for you (wow, this is getting tiresome) - that we have not, in fact, figured out best practices regarding date rape and rape culture on college campuses. And that, indeed, it is a more nuanced conversation than merely getting consent (more on that in a minute). However, this does not give you carte blanche to dismiss every woman who is finally brave enough to stop excusing her abuser and declare the truth as it actually is. In this case, statistically, the odds of "fake news" are simply not in your favor.
What's most telling in Krason's article - outside of his utter lack of anything resembling academic proficiency - is the amount to which he seems to tell us about his own fears. He harps frequently on the statute of limitations, he appeals to a different time period to approve of deviant sexual appetites including statutory rape, he demands - in advance of being accused - a measure of "charity" (by which he means absolution) for all men, and then he serves up that excuse as old as Adam that, deep down, the woman is to blame.
He also, and I find this very interesting, seems anxious about what behavior is and isn't appropriate. We'll come to that last.
In the meantime, here are a few quick takes on his major arguments:
Time, Time, Time, See What's Become of Me
In his defense of Roy Moore, Krason invokes not innocence, so much as time. To whit, he invokes the statue of limitations, reminding us that:
He then invokes shifting cultural norms in place of a universal morality, by defending:
Trauma leaves the victim in a state of incapability, much like any wound. Healing sufficiently to be able to come forward may take years, decades, a lifetime if ever. Your refusal to listen doesn't help your sister heal. Moreover, there is no statute of limitations when the victim of sexual abuse was under 16 years old. BOOM. Next.Time doesn't go backwards. Every crime that happened, happened in the past. Just because time has passed - even a significant amount of time - doesn't mean the crime didn't happen. This is so blatantly obvious, I'm not even going to look up a physics article on how time works. I'm just going to give you:
They call it Science Fiction...
Finally: The Catholic Church has always stood for Truth against the vagaries of man. Molestation? Always wrong. Abuse of power? Always wrong. TO A KID? I think Christ had something to say about that. I don't care if it was a different time and place (which it wasn't) and grown men were all legally macking on young teens (which they weren't), as the Director of Ethics at a Catholic University, Krason's argument here can only make me wonder: What has Krason done that he needs to support the morality of statutory rape at all?; andHow he can possibly be considered an expert in the field of ethics?
Even John Paul II is judging you.
If I Speak With Prophetic Tongue, But Have Not Love...
The guilty man always desires mercy. In fact, only the truly guilty require mercy. So it's interesting that Krason's next grammatically tortured appeal is:
Charity, true charity, is to remove predators from their positions and to give them the opportunity to heal from their own wounds away from those they would otherwise victimize. True charity is not to allow Weinstein and ilk to remain in power, but to face their own demons. True charity, again, is not to put Weinstein and his ilk back where they first fell, but to find new avenues for them - if possible - away from their temptations.
How Can I Touch You? Let Me Count the Ways
Which brings us at last to Krason's central fear. Which is a fear that I've seen echoed through many of my brothers' talk: that is, "How Far Is Too Far?" As Krason writes:
Give me a second to cite his source for him. My GOD, man. Learn to Google if you're going to be published in a nationally recognized magazine. But here you go, from the Barna Group. I'll even put the main chart here so you don't have to expend any energy clicking on things.
Krason goes on, just like the young, persistent, not-taking-no-for-a-GD-answer strawman he posits:
I hadn't even bothered to put those guys on the list. Let me reiterate this: I didn't bother to put my long-term stalkers on the list. But if you'd like me to open that wound, too, I suppose we can.
However, as I learned at Franciscan University's Theatre Program, it only takes a moment to ask: "May I?"
And even my six year old nephew knows that "No" means "No."
She Had It Coming
And so we arrive - after his diminishment of women's voices on their own behalf, after his strawman argument about possible victimhood of men rather than actual victimization of women, after his appeal to Time as the great eraser and gentle excuser of bad deeds, his angry demand for mercy (curious for an innocent to desire), after his complaining that he doesn't get to play with me as a toy and fling his arm around me for a photograph if I do not wish it...
Ah. Yes. We come to the coup de grâce of any poorly "argued" article that's given national release:
If the tenured professor who makes you buy his self-published $300 book,
and won't let girls sit in the first three rows if they're wearing skirts
(citation in comments - which comments have since been deleted)
concludes his "argument" with playground nonsense,
the only appropriate response is this.To...sigh...quote the man:
We've Got a Long Way, Baby
I am not going to change Krason's mind with this article. And it's doubtful whether Steubenville will step up to the plate to clean house, and truly live out her mission as a city on the hill.
But two things are for sure: We women have borne this for too long. And, gents? If you want to help, we always love a Samwise Gamgee.
Correction: Thomas Hobbes was incorrectly called John Hobbes. This is due to the author always thinking of John Locke when she starts fuming about the Age of Enlightenment. Hobbes is now Thomas, as he was originally christened.
~*~
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"Cite your source!"That was the constant refrain for four years of taking the Great Books Honors program at my alma mater, Franciscan University of Steubenville, OH (FUS).
"Cite your source!"
It was a great way to force the resident long-winded student who had actually done the a close reading of, say, the entirety of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, to give you enough time to skim the part he was going on about, glance at the bits you'd managed to underline, and formulate a thought sufficient to throw out to satisfy your professor.
Of course, as soon as you'd asserted something, someone else who was frantically looking for a quote themselves would cry out:
"Cite your source!"
And the game would continue.
However, it's a valuable lesson, particularly in this age when the majority of men I know are looking back at #metoo and yelling: "WITCH HUNT! Women can just run up behind you and git you now! Innocent men are falling left and right! Anything can happen!"
To which I would like to reply, calmly but seriously:
"Cite your source."
Just the Facts, Ma'am
A few days ago, Professor Stephen M. Krason, the director of Ethics in Public Life at the Vertias Center, which is housed at Franciscan University, published a controversial piece in Crisis Magazine, a Catholic publication with increasingly far-right politics. In What Sexual Harassment "Crisis"?, Krason essentially attempts to roll back any influence of #metoo, writing - without citation - in his third sentence:
"First, it is troubling that in the minds of the media and political powers that be in Washington mere allegations—often backed up by nothing more than the fact that a woman, often out of the blue, made them—are held to equal proof." (Emphasis mine.)
What follows from there is the usual witch hunt rhetoric - including some tone-deaf support for Roy Moore, stating - once again without citation - that :
"[T]here was no firm evidence that he did anything untoward, there were inconsistencies in the claims made...and some of the allegations—such as a thirty-something man seeking the affections of teenaged girls—were hardly an issue in the culture of that time and place."Immediately following this, Krason prophecies that this witch hunt (my term, not his) will lead to:
"Today it’s sexual harassment concerning which mere allegation is held to be proof. Tomorrow, it will move onto other things, until we end up having moral confusion, an undermining of law, injustices left and right, and a society of deepened inter-personal suspicion that comes to resemble something like Hobbes’ state of nature."Without even a Wikipedia-level citation of Hobbes.
A Cover-Up of a Cover-Up
Unfortunately, in an equally tone-deaf move, FUS's official Facebook page reposted the article, and were then surprised when alumni took offense at the University's director of Ethics defending a man accused of statutory rape while blaming the victims for the traumas that led to #metoo. (A moment to shine a *ahem* Spotlight on the Church and her relation to pedophiles, etc. Yes, we've purged, thank God. Yes, we're rather sensitive .)
Alumni replied back, bringing up the case against a married professor still working at the university who has been known to solicit sex regularly from his undergraduate students at a local bar. Students have attempted to report him for harassment, and have been systematically silenced by the Title IX representatives at the University.
These accusations were silenced a second time when they were dead deleted from the Facebook thread, which had since removed the link and replaced it with the following note:
Fortunately, the deleted allegations were captured and made public - as reported by Mary Pezzulo of Steel Magnificat, who was prompted to ask the question: Is Franciscan University Scared of Speaking Plainly About Sexual Harassment?The answer, as Rebecca Bratten Weiss of Suspended In Her Jar notes in her pithy rebuttal of Krason's article is, "Yes."
Challenge...Accepted!
What then is there to do? It breaks my heart that my beloved alma mater, where I learned so much, where I flourished under the positive mentorship of male professors, from whom I received such excellent and safe formation, is not immune to human nature. I am even now being made aware of similar incidents which happened during my blissful bubble years there.In fact, the truth is that there is no one righteous, no, not one, and that evil can creep in anywhere.
However, as a happy Catholic myself - and as an employer and an educator - I truly believe that it is incumbent upon anyone claiming to be Catholic to hold themselves and their institutions to a higher degree of accountability.
Hence, in my small way, and armed with the rhetoric and debate I learned from Franciscan University of Steubenville, I can conceive of only one possible course of action. Sharpen your pencils, ladies and gentlemen, because it's time to...
Cite some sources.'Allo. My Name Is Inigo Montoya. You Doubt My Trauma. Prepare To Debate.
For this section, I'll be largely quoting in order from the article and then rebutting. As Krason has not bothered to make his own case, I shall in some places be making his case for him. Because I am interested in actual facts and not just logical fallacies masquerading as debate. (Retracted. Poisoning the well.)
We will be taking his points in the following order:
Dissecting the suppositions and worldview presented in his second paragraph (first three sections), to whit:All men are innocent until proven guilty and allegations are not substantive reasons for action;Allegations made by women about trauma inflicted on women is invalid because of the gender of the accused;Allegations may lead to the potential ruination of all men (with implied dismissal of the actual ruination of the abused)Addressing a few of the themes from the remainder of his article (not exhaustive), including:Invoking the statue of limitation, and presuming the erasure of offense - both personal and cultural - through the passage of time;Appealing for "charity" (read: mercy, clemency, absolution) for the accused (who somehow require mercy despite being "innocent");General paranoia that the #metoo movement and feminists in general will make it impossible to touch a woman without her consent;Blaming women - particularly those in the arts - for being complicit in their own assaults with "self-gain" as the motive.With that table of contents, onward Christian soldiers!
But Moses Supposes Erroneously
In his second paragraph, after calling the repercussions of #metoo a "frenzy," Krason states:
"[F]undamental fairness demands that there be genuine proof that a person engaged in an act—to say nothing that the act even occurred—before he’s labeled a miscreant."Krason's desire is for facts before conviction. And certainly, "innocent until proven guilty" is an important tenant of American jurisprudence - despite not being found in any American foundational document, including the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution of the United States. The earliest use of this maxim in America appears to have been around the 1800's, and has since been informally adopted worldwide. (See full article.)
Regardless, presumption of innocence is important for any judge and jury in a court of law. However, in order to get to the court of law, the defendant must be accused of a crime, which requires a presumption of guilt. If everyone in the world were presumed innocent no matter what, I'd be able to go out to my local bodega, smash through their window, and just grab a box of Triscuits right now. Because you must presume I'm innocent.
All of which is to say, "innocent until proven guilty" is only applicable to a trial proper - not a trial popular.
Dem Bitches Be Crazy!
Despite the numerous allegations which have been investigated and corroborated, Krason still dismisses them out of hand, with:
"[M]ere allegations—often backed up by nothing more than the fact that a woman, often out of the blue, made them—are held to equal proof." (Emphasis mine.)
First, Krason presumes that allegations are not a necessary part of jurisprudence ("mere allegations"). Then he dismisses the allegations, first saying that they were made by "a" single person - when in most cases, there are multiple allegations with similar predatory patterning, which is more than sufficient proof for an employer to take action, much less to put before a court of law. (If that'll even happen. Rather than paying the predator millions and sending him on vacation.)
Rather more tellingly, Krason dismisses the allegations because they are made by women which, in cases of sexual harassment and assault against women...who else are they going to come from? This statement alone should disqualify Krason as a person capable of writing on the subject of male-on-female sexual harassment. (If his views on women's fashion weren't sufficient.)
However, to presume mere ignorance on Krason's part (which ignorance of recent events would be almost extraordinary), I shall point him towards the excellent and Pulitzer Prize worthy investigative journalism done by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey about Weinstein's sexual predation in the New York Times . Or if he must hear the same and from a man (whose own sister was similarly abused and silenced), he can read the corroborating exposé by Ronan Farrow in The New Yorker . Perhaps this is not enough. I haven't time to link every single article from the Fall of Powerful Predators, but here's a good start. (You've got to do some of your own homework, Krason.)
As to the point that these allegations came "out of the blue." No, no they really don't. They may seem "out of the blue" to you, because you weren't looking, weren't listening to what your sisters and your students were screaming at the top of their lungs - or whispering on shared Excel sheets - but that willful ignorance is on you - as even The Onion rightly noted.
Truly. It is the end times when The Onion is serious journalism.And I Don't Give A Damn About My Bad Reputation
To finish off Krason's first major paragraph (so many fallacies, so little time), he writes:
"[T]he stakes are high indeed: the destruction of careers and livelihoods, the permanent damaging of reputations..."To which I reply with:
Oh, at last! You lovely man.YES! Thank you, YES! Women's careers and livelihoods are at stake! In fact, one of the great realizations to come out of the #metoo movement is just how damaging these sexual predators have been upon their female victims' careers. Women will leave a position where they are unsafe rather than stay, often leaving the field altogether. These women will then take jobs in "safe" (read: female dominated) careers which are paid even less than the usual salary discrepancy.
As for women's reputations being destroyed by sexual predators. Indeed they are. Whether being blacklisted within their chosen industry, shamed into silence, or sustaining multiple traumas which leave them in a broken life that no longer allow them sufficient credibility in the eyes of the people...there is, in fact, everything at stake.
Well said, sir. You are a true American hero.
[image error] Plot twist!
Oh. Wait. Wait.
You meant for men. You are worried about the men. Not the actual victims who are suffering; but potential "victims" who are of your gender. Just like it's standard practice in emergency rooms not to deal with the person bleeding out in front of you, but to tell them to wait just in case the president comes in with an ear ache.
Alright, well I'll throw you a bone - and cite your sources for you (wow, this is getting tiresome) - that we have not, in fact, figured out best practices regarding date rape and rape culture on college campuses. And that, indeed, it is a more nuanced conversation than merely getting consent (more on that in a minute). However, this does not give you carte blanche to dismiss every woman who is finally brave enough to stop excusing her abuser and declare the truth as it actually is. In this case, statistically, the odds of "fake news" are simply not in your favor.
But let's get back to that "who to blame for sex" issue that seems to be the fundament of your fear, sir.The Gentleman Doth Protest Too Much
What's most telling in Krason's article - outside of his utter lack of anything resembling academic proficiency - is the amount to which he seems to tell us about his own fears. He harps frequently on the statute of limitations, he appeals to a different time period to approve of deviant sexual appetites including statutory rape, he demands - in advance of being accused - a measure of "charity" (by which he means absolution) for all men, and then he serves up that excuse as old as Adam that, deep down, the woman is to blame.
He also, and I find this very interesting, seems anxious about what behavior is and isn't appropriate. We'll come to that last.
In the meantime, here are a few quick takes on his major arguments:
Time, Time, Time, See What's Become of Me
In his defense of Roy Moore, Krason invokes not innocence, so much as time. To whit, he invokes the statue of limitations, reminding us that:
"...the alleged incidents happened forty years ago..."
He then invokes shifting cultural norms in place of a universal morality, by defending:
"...a thirty-something man seeking the affections of teenaged girls—were hardly an issue in the culture of that time and place."To which points I answer:
Trauma leaves the victim in a state of incapability, much like any wound. Healing sufficiently to be able to come forward may take years, decades, a lifetime if ever. Your refusal to listen doesn't help your sister heal. Moreover, there is no statute of limitations when the victim of sexual abuse was under 16 years old. BOOM. Next.Time doesn't go backwards. Every crime that happened, happened in the past. Just because time has passed - even a significant amount of time - doesn't mean the crime didn't happen. This is so blatantly obvious, I'm not even going to look up a physics article on how time works. I'm just going to give you:
They call it Science Fiction...Finally: The Catholic Church has always stood for Truth against the vagaries of man. Molestation? Always wrong. Abuse of power? Always wrong. TO A KID? I think Christ had something to say about that. I don't care if it was a different time and place (which it wasn't) and grown men were all legally macking on young teens (which they weren't), as the Director of Ethics at a Catholic University, Krason's argument here can only make me wonder: What has Krason done that he needs to support the morality of statutory rape at all?; andHow he can possibly be considered an expert in the field of ethics?
Even John Paul II is judging you.If I Speak With Prophetic Tongue, But Have Not Love...
The guilty man always desires mercy. In fact, only the truly guilty require mercy. So it's interesting that Krason's next grammatically tortured appeal is:
"...[E]ven without anything like probable cause as a threshold so as to determine if anything happened in the first place and if it could reasonably be believed that a person did anything wrong hardly bespeaks charity."Putting aside that Krason is still advocating mercy for potential victims over assistance for the actual wounded, it's worthy to note that he's using "charity" to mean "mercy," "leniency" or even "absolution" here - not charity. Charity is something far more awesome and awful. Charity is doing good for the other person - not indulging evil habits, but doing what is actually good for the soul of the other. Charity is the love God has for us, which St. Peter defines in Hebrews as:
"Endure your trials as 'discipline;' God treats you as sons. For what 'son' is there whom his father does not discipline?"If we have learned anything from the priest scandals, it is this:
Charity, true charity, is to remove predators from their positions and to give them the opportunity to heal from their own wounds away from those they would otherwise victimize. True charity is not to allow Weinstein and ilk to remain in power, but to face their own demons. True charity, again, is not to put Weinstein and his ilk back where they first fell, but to find new avenues for them - if possible - away from their temptations.
How Can I Touch You? Let Me Count the Ways
Which brings us at last to Krason's central fear. Which is a fear that I've seen echoed through many of my brothers' talk: that is, "How Far Is Too Far?" As Krason writes:
"If anything has been apparent from the recent exposés, it is that what constitutes 'sexual harassment' is up for grabs."
Give me a second to cite his source for him. My GOD, man. Learn to Google if you're going to be published in a nationally recognized magazine. But here you go, from the Barna Group. I'll even put the main chart here so you don't have to expend any energy clicking on things.
Krason goes on, just like the young, persistent, not-taking-no-for-a-GD-answer strawman he posits:"Directly on point with sexual harassment, we are seeing feminists and some others pushing an expansive definition of rape that goes well beyond what has always been understood. We’re now even told that it’s sexual harassment for a young man to keep asking a young, unattached woman for a date if she keeps saying no. Didn’t at one time we think that gentle persistence would pay off in the end for both parties, that the woman might change her mind over time and wish that she had responded positively sooner?"Yesterday, I wrote in fear and trembling about some, some of my traumas. After I wrote it, I was thinking about the guys who pursued me relentlessly and with my extremely vocal negative for years in middle and high school.
I hadn't even bothered to put those guys on the list. Let me reiterate this: I didn't bother to put my long-term stalkers on the list. But if you'd like me to open that wound, too, I suppose we can.
However, as I learned at Franciscan University's Theatre Program, it only takes a moment to ask: "May I?"
And even my six year old nephew knows that "No" means "No."
She Had It Coming
And so we arrive - after his diminishment of women's voices on their own behalf, after his strawman argument about possible victimhood of men rather than actual victimization of women, after his appeal to Time as the great eraser and gentle excuser of bad deeds, his angry demand for mercy (curious for an innocent to desire), after his complaining that he doesn't get to play with me as a toy and fling his arm around me for a photograph if I do not wish it...
Ah. Yes. We come to the coup de grâce of any poorly "argued" article that's given national release:
It's all her fault.
If the tenured professor who makes you buy his self-published $300 book, and won't let girls sit in the first three rows if they're wearing skirts
(citation in comments - which comments have since been deleted)
concludes his "argument" with playground nonsense,
the only appropriate response is this.To...sigh...quote the man:
"Speaking of self-interest, it’s noteworthy that some of the accusers of recent months—from the worlds of politics, entertainment, and media—say that they tolerated the harassment or agreed to provide sexual favors for fear that their careers would otherwise not advance. Were their careers more important to them than sexual virtue? Can’t they truly be viewed, at least to some degree, as cooperators with wrongdoing?"Sir: Freedom and Duress.
We've Got a Long Way, Baby
I am not going to change Krason's mind with this article. And it's doubtful whether Steubenville will step up to the plate to clean house, and truly live out her mission as a city on the hill.
But two things are for sure: We women have borne this for too long. And, gents? If you want to help, we always love a Samwise Gamgee.
Correction: Thomas Hobbes was incorrectly called John Hobbes. This is due to the author always thinking of John Locke when she starts fuming about the Age of Enlightenment. Hobbes is now Thomas, as he was originally christened.
~*~
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January 4, 2018
An Open Letter to My Brothers: #MeToo Is Not About You
As a child, I suffered several severe asthma attacks, two of which hospitalized me. The second time I must have been maybe nine or ten years old, not breathing, lying in an emergency room bed, while a nurse kept laboriously shoving an IV needle into my right arm and then just as excruciatingly drawing it back out because she had missed my vein...again. And I was Not.Breathing.
Meantime, like an enthusiastic Foley artist from Hell, someone else down the row of curtained beds was howling.
I concentrated on three things: drawing in any bit of air, not punching the nurse in the face as she missed my vein again, and trying to tell myself that the person howling was probably having their leg amputated without anesthesia, so who was I to complain?
Finally, they got the IV in me, put the oxygen tent around me, stuffed more oxygen up my nose, and I had breath enough to grab a passing nurse and ask what the screaming patient was suffering from.
"Oh," the nurse said, rolling her eyes. "That guy's got an ear ache."
Silencing the Silence Breakers
I bring this story up, because I've been thinking about it ever since I've seen the steady push to silence the Silence Breakers who began #metoo.
The complaint especially from my Christian and/or Conservative brothers is that they are not sexual aggressors. That, in fact, they as white men have been silenced because of their gender and ethnicity. That they need to be protected from what they fear might be a "witch hunt" by those "evil feminists" always out to emasculate men.
And you know what? Fair enough.
I grew up in the 80's and 90's with Second Wave Feminism which did play itself out as being against things: against the patriarchy, the nuclear family, the church...even against "feminine" identifiers. And as the daughter and sister of white, heterosexual, cis-gendered, family-oriented, religious men, I have witnessed the men in my life being silenced or belittled from news outlets of popular opinion to, more practically, HR departments enacting policy that got my dad laid off in the name of diversity and plunged all of us - including his daughters - into poverty.
So, I get it.
But here's the thing, gents: right now, you've got an ear ache. And right now, your sisters are not breathing.
How to Care For Your Feminist
The thing about the #metoo movement is that it's built up of decades' worth of sexual harassment - whether overt or covert. It's not something that's happening now, it's a reality that the majority of women have to contend with on a daily basis. That we are, even months later, still dealing with. The only difference in October was that we were all brave enough to share this private trauma at the same time in the hopes that you would listen.
So I want to talk to you, my brothers, about what you can do now. Because what we need from you now is for you to keep listening.
The Circle of Trauma
A few years ago, a breast cancer survivor was told by one of her colleagues that the colleague "wanted, she needed to visit Susan after the surgery." The problem? Susan was too exhausted to have visitors. Her colleague promptly told Susan, "This isn't just about you."
"It's not?" Susan wondered. "My breast cancer is not about me? It's about you?"
Susan then wrote an excellent article about how to care for people in trauma called "The Ring Theory." The general idea is that the person to whom the trauma is happening is in the center, and that only care should flow towards them. Perhaps from close family members or friends. Naturally, though, whatever the person in the center is feeling will have an effect on their confidants, who in turn will need support.
So, say, Susan is in the middle, dealing day to day with battling breast cancer. Her husband flows support in; Susan can vent out. But her husband is growing weary and frustrated. Rather than close off Susan, or venting his frustrations inward, he finds his own circle of friends and family and vents outwards to them. And so on.
Image courtesy of Cascadia Workshops
In one heroic effort, women put up the hashtag. And you may say: well, how heroic can it be to put up a damn hashtag? I'll get to that in a moment. But trust me, it weren't easy. In one heroic moment, every woman who put up #metoo admitted that for years they'd been poisoned, had cancer, weren't breathing. Were in need of being the one in the middle of the circle of trauma - and not the ones caring for the fellow with an ear ache.
There was response. For the first time in millennia, there was response. Some of the worst offenders were ejected from their seats of power. For a time, husbands, brothers, fathers, bosses, friends offered care in, even as they nervously began to look over their shoulder, worried that any youthful indiscretions might bite them in the bum.
And slowly - or really, fairly swiftly in the grand course of a bored news cycle - the circle of trauma stopped. As men started up with their old ear ache: venting in, wanting care to come out. OK, already: you had your #metoo moment. Now back to us.
But...this isn't about you. This is about the women whom you love. And again, we really need you to listen.
I remember the day I saw the first #metoo hashtag, as I blearily wandered around in my morning routine, checking Facebook. A dear friend had posted it, along with the now famous note:
But at the day wore on, and more and more of my friends began posting #metoo, some with their stories attached, I reconsidered.
My next inclination was to say: "Oh, but not me." After all, I have several friends, too many, who have been raped. Some repeatedly. So yes, #metoo for them...but not...for me? But then I thought further about the fellow who tried to abduct me in Paris, and who forced me to hold his hand and kissed me in a really brutal way, and...
But I'd gotten over that, right? I mean, I fled from Paris and went into a minor breakdown back in Austria. But...I was totally better. Nope. Nope. Not me. Except...
Oh, right. There was that guy who sexually harassed me in high school. The quarterback who pinned me against the bleachers and made suggestive comments. And then took the opportunity in weight lifting to give me massages. And who tried to call me out in front of the whole school cafeteria.
But...but...although I'd been scared the first time, I'd turned the rest of the times into jokes, and even enjoyed the attention by the end, and that excused pinning me against the bleachers and asking if it was good for me, right? Because: no. Not me.
Except that...
There was the neighborhood kid who looked up my skirt and was generally a jackass. And there was some pretty awful stuff that happened when I was seven or eight years old with other neighborhood kids that I'm not going to go into here, and about which I still feel guilty. Not to mention the guy masturbating on the train across from me just the other day. Not to mention the guy in Italy who groped me on the bus. Not to mention the occasional wolf whistles in town. Not to mention the guy who slapped my ass while I was walking to the train in Harlem. Not to mention the actor who used that one time to try to stick his tongue down my throat. Not to mention that dickwad who used me to cheat on his girlfriend, said he loved me, left me, begged me to be silent, and got off scott free, leaving me to suffer three years of trauma. Not to mention...not to mention...not to mention...
The subtler attacks. The jobs I'd been refused from high school on because I wasn't fuckable enough for the pervy director. The jobs I'd been refused because I was a woman who knew her mind, and this was a place run by guys in over their heads. The jobs I'd gotten where I'd had to endure being hugged and kissed as a form of greeting, while the men all shook each other's hands. The jobs I'd gotten where I was the only woman in the room, and I watched the job I was in the middle of doing being given away to another man who had just admitted he wasn't prepped for the job.
So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. ME. FUCKING. TOO.
Lice in a Tea Cozy: An Analogy
The problem of opening up one part of a trauma is that it opens up all the traumas.
Talking with my girlfriends in the weeks and months that followed, we acknowledged how shaken, how hypersensitive, how high-alert we all felt. How, in fact, by having spent the day examining our lives in the light of #metoo, we were reliving those same traumas - but this time without the safety net of recontextualizing, excusing, or laughing our traumas away.
This past summer, I wrote an article looking at how masculine vs. feminine brains generally tend to process experience and emotion.
One of the most fascinating aspects I discovered was that it appears that men tend to have stronger back-to-front reactions to experiences, which encourages a man to either "fix or ditch" the experience. To put it in terms of #metoo, and why men might not have noticed what was happening daily to the women around them, since the men were not being harassed (or harassing), it was nothing they could fix and so they ditched the memory altogether. Hence, when they witnessed the next time that same woman was harassed, the men hadn't maintained the previous memory of what had happened the last time, and likely ditched this time as well.
Contrast this to how a woman processes emotion. Studies found that in general female brains process across hemispheres, as well as storing experiences immediately and automatically in the amygdala - which is the memory and emotion center of the brain. Essentially, as a woman experiences something, it gets filed and cross filed with every previous association of similar experiences, which then encourages whatever action she has deemed fittest from all her previous experiences. To put it in terms of #metoo, every time a woman experiences sexual harassment, it goes to the same memory bank as the previous one. So that to access that one time that one guy did that one thing is to access every time that particular trauma was stored. And then to enact whatever her coping mechanism might be - generally, making the trauma "safe" not only from herself, but also from you, my dear brothers.
To use an analogy:
Imagine that every time a traumatic occurrence happens it's a piece of lice.
A man's brain is generally wired to either accept the lice or to disregard it and pretend there were never any lice at all.A woman's brain is generally wired not to ditch the lice, but to keep and "make safe" the lice - possibly by knitting a nice tea cozy and covering over every little bug. The woman keeps having men fling lice on her. No problem. She pops it in the tea cozy. And it's like no one has to know and everything is fine. Another lice? No problem. Laugh it off. And it's funny to have lice. And let's just pop that in the tea cozy, shall we? And so on and so on.And it's easy, isn't it my brothers, to pretend we all like lice.
But on the day of #metoo, one by one we women took off those tea cozies, and had to deal with every wriggling worm that life had shoved on us. And some were so monstrous, we were able to tear them down (for now). And others...well, gentlemen, I imagine if you're afraid of a witch hunt, it's because you're wondering whether the girl you pinned up against the lockers in high school remembers, and whether she was thinking of you while she typed out, in fear and trembling:
#me.fucking.too.
A New Hope
Ultimately, we're going to need new legislation that favors victims rather than protecting predators. Hopefully, that legislation will start to be enacted this year. But in the meantime, my brothers, I'm going to challenge you to step up to the plate...and do nothing.
Eventually.
Maybe not today.
And only if you're sorry.
But for God's sake: keep listening.
Because the tea cozy has come off, we've got some things to say.
~*~
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Become my patron on Patreon!
Meantime, like an enthusiastic Foley artist from Hell, someone else down the row of curtained beds was howling.
I concentrated on three things: drawing in any bit of air, not punching the nurse in the face as she missed my vein again, and trying to tell myself that the person howling was probably having their leg amputated without anesthesia, so who was I to complain?
Finally, they got the IV in me, put the oxygen tent around me, stuffed more oxygen up my nose, and I had breath enough to grab a passing nurse and ask what the screaming patient was suffering from.
"Oh," the nurse said, rolling her eyes. "That guy's got an ear ache."
Silencing the Silence Breakers
I bring this story up, because I've been thinking about it ever since I've seen the steady push to silence the Silence Breakers who began #metoo.
The complaint especially from my Christian and/or Conservative brothers is that they are not sexual aggressors. That, in fact, they as white men have been silenced because of their gender and ethnicity. That they need to be protected from what they fear might be a "witch hunt" by those "evil feminists" always out to emasculate men.
And you know what? Fair enough.
I grew up in the 80's and 90's with Second Wave Feminism which did play itself out as being against things: against the patriarchy, the nuclear family, the church...even against "feminine" identifiers. And as the daughter and sister of white, heterosexual, cis-gendered, family-oriented, religious men, I have witnessed the men in my life being silenced or belittled from news outlets of popular opinion to, more practically, HR departments enacting policy that got my dad laid off in the name of diversity and plunged all of us - including his daughters - into poverty.
So, I get it.
But here's the thing, gents: right now, you've got an ear ache. And right now, your sisters are not breathing.
How to Care For Your Feminist
The thing about the #metoo movement is that it's built up of decades' worth of sexual harassment - whether overt or covert. It's not something that's happening now, it's a reality that the majority of women have to contend with on a daily basis. That we are, even months later, still dealing with. The only difference in October was that we were all brave enough to share this private trauma at the same time in the hopes that you would listen. #MeToo not new trauma; it's only new to you.Just like the traumas my brothers and sisters of color bear every day are, unfortunately, not new. I only have the privilege of their daily heartaches being news to me. And therefore, I have the privilege, as 'twere, of forgetting their reality, because it's not my problem. This is a privilege, and have to work hard to remember to listen, believe, and be an ally. Just like that fellow got over his ear ache and went on to live his life without having to think about it again. But every day many women live with the spectre of sexist trauma, just as I live with the fact that I need to make decisions that affect my career based on whether or not I'm able to breathe.
So I want to talk to you, my brothers, about what you can do now. Because what we need from you now is for you to keep listening.
The Circle of Trauma
A few years ago, a breast cancer survivor was told by one of her colleagues that the colleague "wanted, she needed to visit Susan after the surgery." The problem? Susan was too exhausted to have visitors. Her colleague promptly told Susan, "This isn't just about you."
"It's not?" Susan wondered. "My breast cancer is not about me? It's about you?"
Susan then wrote an excellent article about how to care for people in trauma called "The Ring Theory." The general idea is that the person to whom the trauma is happening is in the center, and that only care should flow towards them. Perhaps from close family members or friends. Naturally, though, whatever the person in the center is feeling will have an effect on their confidants, who in turn will need support.
So, say, Susan is in the middle, dealing day to day with battling breast cancer. Her husband flows support in; Susan can vent out. But her husband is growing weary and frustrated. Rather than close off Susan, or venting his frustrations inward, he finds his own circle of friends and family and vents outwards to them. And so on.
Image courtesy of Cascadia WorkshopsCare in. Vent out.Now apply this to the #metoo movement. For years, really since Eve, women have been battling sexism - both culturally and personally. Every woman who put up a #metoo story has multiple instances to share; multiple wounds; their own personal cancers and asthmas that they weren't born with - that were inflicted on them. Toxically, one might say.
In one heroic effort, women put up the hashtag. And you may say: well, how heroic can it be to put up a damn hashtag? I'll get to that in a moment. But trust me, it weren't easy. In one heroic moment, every woman who put up #metoo admitted that for years they'd been poisoned, had cancer, weren't breathing. Were in need of being the one in the middle of the circle of trauma - and not the ones caring for the fellow with an ear ache.
There was response. For the first time in millennia, there was response. Some of the worst offenders were ejected from their seats of power. For a time, husbands, brothers, fathers, bosses, friends offered care in, even as they nervously began to look over their shoulder, worried that any youthful indiscretions might bite them in the bum.
And slowly - or really, fairly swiftly in the grand course of a bored news cycle - the circle of trauma stopped. As men started up with their old ear ache: venting in, wanting care to come out. OK, already: you had your #metoo moment. Now back to us.
But...this isn't about you. This is about the women whom you love. And again, we really need you to listen.
I remember the day I saw the first #metoo hashtag, as I blearily wandered around in my morning routine, checking Facebook. A dear friend had posted it, along with the now famous note:
"If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote 'Me too.' as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem."I saw my friend's post - a woman I greatly respect - but still scoffed. Personally, I hate memes, and tend to roll my eyes at trends.
But at the day wore on, and more and more of my friends began posting #metoo, some with their stories attached, I reconsidered.
My next inclination was to say: "Oh, but not me." After all, I have several friends, too many, who have been raped. Some repeatedly. So yes, #metoo for them...but not...for me? But then I thought further about the fellow who tried to abduct me in Paris, and who forced me to hold his hand and kissed me in a really brutal way, and...
But I'd gotten over that, right? I mean, I fled from Paris and went into a minor breakdown back in Austria. But...I was totally better. Nope. Nope. Not me. Except...
Oh, right. There was that guy who sexually harassed me in high school. The quarterback who pinned me against the bleachers and made suggestive comments. And then took the opportunity in weight lifting to give me massages. And who tried to call me out in front of the whole school cafeteria.
But...but...although I'd been scared the first time, I'd turned the rest of the times into jokes, and even enjoyed the attention by the end, and that excused pinning me against the bleachers and asking if it was good for me, right? Because: no. Not me.
Except that...
There was the neighborhood kid who looked up my skirt and was generally a jackass. And there was some pretty awful stuff that happened when I was seven or eight years old with other neighborhood kids that I'm not going to go into here, and about which I still feel guilty. Not to mention the guy masturbating on the train across from me just the other day. Not to mention the guy in Italy who groped me on the bus. Not to mention the occasional wolf whistles in town. Not to mention the guy who slapped my ass while I was walking to the train in Harlem. Not to mention the actor who used that one time to try to stick his tongue down my throat. Not to mention that dickwad who used me to cheat on his girlfriend, said he loved me, left me, begged me to be silent, and got off scott free, leaving me to suffer three years of trauma. Not to mention...not to mention...not to mention...
The subtler attacks. The jobs I'd been refused from high school on because I wasn't fuckable enough for the pervy director. The jobs I'd been refused because I was a woman who knew her mind, and this was a place run by guys in over their heads. The jobs I'd gotten where I'd had to endure being hugged and kissed as a form of greeting, while the men all shook each other's hands. The jobs I'd gotten where I was the only woman in the room, and I watched the job I was in the middle of doing being given away to another man who had just admitted he wasn't prepped for the job.
So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. ME. FUCKING. TOO.
Lice in a Tea Cozy: An Analogy
The problem of opening up one part of a trauma is that it opens up all the traumas.
Talking with my girlfriends in the weeks and months that followed, we acknowledged how shaken, how hypersensitive, how high-alert we all felt. How, in fact, by having spent the day examining our lives in the light of #metoo, we were reliving those same traumas - but this time without the safety net of recontextualizing, excusing, or laughing our traumas away.
This past summer, I wrote an article looking at how masculine vs. feminine brains generally tend to process experience and emotion.One of the most fascinating aspects I discovered was that it appears that men tend to have stronger back-to-front reactions to experiences, which encourages a man to either "fix or ditch" the experience. To put it in terms of #metoo, and why men might not have noticed what was happening daily to the women around them, since the men were not being harassed (or harassing), it was nothing they could fix and so they ditched the memory altogether. Hence, when they witnessed the next time that same woman was harassed, the men hadn't maintained the previous memory of what had happened the last time, and likely ditched this time as well.
Contrast this to how a woman processes emotion. Studies found that in general female brains process across hemispheres, as well as storing experiences immediately and automatically in the amygdala - which is the memory and emotion center of the brain. Essentially, as a woman experiences something, it gets filed and cross filed with every previous association of similar experiences, which then encourages whatever action she has deemed fittest from all her previous experiences. To put it in terms of #metoo, every time a woman experiences sexual harassment, it goes to the same memory bank as the previous one. So that to access that one time that one guy did that one thing is to access every time that particular trauma was stored. And then to enact whatever her coping mechanism might be - generally, making the trauma "safe" not only from herself, but also from you, my dear brothers.
To use an analogy:
Imagine that every time a traumatic occurrence happens it's a piece of lice.
A man's brain is generally wired to either accept the lice or to disregard it and pretend there were never any lice at all.A woman's brain is generally wired not to ditch the lice, but to keep and "make safe" the lice - possibly by knitting a nice tea cozy and covering over every little bug. The woman keeps having men fling lice on her. No problem. She pops it in the tea cozy. And it's like no one has to know and everything is fine. Another lice? No problem. Laugh it off. And it's funny to have lice. And let's just pop that in the tea cozy, shall we? And so on and so on.And it's easy, isn't it my brothers, to pretend we all like lice.
But on the day of #metoo, one by one we women took off those tea cozies, and had to deal with every wriggling worm that life had shoved on us. And some were so monstrous, we were able to tear them down (for now). And others...well, gentlemen, I imagine if you're afraid of a witch hunt, it's because you're wondering whether the girl you pinned up against the lockers in high school remembers, and whether she was thinking of you while she typed out, in fear and trembling:
#me.fucking.too.
A New Hope
Ultimately, we're going to need new legislation that favors victims rather than protecting predators. Hopefully, that legislation will start to be enacted this year. But in the meantime, my brothers, I'm going to challenge you to step up to the plate...and do nothing.
Listen. Care in, vent out.Just because a few months have passed, and we've chopped off a hydra head or two, doesn't mean the battle's done. Far from it. And you know what? That girl you groped, that woman who's "No," you didn't respect, or just this blogger you calling names in the comments...we're gonna forgive the Hell outta you.
Eventually.
Maybe not today.
And only if you're sorry.
But for God's sake: keep listening.
Because the tea cozy has come off, we've got some things to say.
~*~
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Become my patron on Patreon!
December 31, 2017
The Year of Letting Go: 2017
I've lost the most of me!There's a bag of clothes by my front door.Full of clothes now grown monstrously large on me. Excellent clothes. Beautiful clothes. Well-tailored clothes. The end of an era.
I haven't yet brought them down to the Salvation Army. In part because I'm lazy. In part because I'm impecunious and don't have the $10 to take a cab. In part because I've already brought down about seven bags this year alone, cleaning out my wardrobe so that only two items remain, in addition to the twenty or so bags and boxes I've given away in the past three years.
Largely, though, the bag remains waiting at the door because of this last part: it's a hard thing to give away everything you had. Especially when you've lived your life in poverty, so that the default thought is: "Just In Case!" But also, having my lived as a fat woman, the pernicious whisper: "Just in case."
Let It Go, Let It Go (No, But Seriously - DROP IT, Woman)
As I wrote elsewhere, and as is hard for this perfectionist to believe, there's a power in losing. Most of you know that the big change has been getting bariatric surgery in April, and losing - to date - about 80 pounds. (Give or take half a stone on holidays.)
But I'd venture to say that bariatric surgery was really just a physical manifestation of the work of these past three years. A long three years of closing doors. A lifetime, really, of learning to embrace the small deaths to the self. Of having the Divine uncurl my fingers, even if that means He has to break them, to take away what I no longer need.
Other poets and prophets have said it better than myself: the need to die while living. Seeds falling to the earth, butterflies, the process of birth itself which to the child feels like Armageddon. All Creation sings the necessity of Death.
Bigger On the Inside
Recently, while tutoring my sixth grade boys in theology, the perennial question of "What happens after?" cropped up. And I found myself describing whatever particular question ("How does Time work? What age is 'perfect?' Do we really all wear white robes and play croquet?" Answer to that last one: Oh God, no.) in terms of the TARDIS and Doctor Who.
ME. Well, I mean, I can only answer partially. After this is just...bigger on the inside.
BOY. Like Dr. Who?
ME. Exactly. Or to take another example: try to imagine explaining the ocean to a child still in the womb. You'd be like, "So there's this enormous body of water..." And they'd be like, "Like my amniotic sac, but big?" And you'd be like, "Uhm, no. Much bigger. And there are fish..." "Like my umbilical cord?" "No, no, not at all like that and...um. Just wait 'til you get out here."
Even so, then it would be a considerably long time before the infant saw the ocean. So you'd try to explain that it was like a bathtub. And they might ask: "So the ocean is really huge and surrounded by porcelain?" And you'd try to explain what sand was, and coral reefs, and how they're nothing like tiles and towels. And those rubber duckies, well there are real duckies, mobile duckies, with feathers, which are like hair? Or skin? Or nothing like that at all. And we still haven't gotten into fish, which don't have feathers - not that you understand feathers yet - they have scales which aren't like any of these other things at all, and...
And eventually, they'd get into a swimming pool, and you'd bring up the ocean again. And they'd ask whether all oceans have diving boards, and you'd consider that sometimes there are rafts that you can jump off of, but no, no that's not really like the ocean either. And they'd look suspiciously at you and say, "You said there was no porcelain holder. So there's a concrete rim? With steps?" And you'd say, "No. It just begins. And the earth...holds it in. And they...dance. Sort of. The earth and sea and the moon's involved, too. And there are waves and currents, yes a little like when you canonball in, and again, nothing like it - and there are still those fish I was talking about..."
Essentially, at each stage of life you imperfectly understand the next. And so you cling to what you partially know. Unwilling to trust that there's something better if you'd only let go. That if you only kill what you have, your hands would be open to receive infinitely more.Different, maybe, but no less "brilliant" than that. (And yes, future blog post about Jodie Whittaker forthcoming.)
Looking Forward, Looking Back
One of my resolutions in 2018 is to give that damn bag away. To shed that weight as well. To lock the door, burn the bridge, and be the cool girl who walks away from explosions without looking at them. (I'll probably look.)
In the meantime, what did I lose in 2017?
Weight. Hope to keep losing."Lost" unemployment benefits. Which meant that I was forced to earn my living just by my art. Which has included this blog, and an article in Howlround, the publication of a book, and an audiobook, and an old play, and the writing of a new play, and another new play, wrote some music, had a great year for TURN TO FLESH PRODUCTIONS and my first year on Patreon.Lost a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad roommate. Gained a wonderful new roommate! (Thank the Good Lord.) Also, can boast new knowledge of tenancy laws. Achievement unlocked!Lost some toxic relationships. Which means I gained new friendships and strengthened old ones.Learned stage combat (at least a little). Discovered even this old body was capable of more than I had thought.And got a few new clothes, courtesy of kindly friends. Eventually, I'll lose those clothes, too. But not the friends.So here's to 2018 and everything I'll continue losing: conceptions of what's in a police box, of what the ocean will be like, of who I am and what I can do.
I hope you keep losing, too.
December 28, 2017
Star Wars: The Return of the Stakes, or The Failure Frontier
Warning: The following contains multiple spoilers for the Star Wars franchise, the Whedonverse, Tolkein, Harry Potter, Hunger Games, Supernatural and The Vampire Diaries - oh, and King Arthur, Beowulf, Hercules, Gilgamesh and the Bible.
Also note: This is long. There are pictures.
To give you a running start, though, we'll begin with a bit of family history. Cue the familiar scroll...
I'm here to look pretty and kick ass. And I just ran out of ass.
A Long Time Ago, in a Galaxy Right Nearby
My family tree has pirates.
Alright, we've got privateers, which are just legal pirates, but still: I've got outlaw-rebellion-Browncoat-blood running in deep within my veins.
The story goes like this: in the War of 1812, the Mackie brothers were fishing off the Island of Skye when they were impressed into the British navy. Not caring for this, they jumped ship as soon as they made port in New York City, and joined up with a famous privateer recently hired by the US Government to stop those rascally Brits. They helped build their pirate ship, the General Armstrong, and went back to sea: this time letting loose upon those periwigged poppinjays.
However, it wasn't long before the General Armstrong was caught by a fleet of British men-of-war crafts headed across the Atlantic to strengthen the English forces in the second Revolutionary war. The British, recognizing the privateers, directed the entire fleet to give chase, eventually trapping my ancestors on the island of Faial in the Portugese-controlled Azores.
The crescent moon shaped bay helped the scrappy group of privateers to hold off the considerably larger fleet, including three men-of-war vessels, to staggering success. Among the British, about 200 men were killed or wounded, compared with only two wounded Americans on-board the General Armstrong.
However, when it became apparent that the numbers were simply against them, the privateer captain gave the order to overturn the Armstrong, set it on fire, and take shelter in a Gothic convent on the island - hacking away the drawbridge as they did so.
The British gave pursuit on land, but when their captain's threats against the neutral Portuguese government proved ineffective, the captain asked for the return of two men who had jumped ship - presumably my ancestors, the scrappy Mackie brothers. The Portugese refused, the British had to turn around and go back to England to deal with damages, and it's possible (at least according to Teddy Roosevelt) that this delay was sufficient to turn the tide of the War of 1812 in favor of the Americans.
(You can read a bit more of the history here.)
Pretty awesome stuff, right? Scrappy Americans win the day! David triumphs over Goliath again! Teensy Rebellion army with a nautical Millennium Falcon trump your enormous Death Planet, or whatever you've got going for you these days.
It's the stuff the American Dream is made of.
Except for one thing:
We don't like to talk about failure much in our modern day myths. Going in to see Wonder Woman or the latest Avengers flick, or just about any sci-fi franchise, we enter knowing that the good guys are going to win, and the bad guys are going to lose. We enter knowing that our screen will be divided up, unambiguously, between "good" and "bad" - the light and dark side of the force, Heaven and Hell, Indiana Jones and face-melting Nazis, Browncoats and the Alliance - hell, even Gryffindor vs. Slytherin.
There may even be good reason for savoring unambiguous mythology. As C. S. Lewis describes in the second novel of his Space Trilogy, Perelandra, when Ransom is astonished at the rightness of his truly justified anger at the Un-man; as Christ Himself displayed when He overturned the tables of the money changers in the Temple; as so many felt when the abuser priests of Boston came tumbling down a decade ago - sometimes, there really are good guys and bad guys. Sometimes it's helpful to simply remember there is good and there is evil. And we're fighting for good.
When these are the stakes, of course, failure is not an option. Good-enough is insufficient when your aim is Paradise. And that may be true in the grand eschatology of our souls - but here on earth? Well, Oscar Wilde said it best: "The good end happily, and the bad unhappily. This is what Fiction means." Or, to bring it back to one of my favorite shows, Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
BUFFY. Does it ever get easy?
GILES. You mean life?
BUFFY. Yeah, does it get easy?
GILES. What do you want me to say?
BUFFY. Lie to me.
GILES. Yes. It's terribly simple. The good guys are always stalwart and true. The bad guys are easily distinguished by their pointy horns or black hats, and, uh, we always defeat them and save the day. No one ever dies and...everybody lives happily ever after.
BUFFY. Liar.
Failure and the Fanboy
One of the major complaints lobbed at the latest Star Wars outing, The Last Jedi, as well as its immediate predecessor, Rogue One, is that so many of the missions fail. "What was the point of Finn and Rose's side adventure?" they ask (as in this great video from Channel Awesome). "Why was so much time spent on something that failed?"
Or as Rob Bricken wrote on io9:
Everything is perfect. And nothing truly bad will happen after this moment.
Except more winning. By winners. Winning. Because: Winners.
The other assumption at play is the uniquely American Evangelical "saved once, saved always" canard, which in some iterations promises us untold riches if we subscribe a Jesus of magical thinking; which stops existence as soon as we reach "Happily ever after," as though we could force Heaven on earth; as though Time doesn't march onward and demand not just that we choose goodness once...but that we keep choosing to do good. Day after day after boring, green-milk swigging day.
The last assumption, and perhaps the most pernicious, is the belief that there is no point to suffering. That if you cannot reap, you had best not sow. That success is a zero-sum game, and failure is absolute, unwavering, and eternal. That we cannot learn from what we lose. And therefore, in the Siren song of Hollywood, we ought to be young and rich and beautiful forever and ever amen.
The problem of these assumptions is that, ultimately, they are selfish. It's juvenile solipsism: the belief that the world revolves around myself (or my on-screen avatar). I must be the hero. The story ends when I am at my best. There is no winning if I am not the one who won it.
In this view, there is no room for anyone else to succeed - including my enemies. In this view, there is no room to keep learning, keep growing; there is only the pinnacle of immobility, and a future frozen in carbonite. In this view, failure is not just a temporary set-back, or part of every day life. Failure is nihilism in extreme. To fail is to suffer cataclysmic defeat, from which there can be no redeemer, because I am the Redeemer. And what a small redeemer I must be!
To quote G. K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy , addressing the man who "believes in himself":
It's the End of the World As We Know It
Which brings me back to the question of myth and reality that we began with - and how to look at failure.
The privateers in my family "failed." Rather than continuing to attack the British forces, they gave up everything like the Rebellion fleet, and rushed to safety to preserve whom they could. In the end, foreign diplomacy, not themselves, saved the Mackie brothers - and because of that "failure" to keep fighting, I am alive 205 years later to write this blog.
Nor are our myths and legends full of "winning men winning." King Arthur certainly was the chosen one to be king, but he was not worthy of the Holy Grail. His own sin caught up with him, as his bastard son destroyed the kingdom he created. Yet Arthur is a hero. Hercules certainly succeeded in his twelve trials, but he only underwent those trials because he went mad and murdered his wife and children. We can attribute his madness to Hera's curse, but it's because Hercules accepted the responsibility of his actions that he sits among the greats. Beowulf defeated Grendel and his mother, true, but he died in a dragon's maw. His last act was a failure, and yet he is a hero because he persevered. Gilgamesh, that ur-myth, faced the failure we all must suffer - that is, Death. And although he was a half-god, he could not defeat our final end but surrendered all to it.
King Arthur's death, by John Mulcaster Carrick
Such large and epic defeats may be easier to bear, but the pressing complaint is that of Poe's defeat, Finn and Rose's fruitless mission, the multiple deaths of Rogue One. To which I say: Bravo. Bring it on. And here's why:
Let There Be Stakes!
Beyond any philosophical or theological argument, one of the dangers of "The Chosen One" manifesting destiny in a Single Winning Bloodline of "Good Guys"...is that there's simply no drama.
Amp up the action all you want: I personally get bored of watching X-wing fighters aiming for conveniently placed plot holes time and time again. The Prequels suffered the same fate, albeit on the other side of the coin: Would Anakin Skywalker turn to the Dark Side of the Force? Yawn. And get your Jar-Jar CGI off my damn lawn.
I'm not the hero, but I'm going to fight you anyway.
It's my same problem with the early Harry Potter novels: Gee! Will he get through it? Well, whose name is in the title? (Personally, I've always been team Neville.) Suzanne Collins managed to avoid this trope somewhat in the Hunger Games books (not the movies) by writing in first person, present tense, so that although the story was narrated by Katniss Everdeen, since we were reading "in real time," our protagonist could theoretically bite it at any second.
Falling into this trap of "The Good Guys Are Always Safe Because" is the trope, too common among CW shows of a certain genre, such as Supernatural and The Vampire Diaries, wherein each season hinges on whether so-and-so will get pulled down to Hell and Die Forever And Ever...Until Next Season. Year after year slogs on in a Chosen One see-saw effect of Lead #2 taking Lead #1's place in (Supposedly) Eternal Damnation. So that the following season reverses this as Lead #1 takes Lead #2's place...until the next season where Lead #2 jumps back into death for Lead #1, who the following...so that I end up yelling at my screen: "ONE OF YOU DIE ALREADY!"
But they can't die. They can't fail. They are "chosen." There are no stakes.
I can't remember, Dean! Whose turn is it to die?
Compare this to the Whedonverse where everyone is notoriously on notice. In the movie Serenity, when Wash died, just as soon as our scrappy crew seemed to be in the clear, it hurt. It hurt because we, the audience, were on the verge of success - finally. And then just as Wash piloted us to safety like a leaf on the wind, he was impaled. And Joss being Joss: that's it. Should the crew of the Firefly ever get together again, it will be without that dinosaur loving pilot.
Wash failed. And that's why Wash matters.
Tolkien is, by his detractors, ridiculed for this "good/evil" seeming simplicity in his Lord of the Rings novels. But his trilogy is never so shallow. Frodo isn't chosen to take the One Ring. He isn't even qualified. But he sees a need and, to the best of his ability, fulfills it. Nor is he successful in his mission, ultimately. It is the failure of Frodo and the success of Gollum that ultimately leads to the destruction of the One Ring. Just as it was the "failure" of Frodo's uncle Bilbo to kill Gollum all those years ago, that ultimately led to the salvation of the world.
May the Failure Be With You
When I first watched Rogue One - and full disclosure, I went in fairly blind - I presumed that this would be the start to a new franchise. I enjoyed the characters, especially the blind non-Jedi and the new robot (that's how I thought of them, the new Star Wars names being somewhat less memorable than the original trilogy's). As the movie progressed, I began envisioning the pleasure of seeing this rag-tag crew in their further adventures. Since naturally, Corporate Hollywood being what it is, they would never pass up the opportunity to take more of our hard-earned cash. I had absolute belief in everyone's success. Because that's how Star Wars works.
Then - just in the middle of when the Rebels must succeed, they must, because I knew Luke Skywalker and company saw the plans the Rogue One team was getting...
K-2S0 died.
O Droid, my Droid.
My jaw dropped. He wasn't...dead, surely. He was a droid, right? He could be put back together.
And then another one of the crew fell. And another. And another. And another. And the whole damn world exploded. And all our heroes came to the end of their journey.
And the plans - the Good that they were pursuing as a team - got passed into the hands of other, nameless Rebels. Unknown redshirts (or white helmets) who, despite this, must survive. Because Luke Skywalker had seen the Death Star plans and...
Winning.
Darth Vader came on: the most horrifying he had ever been. Swiping Rebel after Rebel away. Succeeding on an epic and disgustingly casual scale. Succeeding as the greatest Force user would succeed if small little Rebels were in his way.
The plans got to Leia, of course, but barely. Hope was achieved, but now we knew the cost.
In the light of this, let's take a look at the failures of The Last Jedi.
Others have spoken about the political and cultural overtones of having women in charge of the Rebellion, of Kylo Ren's exemplar of toxic masculinity and white male privilege, so I'll leave those for now. Instead, let's consider the details of the plot.
From the first battle, we expect success. Moderate success, perhaps, a rousing space battle led by Han Solo-step-in, Poe Dameron, dashing around a dreadnaught and taking canons out Skywalker style. And so he does. But immediately after we're treated to the reality of what a small force against a well-armed fleet might look like in reality as Rebel ship after ship, bearing cargo holds full of explosives, implode on themselves. It was Rogue One all over again, as a nameless woman gave her life to take out a single dreadnaught. From the beginning, this was a movie about the cost of a life lived at war.
Everything's fine here. We're all fine. How are you?
Little wonder, then, that Poe was demoted by General Leia Organa, or that Vice General Holdo saw no reason to trust the man who defied direct orders and couldn't even achieve a Pyrrhic victory for the Rebellion. Poe - epically - failed.
His further attempts to gain control of the situation, from helping Rose and Finn to escape on an insane quest to infiltrate the First Order via hacker at casino, to daring to mutiny against his superior officer, are examples of faux-success. Poe successfully helps Rose and Finn. Poe successfully takes over command of the ship. Poe even successfully took out one dreadnaught. But through these very seeming successes, Poe was failing the Rebellion. Because he couldn't let Holdo succeed, he was risking everybody's death.
Meanwhile, in the too-reviled casino scene, Rose and Finn are on track to Beat the Odds™ through spunk, gumption, will-power, and can-do attitudes. Who they meet is a hacker, played by Benicio Del Toro who, among everyone we have ever met in the Star Wars universe, is undeniably successful. His allegiance is to no one but himself - and he succeeds; switching sides as will benefit him. The people at the casino, arms dealers all, are likewise winners winning. They benefit from every failure: Rebel or First Order. Even the loss of their space-horses won't really affect them. The "failure" of losing a few coins to the dice won't phase them. The destruction in the wake of the Rebels leaving can't touch them.
In fact...
Everyone who should be here is here. All the time. Winning.
A Rey of Hope
Looking at success/failure in the other storylines, some complain that because Luke Skywalker has aged and become the whiny mentor instead of the kick-ass hero, he has failed. (They apparently don't remember the whiny kid from Tattooine in A New Hope.) And, indeed, Luke has failed: failed who he could have been, failed Kylo Ren by doubting there was goodness in him, failed Rey by refusing to be her Yoda...just as he failed Yoda by running away from his training in The Empire Strikes Back all those years ago.
Yet, like the heroes of old, Luke can always learn, always change, always grow. He can be humble enough to listen to Yoda, even when he fails at destroying the Jedi tree. He can fail to survive, in order to allow his sister to live. He can "fail" being the ur-hero, and allow a new generation to take their places in life.
One thing they don't teach you in Jedi camp is how to hold a damn hand.
The majority of the tension between Rey and Kylo Ren - arguably the most compelling plot of the movie - hinges on the far more subtle question of: which way lies success? Rey faces the dark side, plunging in head first. Is this a moral success or failure? Kylo kills Snoke to save Rey, but then fails to let her save his soul. Does Kylo's Skywalker-Solo bloodline make him a Chosen One, or is his failure to live up to Darth Vader his success? Does Rey's lack of Chosen One parentage mean that she's a failure, or is her success in her pursuit of her vocation? Further, what happens if they fail to let the past die? Do they succeed if they just perpetuate the evils of their predecessors (especially the return of Jar Jar Binks)? Which way lies success? Who's right?
Those questions likely won't be answered - if they're answered at all - until the next movie. But in the meantime, we see the similar redemption arc of Poe, Finn and Rose as all three learn that success can sometimes come in the form of following orders, listening and trusting your superiors, failing to die and allowing yourself to be rescued. In short those unsexy virtues of humility. Survival. Putting the other first.
Had they, like Kylo, clung fast to vainglorious rage - to their idea of success - then we might call them failures. But since they learn from when they fall, they transform that very failure into, well...
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Also note: This is long. There are pictures.
To give you a running start, though, we'll begin with a bit of family history. Cue the familiar scroll...
I'm here to look pretty and kick ass. And I just ran out of ass.A Long Time Ago, in a Galaxy Right Nearby
My family tree has pirates.
Alright, we've got privateers, which are just legal pirates, but still: I've got outlaw-rebellion-Browncoat-blood running in deep within my veins.
The story goes like this: in the War of 1812, the Mackie brothers were fishing off the Island of Skye when they were impressed into the British navy. Not caring for this, they jumped ship as soon as they made port in New York City, and joined up with a famous privateer recently hired by the US Government to stop those rascally Brits. They helped build their pirate ship, the General Armstrong, and went back to sea: this time letting loose upon those periwigged poppinjays.
However, it wasn't long before the General Armstrong was caught by a fleet of British men-of-war crafts headed across the Atlantic to strengthen the English forces in the second Revolutionary war. The British, recognizing the privateers, directed the entire fleet to give chase, eventually trapping my ancestors on the island of Faial in the Portugese-controlled Azores.
The crescent moon shaped bay helped the scrappy group of privateers to hold off the considerably larger fleet, including three men-of-war vessels, to staggering success. Among the British, about 200 men were killed or wounded, compared with only two wounded Americans on-board the General Armstrong.
However, when it became apparent that the numbers were simply against them, the privateer captain gave the order to overturn the Armstrong, set it on fire, and take shelter in a Gothic convent on the island - hacking away the drawbridge as they did so.
The British gave pursuit on land, but when their captain's threats against the neutral Portuguese government proved ineffective, the captain asked for the return of two men who had jumped ship - presumably my ancestors, the scrappy Mackie brothers. The Portugese refused, the British had to turn around and go back to England to deal with damages, and it's possible (at least according to Teddy Roosevelt) that this delay was sufficient to turn the tide of the War of 1812 in favor of the Americans.
(You can read a bit more of the history here.)
Pretty awesome stuff, right? Scrappy Americans win the day! David triumphs over Goliath again! Teensy Rebellion army with a nautical Millennium Falcon trump your enormous Death Planet, or whatever you've got going for you these days.
It's the stuff the American Dream is made of.
Except for one thing:
It wasn't our actions that won the day; it was our failure.Mything the Point
We don't like to talk about failure much in our modern day myths. Going in to see Wonder Woman or the latest Avengers flick, or just about any sci-fi franchise, we enter knowing that the good guys are going to win, and the bad guys are going to lose. We enter knowing that our screen will be divided up, unambiguously, between "good" and "bad" - the light and dark side of the force, Heaven and Hell, Indiana Jones and face-melting Nazis, Browncoats and the Alliance - hell, even Gryffindor vs. Slytherin.
We like our myths like we like our brandy: neat.There certainly is room within mythology to look at the world without ambiguity. The Lord of the Rings trilogy makes no bones about the irredeemable nature of Sauron, which in turn necessitates the total destruction the One Ring. In fairy tales and lore, there's a moral absolutism which allows us to kill allegorical wolves with impunity. In fact, I remember the outrage from my kindergardeners, once, when I tried to tell Peter and the Wolf as it's actually written: with the wolf put in a zoo, and the duck still trapped in its belly. Sixty pairs of eyes looked at me with contempt and requested the proper ending: with the wolf very, very dead. (The duck's fate was debated, with myself at last deciding that the wolf burping before his death so the duck could escape was the better part of educational valor.)
There may even be good reason for savoring unambiguous mythology. As C. S. Lewis describes in the second novel of his Space Trilogy, Perelandra, when Ransom is astonished at the rightness of his truly justified anger at the Un-man; as Christ Himself displayed when He overturned the tables of the money changers in the Temple; as so many felt when the abuser priests of Boston came tumbling down a decade ago - sometimes, there really are good guys and bad guys. Sometimes it's helpful to simply remember there is good and there is evil. And we're fighting for good.
When these are the stakes, of course, failure is not an option. Good-enough is insufficient when your aim is Paradise. And that may be true in the grand eschatology of our souls - but here on earth? Well, Oscar Wilde said it best: "The good end happily, and the bad unhappily. This is what Fiction means." Or, to bring it back to one of my favorite shows, Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
BUFFY. Does it ever get easy?GILES. You mean life?
BUFFY. Yeah, does it get easy?
GILES. What do you want me to say?
BUFFY. Lie to me.
GILES. Yes. It's terribly simple. The good guys are always stalwart and true. The bad guys are easily distinguished by their pointy horns or black hats, and, uh, we always defeat them and save the day. No one ever dies and...everybody lives happily ever after.
BUFFY. Liar.
Failure and the Fanboy
One of the major complaints lobbed at the latest Star Wars outing, The Last Jedi, as well as its immediate predecessor, Rogue One, is that so many of the missions fail. "What was the point of Finn and Rose's side adventure?" they ask (as in this great video from Channel Awesome). "Why was so much time spent on something that failed?"
Or as Rob Bricken wrote on io9:
Everything is perfect. And nothing truly bad will happen after this moment. Except more winning. By winners. Winning. Because: Winners.
"Luke Skywalker was my hero. It’s not that I necessarily considered him the best hero in pop culture, it’s that he was The Hero...When he becomes one with the Force, things are infinitely worse...[than] before Luke starts his journey. Evil rules the galaxy. There are no more than a dozen members left living in the neo-Rebellion...His adventures, his sacrifices, his victories in the three movies that dominated my childhood accomplished nothing, meant nothing."The underlying assumption, of course, is that age old and peculiarly American belief that individual success is everything. We are on the Hero's Journey: singular. It's not about Goodness itself, it's about this winning guy winning. It's the American Manifest Destiny, the myth of the "Chosen One," of the Nobody fated to be the Somebody, promulgated from every Disney Channel movie to this terrific lampoon by Frye and Laurie. It's very, well, Charlie Sheen. Or in the vaguely plural, Trump.
The other assumption at play is the uniquely American Evangelical "saved once, saved always" canard, which in some iterations promises us untold riches if we subscribe a Jesus of magical thinking; which stops existence as soon as we reach "Happily ever after," as though we could force Heaven on earth; as though Time doesn't march onward and demand not just that we choose goodness once...but that we keep choosing to do good. Day after day after boring, green-milk swigging day.
The last assumption, and perhaps the most pernicious, is the belief that there is no point to suffering. That if you cannot reap, you had best not sow. That success is a zero-sum game, and failure is absolute, unwavering, and eternal. That we cannot learn from what we lose. And therefore, in the Siren song of Hollywood, we ought to be young and rich and beautiful forever and ever amen.
The problem of these assumptions is that, ultimately, they are selfish. It's juvenile solipsism: the belief that the world revolves around myself (or my on-screen avatar). I must be the hero. The story ends when I am at my best. There is no winning if I am not the one who won it.
In this view, there is no room for anyone else to succeed - including my enemies. In this view, there is no room to keep learning, keep growing; there is only the pinnacle of immobility, and a future frozen in carbonite. In this view, failure is not just a temporary set-back, or part of every day life. Failure is nihilism in extreme. To fail is to suffer cataclysmic defeat, from which there can be no redeemer, because I am the Redeemer. And what a small redeemer I must be!
To quote G. K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy , addressing the man who "believes in himself":
"Are there no other stories in the world except yours; and are all men busy with your business?...How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it; if you could really look at other men with common curiosity and pleasure; if you could see them walking as they are in their sunny selfishness and their virile indifference! You would begin to be interested in them, because they were not interested in you. You would break out of this tiny and tawdry theatre in which your own little plot is always being played, and you would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers."
It's the End of the World As We Know It
Which brings me back to the question of myth and reality that we began with - and how to look at failure.
The privateers in my family "failed." Rather than continuing to attack the British forces, they gave up everything like the Rebellion fleet, and rushed to safety to preserve whom they could. In the end, foreign diplomacy, not themselves, saved the Mackie brothers - and because of that "failure" to keep fighting, I am alive 205 years later to write this blog.
Nor are our myths and legends full of "winning men winning." King Arthur certainly was the chosen one to be king, but he was not worthy of the Holy Grail. His own sin caught up with him, as his bastard son destroyed the kingdom he created. Yet Arthur is a hero. Hercules certainly succeeded in his twelve trials, but he only underwent those trials because he went mad and murdered his wife and children. We can attribute his madness to Hera's curse, but it's because Hercules accepted the responsibility of his actions that he sits among the greats. Beowulf defeated Grendel and his mother, true, but he died in a dragon's maw. His last act was a failure, and yet he is a hero because he persevered. Gilgamesh, that ur-myth, faced the failure we all must suffer - that is, Death. And although he was a half-god, he could not defeat our final end but surrendered all to it.
King Arthur's death, by John Mulcaster CarrickSuch large and epic defeats may be easier to bear, but the pressing complaint is that of Poe's defeat, Finn and Rose's fruitless mission, the multiple deaths of Rogue One. To which I say: Bravo. Bring it on. And here's why:
Let There Be Stakes!
Beyond any philosophical or theological argument, one of the dangers of "The Chosen One" manifesting destiny in a Single Winning Bloodline of "Good Guys"...is that there's simply no drama.
Amp up the action all you want: I personally get bored of watching X-wing fighters aiming for conveniently placed plot holes time and time again. The Prequels suffered the same fate, albeit on the other side of the coin: Would Anakin Skywalker turn to the Dark Side of the Force? Yawn. And get your Jar-Jar CGI off my damn lawn.
I'm not the hero, but I'm going to fight you anyway.It's my same problem with the early Harry Potter novels: Gee! Will he get through it? Well, whose name is in the title? (Personally, I've always been team Neville.) Suzanne Collins managed to avoid this trope somewhat in the Hunger Games books (not the movies) by writing in first person, present tense, so that although the story was narrated by Katniss Everdeen, since we were reading "in real time," our protagonist could theoretically bite it at any second.
Falling into this trap of "The Good Guys Are Always Safe Because" is the trope, too common among CW shows of a certain genre, such as Supernatural and The Vampire Diaries, wherein each season hinges on whether so-and-so will get pulled down to Hell and Die Forever And Ever...Until Next Season. Year after year slogs on in a Chosen One see-saw effect of Lead #2 taking Lead #1's place in (Supposedly) Eternal Damnation. So that the following season reverses this as Lead #1 takes Lead #2's place...until the next season where Lead #2 jumps back into death for Lead #1, who the following...so that I end up yelling at my screen: "ONE OF YOU DIE ALREADY!"
But they can't die. They can't fail. They are "chosen." There are no stakes.
I can't remember, Dean! Whose turn is it to die?Compare this to the Whedonverse where everyone is notoriously on notice. In the movie Serenity, when Wash died, just as soon as our scrappy crew seemed to be in the clear, it hurt. It hurt because we, the audience, were on the verge of success - finally. And then just as Wash piloted us to safety like a leaf on the wind, he was impaled. And Joss being Joss: that's it. Should the crew of the Firefly ever get together again, it will be without that dinosaur loving pilot.
Wash failed. And that's why Wash matters.
Tolkien is, by his detractors, ridiculed for this "good/evil" seeming simplicity in his Lord of the Rings novels. But his trilogy is never so shallow. Frodo isn't chosen to take the One Ring. He isn't even qualified. But he sees a need and, to the best of his ability, fulfills it. Nor is he successful in his mission, ultimately. It is the failure of Frodo and the success of Gollum that ultimately leads to the destruction of the One Ring. Just as it was the "failure" of Frodo's uncle Bilbo to kill Gollum all those years ago, that ultimately led to the salvation of the world.
May the Failure Be With You
When I first watched Rogue One - and full disclosure, I went in fairly blind - I presumed that this would be the start to a new franchise. I enjoyed the characters, especially the blind non-Jedi and the new robot (that's how I thought of them, the new Star Wars names being somewhat less memorable than the original trilogy's). As the movie progressed, I began envisioning the pleasure of seeing this rag-tag crew in their further adventures. Since naturally, Corporate Hollywood being what it is, they would never pass up the opportunity to take more of our hard-earned cash. I had absolute belief in everyone's success. Because that's how Star Wars works.
Then - just in the middle of when the Rebels must succeed, they must, because I knew Luke Skywalker and company saw the plans the Rogue One team was getting...
K-2S0 died.
O Droid, my Droid.My jaw dropped. He wasn't...dead, surely. He was a droid, right? He could be put back together.
And then another one of the crew fell. And another. And another. And another. And the whole damn world exploded. And all our heroes came to the end of their journey.
And the plans - the Good that they were pursuing as a team - got passed into the hands of other, nameless Rebels. Unknown redshirts (or white helmets) who, despite this, must survive. Because Luke Skywalker had seen the Death Star plans and...
Winning.Darth Vader came on: the most horrifying he had ever been. Swiping Rebel after Rebel away. Succeeding on an epic and disgustingly casual scale. Succeeding as the greatest Force user would succeed if small little Rebels were in his way.
The plans got to Leia, of course, but barely. Hope was achieved, but now we knew the cost.
Success had come precisely because so many heroes had failed.I'm Just a Poe Boy, I Get No Sympathy
In the light of this, let's take a look at the failures of The Last Jedi.
Others have spoken about the political and cultural overtones of having women in charge of the Rebellion, of Kylo Ren's exemplar of toxic masculinity and white male privilege, so I'll leave those for now. Instead, let's consider the details of the plot.
From the first battle, we expect success. Moderate success, perhaps, a rousing space battle led by Han Solo-step-in, Poe Dameron, dashing around a dreadnaught and taking canons out Skywalker style. And so he does. But immediately after we're treated to the reality of what a small force against a well-armed fleet might look like in reality as Rebel ship after ship, bearing cargo holds full of explosives, implode on themselves. It was Rogue One all over again, as a nameless woman gave her life to take out a single dreadnaught. From the beginning, this was a movie about the cost of a life lived at war.
Everything's fine here. We're all fine. How are you?Little wonder, then, that Poe was demoted by General Leia Organa, or that Vice General Holdo saw no reason to trust the man who defied direct orders and couldn't even achieve a Pyrrhic victory for the Rebellion. Poe - epically - failed.
His further attempts to gain control of the situation, from helping Rose and Finn to escape on an insane quest to infiltrate the First Order via hacker at casino, to daring to mutiny against his superior officer, are examples of faux-success. Poe successfully helps Rose and Finn. Poe successfully takes over command of the ship. Poe even successfully took out one dreadnaught. But through these very seeming successes, Poe was failing the Rebellion. Because he couldn't let Holdo succeed, he was risking everybody's death.
Meanwhile, in the too-reviled casino scene, Rose and Finn are on track to Beat the Odds™ through spunk, gumption, will-power, and can-do attitudes. Who they meet is a hacker, played by Benicio Del Toro who, among everyone we have ever met in the Star Wars universe, is undeniably successful. His allegiance is to no one but himself - and he succeeds; switching sides as will benefit him. The people at the casino, arms dealers all, are likewise winners winning. They benefit from every failure: Rebel or First Order. Even the loss of their space-horses won't really affect them. The "failure" of losing a few coins to the dice won't phase them. The destruction in the wake of the Rebels leaving can't touch them.
In fact...
The beauty of the casino scene is that it shows the inertia of success.
Everyone who should be here is here. All the time. Winning.A Rey of Hope
Looking at success/failure in the other storylines, some complain that because Luke Skywalker has aged and become the whiny mentor instead of the kick-ass hero, he has failed. (They apparently don't remember the whiny kid from Tattooine in A New Hope.) And, indeed, Luke has failed: failed who he could have been, failed Kylo Ren by doubting there was goodness in him, failed Rey by refusing to be her Yoda...just as he failed Yoda by running away from his training in The Empire Strikes Back all those years ago.
Yet, like the heroes of old, Luke can always learn, always change, always grow. He can be humble enough to listen to Yoda, even when he fails at destroying the Jedi tree. He can fail to survive, in order to allow his sister to live. He can "fail" being the ur-hero, and allow a new generation to take their places in life.
One thing they don't teach you in Jedi camp is how to hold a damn hand.The majority of the tension between Rey and Kylo Ren - arguably the most compelling plot of the movie - hinges on the far more subtle question of: which way lies success? Rey faces the dark side, plunging in head first. Is this a moral success or failure? Kylo kills Snoke to save Rey, but then fails to let her save his soul. Does Kylo's Skywalker-Solo bloodline make him a Chosen One, or is his failure to live up to Darth Vader his success? Does Rey's lack of Chosen One parentage mean that she's a failure, or is her success in her pursuit of her vocation? Further, what happens if they fail to let the past die? Do they succeed if they just perpetuate the evils of their predecessors (especially the return of Jar Jar Binks)? Which way lies success? Who's right?
Those questions likely won't be answered - if they're answered at all - until the next movie. But in the meantime, we see the similar redemption arc of Poe, Finn and Rose as all three learn that success can sometimes come in the form of following orders, listening and trusting your superiors, failing to die and allowing yourself to be rescued. In short those unsexy virtues of humility. Survival. Putting the other first.
Had they, like Kylo, clung fast to vainglorious rage - to their idea of success - then we might call them failures. But since they learn from when they fall, they transform that very failure into, well...
Hope.~*~
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December 23, 2017
Hello, Young Authors Whomever You Are
'Twas the Friday before Christmas, and despite all the fuss
Emily got up way early to jump on a bus
First hour she slumbered; in the second she droned;
Until in the third she turned on her phone,
Fired up the wi-fi and suddenly saw
Her play had been published! She whispered: "Huzzah!"
Soon after the news came in a separate email
That the long-delayed audiobook was finally for sale.
"Phew!" Emily muttered, and sent out the news,
Awaiting the fun of her Facebook reviews.
But when she got home to her nephews and nieces
She forgot all about her latest releases.
After all, she was far from her first publication,
And so she forgot to include jubilation.
"It's curious," she pondered, as she blogged late at night.
"But I guess that's what happens when your career is to write.
It's not you're not happy when something's come out,
But after the first, it seems silly to shout.
And besides, whatever you're writing at present gives grief,
So something else published is an instant relief.
"But still," Emily thought, as she paused on her keyboard,"Had I been younger, my heart would have soared!
Two releases, one day? My first audiobook?
I should climb on a rooftop and shout out, 'Hey! Look!'
Why aren't I giddy? I shouldn't be lacksidazing!
How blessèd am I? TWO RELEASES? Amazing!"
The branches outside, though, were all covered in ice
And besides the neighbors thought it not nice
When women climbed rooftops to shout to the sky:
"I'm really an Author! Oh, Mr. Williams...hi..."
So down to the basement she started with glee
To log onto the blog of one Emily
And shout (very quietly) to folks large and small,
"Happy release day to us! And Merry Christmas to all!"
~*~
Related Posts:
Publishing 101: You Can Do It!
Publishing 101: Dealing With Rejection
A History of Words
Let There Be Light: Performing Beauty When the World Seems Worst
~*~
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Become my patron on Patreon!
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