Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 870
February 8, 2016
The lightweight candidate: Rubio’s NH town hall left no doubt he’s in it for himself and the plutocrats who fund his campaign
Toward the end of his town hall in a crowded school cafeteria in Hudson, New Hampshire, on Sunday, Marco Rubio said something that summed up the shallowness of his campaign and his character. If you had any doubt that he is in this race for the benefit of anyone other than himself and the plutocrats funding his campaign, this should drive them right out. To explain, let’s start with the protesters. Before the event’s start, a group of about 25 protesters had gathered outside the front door of Hills Garrison Elementary School. They were volunteers for the United Auto Workers who had driven up from New York to spend a couple of days bringing their message to New Hampshire. They were protesting not Rubio specifically, but their feeling that there has been too little recognition of what all the GOP candidates’ economic policies will accomplish if implemented. Namely, that the benefits of their tax plans will accrue mostly to upper-income taxpayers through the reduction of rates and elimination of capital gains taxes, while the vast swath of middle- and working-class folks will see their healthcare disappear when a GOP president repeals Obamacare, their Social Security vanish down rat holes labeled “raising the retirement age” and “benefit reductions,” and their wages continue stagnating as the upper class uses its financial and political power to grab more of the pie for itself. In short, the protesters are there to talk about one of the central themes of this election, that of the effects on society of the vast wealth-inequality gap between the very rich who are funding most of these campaigns, and everyone else. The group called themselves “superheroes for the super-rich.” To that end, a few of them wore superhero masks – Batman, Spider-Man, Captain America (the DC-Marvel rivalry having been set aside in the fight against inequality). They chanted sarcastic slogans that were the equivalent of a Bronx cheer: “We don’t need no middle class … Marco Rubio’s got our backs!” So, here was Rubio giving his stump speech inside the cafeteria a little later: “I wanna be a president for all Americans. Batman and Spider-Man out there? I’m going to cut their taxes too!” The line got a big laugh, because ho ho ho, those silly liberals outside don’t realize that Marco Rubio, in the middle of his ongoing audition to be Sheldon Adelson’s cabana boy, wants to put more money in their pockets by slashing their taxes. And if all his millionaire super PAC donors get more money in their pockets at the same time, well, that’s just as American as apple pie. To which I feel comfortable saying that the protesters outside would reply, “Piss off.” They were not out there complaining that their taxes are too high. They were upset, in part, because the low taxes paid by Rubio’s backers have helped create an unsustainable inequality gap not seen since the Gilded Age of the 1920s. They were complaining because they have been told for decades that if millionaires get tax cuts, that will somehow unleash the power of the American economy to grow and grow, and everyone will benefit. They have seen that the theory of trickle-down economics Rubio pushes is a load of hot garbage, that he is selling snake oil, and they aren’t getting suckered into buying it. Let us try to imagine a politician who might have at the very least sent a staff member out to the protesters to find out what they were upset about and come back and briefed him before he engaged in this insulting round of hippie-punching. That politician would be a much better choice for president than Marco Rubio. The irony is that Rubio in person is better than the Rubio I had seen in the GOP debate the night before, and in every other debate and Fox News interview. He might still be spouting memorized talking points, but he comes off as more natural in front of a crowd. He even manages to make his laugh lines sound spontaneous. He’s not a bad candidate as long as you don’t pay close attention to the actual content of the policies he advocates. In fact, his team must be feverishly hoping that the electorate is so distracted by Donald Trump and Ted Cruz that it won’t listen too closely to Rubio, who can sound just as unhinged and ridiculous as those two sociopaths. In Hudson, he promises that on day one of his presidency, he’ll tear up the deal with Iran and repeal “every single one of Obama’s unconstitutional executive orders.” He’ll rebuild the military, which has shrunk to unacceptable levels, and size matters to Marco Rubio. He’ll send every suspected terrorist he can get his hands on right to Guantánamo, legal niceties be damned. He’ll secure the border and deport all the violent criminals who are here illegally. Basically, Rubio comes off like a mashup of Greg Stillson and a particularly frenetic labradoodle. Kind of butch, kind of nuts and really, really hoping you like him. And conventional wisdom has it that he’s the best hope the GOP has to win the general election, if it can only get him through the primaries without the public noticing that he’s such a lightweight, CBS could have strapped a camera to him and floated him over the Super Bowl on Sunday night. Which would be a much better use of him than as another ring in the circus that is this primary season.Toward the end of his town hall in a crowded school cafeteria in Hudson, New Hampshire, on Sunday, Marco Rubio said something that summed up the shallowness of his campaign and his character. If you had any doubt that he is in this race for the benefit of anyone other than himself and the plutocrats funding his campaign, this should drive them right out. To explain, let’s start with the protesters. Before the event’s start, a group of about 25 protesters had gathered outside the front door of Hills Garrison Elementary School. They were volunteers for the United Auto Workers who had driven up from New York to spend a couple of days bringing their message to New Hampshire. They were protesting not Rubio specifically, but their feeling that there has been too little recognition of what all the GOP candidates’ economic policies will accomplish if implemented. Namely, that the benefits of their tax plans will accrue mostly to upper-income taxpayers through the reduction of rates and elimination of capital gains taxes, while the vast swath of middle- and working-class folks will see their healthcare disappear when a GOP president repeals Obamacare, their Social Security vanish down rat holes labeled “raising the retirement age” and “benefit reductions,” and their wages continue stagnating as the upper class uses its financial and political power to grab more of the pie for itself. In short, the protesters are there to talk about one of the central themes of this election, that of the effects on society of the vast wealth-inequality gap between the very rich who are funding most of these campaigns, and everyone else. The group called themselves “superheroes for the super-rich.” To that end, a few of them wore superhero masks – Batman, Spider-Man, Captain America (the DC-Marvel rivalry having been set aside in the fight against inequality). They chanted sarcastic slogans that were the equivalent of a Bronx cheer: “We don’t need no middle class … Marco Rubio’s got our backs!” So, here was Rubio giving his stump speech inside the cafeteria a little later: “I wanna be a president for all Americans. Batman and Spider-Man out there? I’m going to cut their taxes too!” The line got a big laugh, because ho ho ho, those silly liberals outside don’t realize that Marco Rubio, in the middle of his ongoing audition to be Sheldon Adelson’s cabana boy, wants to put more money in their pockets by slashing their taxes. And if all his millionaire super PAC donors get more money in their pockets at the same time, well, that’s just as American as apple pie. To which I feel comfortable saying that the protesters outside would reply, “Piss off.” They were not out there complaining that their taxes are too high. They were upset, in part, because the low taxes paid by Rubio’s backers have helped create an unsustainable inequality gap not seen since the Gilded Age of the 1920s. They were complaining because they have been told for decades that if millionaires get tax cuts, that will somehow unleash the power of the American economy to grow and grow, and everyone will benefit. They have seen that the theory of trickle-down economics Rubio pushes is a load of hot garbage, that he is selling snake oil, and they aren’t getting suckered into buying it. Let us try to imagine a politician who might have at the very least sent a staff member out to the protesters to find out what they were upset about and come back and briefed him before he engaged in this insulting round of hippie-punching. That politician would be a much better choice for president than Marco Rubio. The irony is that Rubio in person is better than the Rubio I had seen in the GOP debate the night before, and in every other debate and Fox News interview. He might still be spouting memorized talking points, but he comes off as more natural in front of a crowd. He even manages to make his laugh lines sound spontaneous. He’s not a bad candidate as long as you don’t pay close attention to the actual content of the policies he advocates. In fact, his team must be feverishly hoping that the electorate is so distracted by Donald Trump and Ted Cruz that it won’t listen too closely to Rubio, who can sound just as unhinged and ridiculous as those two sociopaths. In Hudson, he promises that on day one of his presidency, he’ll tear up the deal with Iran and repeal “every single one of Obama’s unconstitutional executive orders.” He’ll rebuild the military, which has shrunk to unacceptable levels, and size matters to Marco Rubio. He’ll send every suspected terrorist he can get his hands on right to Guantánamo, legal niceties be damned. He’ll secure the border and deport all the violent criminals who are here illegally. Basically, Rubio comes off like a mashup of Greg Stillson and a particularly frenetic labradoodle. Kind of butch, kind of nuts and really, really hoping you like him. And conventional wisdom has it that he’s the best hope the GOP has to win the general election, if it can only get him through the primaries without the public noticing that he’s such a lightweight, CBS could have strapped a camera to him and floated him over the Super Bowl on Sunday night. Which would be a much better use of him than as another ring in the circus that is this primary season.
Novelists Sara Gruen and Sarah McCoy in conversation: “I study history through a kind of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ looking-glass”
Sarah McCoy's novel "The Baker’s Daughter" was a nominee for the 2012 Goodreads Choice Award for Best Historical Fiction, a New York Times and international bestseller, and perennial book club favorite. She returns with her third novel, "The Mapmaker’s Children," for which Sarah spent three years researching abolitionist John Brown’s family history — most notably, his daughter Sarah Brown. Praised as ingeniously plotted and magnificently transporting, "The Mapmaker’s Children" highlights the power of community and legacy, illustrating the ways in which history and destiny are interconnected on one enormous, intricate map. "The Mapmaker’s Children" was hailed by the Washington Post as "lovingly constructed" and "passionately told.” The Dallas Morning News raved, "McCoy mined the archives for information about Brown's daughter Sarah, an artist who is the titular character of her latest novel … The lacing of the two plots is seamless." Gruen also happens to be my dear friend and fellow fan of pajamas and fascinators. I’m delighted to sit down with her in pajamas (the official uniform of our writerly sisterhood) and chat about her book, releasing in paperback Feb. 9. Sara Gruen: Welcome Sarah! Sarah McCoy: Hello, dear friend, I’m equally thrilled and PJ-ed to be here with you! Yes, but I’m in footies, so I win. Moving on, let’s talk about your book. "The Mapmaker’s Children" moves back and forth between Eden Anderson in 2014 New Charlestown, West Virginia, and Sarah Brown, daughter of abolitionist John Brown in 1859 West Virginia. What was the spark of inspiration that connected these two over 150 years apart? The "spark" for each of my historical novels has come to me differently. Is it the same for you? Other author friends have told me how they are inspired through a consistent mode: a visual image, historical character, political agenda, emotional struggle, color, food, etc. My muse likes to throw her bolts in various forms. I’ve never had a story come to me the same way. "The Mapmaker’s Children" began with a sentence being spoken: “A dog is not a child,” the woman Eden Anderson said. And it was the way she said it that wouldn’t let me be. Confident, irked and, yet, deeply wounded by the words she spoke. I couldn’t shush her no matter what I did. Months of hearing this over and over in my head produced a wicked case of insomnia. I was worried I’d developed schizophrenia! (Hush, I read your thought bubble, sister.) I didn’t say a word! (LOL—in silent thought bubble.) (Moving on…) In an effort to reclaim my compos mentis, I wrote the sentence and its corresponding scene in my journal. I realized then that the statement was echoing through and out the front door of an old house. The house in New Charlestown was calling me to research its past and solve its Underground Railroad secret. A mystery set between Eden in present-day West Virginia and Sarah Brown 150 years ago. Looking back, I realize that from the first sentence, I was playing mapmaker to the Mapmaker. Sarah to Sarah, as creepy as that sounds. I methodically outlined both characters' narrative trajectory start-to-finish. Using that as my guide, I wrote the back and forth chapters, allowing that outline to guide me but also to transform, meander and lead me to new territory as the characters commanded. While we’re on the subject of structure—now from Sara to Sarah to Sarah—"The Mapmaker’s Children" weaves two dynamic voices, Eden and Sarah. A dual narrative, multiple POVs. How did you decide on that specific form: alternating chapters between 2014 and 1859. What challenges did you face? As a writer and reader, the historical-contemporary dual narrative is often my organic way of processing the past. Collectively, as human beings, we view history through our present-day lens and make connections and judgments based on that reflection. It’s similar in the fictional worlds I’m working in. I study history through a kind of "Alice in Wonderland" looking-glass with an eye to how the quiet details tell a greater story that then has a macro impact on the future. I wrote that way for "The Baker’s Daughter" and now again in "The Mapmaker’s Children." I’m fascinated by how the people of the past can reach across generations and impact the present; how mysteries of the present have their solutions in the past; how issues we face and decisions we make today are strikingly similar to ones our forbearers made—with good and bad outcomes. I’m riveted by this interplay. I think it’s important we don’t just read and compartmentalize the past as an “interesting story.” As writers, we want readers to see that history is a key, a manual, a lesson guidebook for us to learn and implement change in our present lives. In essence, Eden Anderson in "The Mapmaker’s Children" is being guided by Sarah Brown in 1859. Their struggles are mirrored and connected via significant and minor decisions. They develop each other: Eden’s life is changed as she (and we) discover Sarah’s secrets. That all being said, two books in one does not make for easy or simple novel writing. There were days when I could’ve sworn I really had fallen down that the white rabbit hole and lost my mind. Being the illustrious historical fiction writer you are, you know well that the challenge to writing historical fiction is being faithful to the facts while developing the fiction. It’s hard work—amen? Amen! The cardinal sin is to misinform or trick readers. We want readers to learn truth from our stories, be it a sequence of historical events or an emotional education. The characters must be authentic to their place and time. Sarah Brown was our kind of gal. A get-down-in-the-trenches pioneer woman who didn’t mind that her fingers were ink-stained with her life’s work. Eden Anderson is a manifestation of many women I know in real life who’ve struggled with infertility, having a career, maintaining a home, loving a spouse, and wanting to do it all at 110 percent! Both of these women sound uncannily familiar, right? I believe the key is to ensure that the storytelling is authentic to the characters’ spirits and honors their true lives transcribed into make-believe. While we have Sarahs on the brain, was it strange writing a character with your own name? Seeing “Sarah” everywhere you turned for the next three years while you researched and wrote the book? Not that anyone’s complaining … it’s a fine name, if I do say so myself. Ahem. It is a darn fine name, I wholeheartedly agree with you, Sara. Our mommas were obviously women of brilliant taste. Though, technically, Mary Day Brown (Sarah Brown’s momma) claimed it long before either of ours. It was a little bizarre writing “Sarah this, Sarah that” for all those years, but as an author, you sort of put on this Other Objective Person hardhat when it comes to your characters. I lose myself and become a conduit—a listener and translator—to their lives and not a direct participant in their business. The name commonality was one of those goosebumps experiences: fate unquestionably at work. Had John Brown’s only unmarried, artist daughter been named Dorcus, that would’ve been one of "The Mapmaker’s Children’s" protagonists’ names. It just so happens my name is Sarah, too. Perhaps that’s what made her story spirit seek me out—a sister Sarah. But I can confidently say she was and is her own autonomous person. I learned from her; I admire her greatly for the legacy she left behind. Through the writing of this novel, I’ve integrated aspects of her into my own life that I didn’t have on page 1. She inspired me to be a braver, bolder, stronger woman, unafraid to map my own life outside of the constraints of convention. She told me, You’re OK, Sarah. You’re OK, readers out there. We’re OK, sister women. That was her inheritance to me, and I pray to everyone who picks up this book. Well, I can tell you, she’s branded on my memory now, too. Sister Sara(h)s: I think we should form a club— a book club! Pajamas mandatory, fascinators still open for discussion. Speaking of, I think this novel would be a hit with book clubs. So many topics of discussion. What issues do you hope readers take away from the novel? That’s a tough question — there’s so much! I'll limit my answer to one of the overarching themes: nurturing and defining a family. As a global community, I believe we've allowed a worrisome stereotype to become the high mark of good family model. We've constructed a rigid mold for what a happy family looks like and anything different is somehow ... less. It weighed heavily on me and continues to. So I asked: Can you be a devoted parent without physical procreation? Does a loving, fulfilling family have to consist of children? Does being a parent only apply to humans or can you parent/nurture animals or a righteous cause? Who wrote the prototypical happily-ever-after and might each of us have the power to rewrite it? I noticed that a majority of my friends (men and women, couples to singles) were uncomfortable—even disgruntled—by my questioning of the status quo in group settings. Yet in private, they admitted that they internally battled these very constraints. It mystified me. Why weren't we able to have an open conversation? Why were people afraid to challenge the norm? And what happened to those who didn't attain the set parent-child-family vision—was their family and legacy not as good as those who did? Being an author, I sought answers through my characters. Likewise, I hope readers of "The Mapmaker's Children" are willing to ponder the questions and possibly discover keys to their own hearts, too. So true. Latching on to your question regarding being a parent/nurturer to animals— can we please talk puppy love? I love animals! Earlier you said that the spark of the book was Eden saying, “A dog is not a child,” so I don’t think I’m giving away anything to readers by mentioning there is a wonderful dog involved. You have a dog. In fact, he’s my Coco’s one true love! Tell us about him. First off, I must mention that this was one of the first things that brought us together and solidified our forever friendship— we are fur mamas! I swoon over the photos of your pets and love hearing all of your escapades with them. They are our children, too. As you know, I have a little king of the castle named Gilbert [Blythe]. We call him Gilly for short. He’s a 10-pound Coton de Tulear who rules our home with a furry fist. We adopted him from a breeder outside of Chicago after a heartbreaking experience with our much-loved first dog. His name was Gatsby, a darling cockapoo (Cocker Spaniel Poodle). At 2 years old, he developed stomach lymphoma—a grapefruit-sized malignant mass. We chose not to put him down but nurse him with chemotherapy and love to the very last minute. We were there for that, too. We held his tired body, rocked him, prayed over him, and watched as he slipped from this world to the next. It was an incredibly spiritual moment that neither my husband nor I will ever forget. It was sad, yes, but not in the devastating way we assumed. There was peace and beauty to it. Life so fragile, so fleeting, so powerful in its existence. About a year later Gilly was born on the day after my birthday. I have every confidence that Gilly met Gatsby before he came down to us. I grew up with dogs. My family is a huge animal-loving clan, but I was surprised by how different and potent the experience was as the primary nurturer. Pets are children, family members, beloved friends and so much more. Gilly has taught me patience, unconditional love, not to put too much stock in anything material because it can always be chewed, inexplicable joy that comes from nothing remarkable but a tail wag, and that the definition of motherhood extends beyond all conventional molds. You know I entirely agree. Another love we share is baking up fun dishes. I noticed there’s a dog treat recipe in the reading group activity packet in the back of the book. Yes! I’m so excited for this new paperback edition. It has a bevy of book club goodies. The Original CricKet BisKet recipe, the Author’s Note, a discussion guide, suggested reading group activities, a special feature Q&A, and more! One book club leader and friend who runs a wonderful literary event program in San Diego introduced me to her term, “the multi-sensorial book experience.” A brilliant way to define what I try to provide in every book I write. I hope readers enjoy bringing a taste of New Charlestown to their kitchens! It’ll be like Eden, Sarah Brown, sweet Cricket, and I are right there, too. Now, I want you to come over and help me bake up some treats for our pack. Before we go, give our friends a little teaser about what you’re working on next. Now, Sara. Sister. Pajama Princess of my fur-mama heart. You know I don’t breathe a word about my book’s subject until it’s reached a certain developmental stage. Like a gestational baby. But, I can never say no to you… I’m pushing out of my comfort zone in this next novel by giving over entirely to the historical voices. There’s a dual narrative, yes, but from a real-life man and woman. It’s a sparring tale of art, politics and love at the turn of the 20th century, set across New York, Europe and wild territories beyond. This story has me obsessed.Sarah McCoy's novel "The Baker’s Daughter" was a nominee for the 2012 Goodreads Choice Award for Best Historical Fiction, a New York Times and international bestseller, and perennial book club favorite. She returns with her third novel, "The Mapmaker’s Children," for which Sarah spent three years researching abolitionist John Brown’s family history — most notably, his daughter Sarah Brown. Praised as ingeniously plotted and magnificently transporting, "The Mapmaker’s Children" highlights the power of community and legacy, illustrating the ways in which history and destiny are interconnected on one enormous, intricate map. "The Mapmaker’s Children" was hailed by the Washington Post as "lovingly constructed" and "passionately told.” The Dallas Morning News raved, "McCoy mined the archives for information about Brown's daughter Sarah, an artist who is the titular character of her latest novel … The lacing of the two plots is seamless." Gruen also happens to be my dear friend and fellow fan of pajamas and fascinators. I’m delighted to sit down with her in pajamas (the official uniform of our writerly sisterhood) and chat about her book, releasing in paperback Feb. 9. Sara Gruen: Welcome Sarah! Sarah McCoy: Hello, dear friend, I’m equally thrilled and PJ-ed to be here with you! Yes, but I’m in footies, so I win. Moving on, let’s talk about your book. "The Mapmaker’s Children" moves back and forth between Eden Anderson in 2014 New Charlestown, West Virginia, and Sarah Brown, daughter of abolitionist John Brown in 1859 West Virginia. What was the spark of inspiration that connected these two over 150 years apart? The "spark" for each of my historical novels has come to me differently. Is it the same for you? Other author friends have told me how they are inspired through a consistent mode: a visual image, historical character, political agenda, emotional struggle, color, food, etc. My muse likes to throw her bolts in various forms. I’ve never had a story come to me the same way. "The Mapmaker’s Children" began with a sentence being spoken: “A dog is not a child,” the woman Eden Anderson said. And it was the way she said it that wouldn’t let me be. Confident, irked and, yet, deeply wounded by the words she spoke. I couldn’t shush her no matter what I did. Months of hearing this over and over in my head produced a wicked case of insomnia. I was worried I’d developed schizophrenia! (Hush, I read your thought bubble, sister.) I didn’t say a word! (LOL—in silent thought bubble.) (Moving on…) In an effort to reclaim my compos mentis, I wrote the sentence and its corresponding scene in my journal. I realized then that the statement was echoing through and out the front door of an old house. The house in New Charlestown was calling me to research its past and solve its Underground Railroad secret. A mystery set between Eden in present-day West Virginia and Sarah Brown 150 years ago. Looking back, I realize that from the first sentence, I was playing mapmaker to the Mapmaker. Sarah to Sarah, as creepy as that sounds. I methodically outlined both characters' narrative trajectory start-to-finish. Using that as my guide, I wrote the back and forth chapters, allowing that outline to guide me but also to transform, meander and lead me to new territory as the characters commanded. While we’re on the subject of structure—now from Sara to Sarah to Sarah—"The Mapmaker’s Children" weaves two dynamic voices, Eden and Sarah. A dual narrative, multiple POVs. How did you decide on that specific form: alternating chapters between 2014 and 1859. What challenges did you face? As a writer and reader, the historical-contemporary dual narrative is often my organic way of processing the past. Collectively, as human beings, we view history through our present-day lens and make connections and judgments based on that reflection. It’s similar in the fictional worlds I’m working in. I study history through a kind of "Alice in Wonderland" looking-glass with an eye to how the quiet details tell a greater story that then has a macro impact on the future. I wrote that way for "The Baker’s Daughter" and now again in "The Mapmaker’s Children." I’m fascinated by how the people of the past can reach across generations and impact the present; how mysteries of the present have their solutions in the past; how issues we face and decisions we make today are strikingly similar to ones our forbearers made—with good and bad outcomes. I’m riveted by this interplay. I think it’s important we don’t just read and compartmentalize the past as an “interesting story.” As writers, we want readers to see that history is a key, a manual, a lesson guidebook for us to learn and implement change in our present lives. In essence, Eden Anderson in "The Mapmaker’s Children" is being guided by Sarah Brown in 1859. Their struggles are mirrored and connected via significant and minor decisions. They develop each other: Eden’s life is changed as she (and we) discover Sarah’s secrets. That all being said, two books in one does not make for easy or simple novel writing. There were days when I could’ve sworn I really had fallen down that the white rabbit hole and lost my mind. Being the illustrious historical fiction writer you are, you know well that the challenge to writing historical fiction is being faithful to the facts while developing the fiction. It’s hard work—amen? Amen! The cardinal sin is to misinform or trick readers. We want readers to learn truth from our stories, be it a sequence of historical events or an emotional education. The characters must be authentic to their place and time. Sarah Brown was our kind of gal. A get-down-in-the-trenches pioneer woman who didn’t mind that her fingers were ink-stained with her life’s work. Eden Anderson is a manifestation of many women I know in real life who’ve struggled with infertility, having a career, maintaining a home, loving a spouse, and wanting to do it all at 110 percent! Both of these women sound uncannily familiar, right? I believe the key is to ensure that the storytelling is authentic to the characters’ spirits and honors their true lives transcribed into make-believe. While we have Sarahs on the brain, was it strange writing a character with your own name? Seeing “Sarah” everywhere you turned for the next three years while you researched and wrote the book? Not that anyone’s complaining … it’s a fine name, if I do say so myself. Ahem. It is a darn fine name, I wholeheartedly agree with you, Sara. Our mommas were obviously women of brilliant taste. Though, technically, Mary Day Brown (Sarah Brown’s momma) claimed it long before either of ours. It was a little bizarre writing “Sarah this, Sarah that” for all those years, but as an author, you sort of put on this Other Objective Person hardhat when it comes to your characters. I lose myself and become a conduit—a listener and translator—to their lives and not a direct participant in their business. The name commonality was one of those goosebumps experiences: fate unquestionably at work. Had John Brown’s only unmarried, artist daughter been named Dorcus, that would’ve been one of "The Mapmaker’s Children’s" protagonists’ names. It just so happens my name is Sarah, too. Perhaps that’s what made her story spirit seek me out—a sister Sarah. But I can confidently say she was and is her own autonomous person. I learned from her; I admire her greatly for the legacy she left behind. Through the writing of this novel, I’ve integrated aspects of her into my own life that I didn’t have on page 1. She inspired me to be a braver, bolder, stronger woman, unafraid to map my own life outside of the constraints of convention. She told me, You’re OK, Sarah. You’re OK, readers out there. We’re OK, sister women. That was her inheritance to me, and I pray to everyone who picks up this book. Well, I can tell you, she’s branded on my memory now, too. Sister Sara(h)s: I think we should form a club— a book club! Pajamas mandatory, fascinators still open for discussion. Speaking of, I think this novel would be a hit with book clubs. So many topics of discussion. What issues do you hope readers take away from the novel? That’s a tough question — there’s so much! I'll limit my answer to one of the overarching themes: nurturing and defining a family. As a global community, I believe we've allowed a worrisome stereotype to become the high mark of good family model. We've constructed a rigid mold for what a happy family looks like and anything different is somehow ... less. It weighed heavily on me and continues to. So I asked: Can you be a devoted parent without physical procreation? Does a loving, fulfilling family have to consist of children? Does being a parent only apply to humans or can you parent/nurture animals or a righteous cause? Who wrote the prototypical happily-ever-after and might each of us have the power to rewrite it? I noticed that a majority of my friends (men and women, couples to singles) were uncomfortable—even disgruntled—by my questioning of the status quo in group settings. Yet in private, they admitted that they internally battled these very constraints. It mystified me. Why weren't we able to have an open conversation? Why were people afraid to challenge the norm? And what happened to those who didn't attain the set parent-child-family vision—was their family and legacy not as good as those who did? Being an author, I sought answers through my characters. Likewise, I hope readers of "The Mapmaker's Children" are willing to ponder the questions and possibly discover keys to their own hearts, too. So true. Latching on to your question regarding being a parent/nurturer to animals— can we please talk puppy love? I love animals! Earlier you said that the spark of the book was Eden saying, “A dog is not a child,” so I don’t think I’m giving away anything to readers by mentioning there is a wonderful dog involved. You have a dog. In fact, he’s my Coco’s one true love! Tell us about him. First off, I must mention that this was one of the first things that brought us together and solidified our forever friendship— we are fur mamas! I swoon over the photos of your pets and love hearing all of your escapades with them. They are our children, too. As you know, I have a little king of the castle named Gilbert [Blythe]. We call him Gilly for short. He’s a 10-pound Coton de Tulear who rules our home with a furry fist. We adopted him from a breeder outside of Chicago after a heartbreaking experience with our much-loved first dog. His name was Gatsby, a darling cockapoo (Cocker Spaniel Poodle). At 2 years old, he developed stomach lymphoma—a grapefruit-sized malignant mass. We chose not to put him down but nurse him with chemotherapy and love to the very last minute. We were there for that, too. We held his tired body, rocked him, prayed over him, and watched as he slipped from this world to the next. It was an incredibly spiritual moment that neither my husband nor I will ever forget. It was sad, yes, but not in the devastating way we assumed. There was peace and beauty to it. Life so fragile, so fleeting, so powerful in its existence. About a year later Gilly was born on the day after my birthday. I have every confidence that Gilly met Gatsby before he came down to us. I grew up with dogs. My family is a huge animal-loving clan, but I was surprised by how different and potent the experience was as the primary nurturer. Pets are children, family members, beloved friends and so much more. Gilly has taught me patience, unconditional love, not to put too much stock in anything material because it can always be chewed, inexplicable joy that comes from nothing remarkable but a tail wag, and that the definition of motherhood extends beyond all conventional molds. You know I entirely agree. Another love we share is baking up fun dishes. I noticed there’s a dog treat recipe in the reading group activity packet in the back of the book. Yes! I’m so excited for this new paperback edition. It has a bevy of book club goodies. The Original CricKet BisKet recipe, the Author’s Note, a discussion guide, suggested reading group activities, a special feature Q&A, and more! One book club leader and friend who runs a wonderful literary event program in San Diego introduced me to her term, “the multi-sensorial book experience.” A brilliant way to define what I try to provide in every book I write. I hope readers enjoy bringing a taste of New Charlestown to their kitchens! It’ll be like Eden, Sarah Brown, sweet Cricket, and I are right there, too. Now, I want you to come over and help me bake up some treats for our pack. Before we go, give our friends a little teaser about what you’re working on next. Now, Sara. Sister. Pajama Princess of my fur-mama heart. You know I don’t breathe a word about my book’s subject until it’s reached a certain developmental stage. Like a gestational baby. But, I can never say no to you… I’m pushing out of my comfort zone in this next novel by giving over entirely to the historical voices. There’s a dual narrative, yes, but from a real-life man and woman. It’s a sparring tale of art, politics and love at the turn of the 20th century, set across New York, Europe and wild territories beyond. This story has me obsessed.Sarah McCoy's novel "The Baker’s Daughter" was a nominee for the 2012 Goodreads Choice Award for Best Historical Fiction, a New York Times and international bestseller, and perennial book club favorite. She returns with her third novel, "The Mapmaker’s Children," for which Sarah spent three years researching abolitionist John Brown’s family history — most notably, his daughter Sarah Brown. Praised as ingeniously plotted and magnificently transporting, "The Mapmaker’s Children" highlights the power of community and legacy, illustrating the ways in which history and destiny are interconnected on one enormous, intricate map. "The Mapmaker’s Children" was hailed by the Washington Post as "lovingly constructed" and "passionately told.” The Dallas Morning News raved, "McCoy mined the archives for information about Brown's daughter Sarah, an artist who is the titular character of her latest novel … The lacing of the two plots is seamless." Gruen also happens to be my dear friend and fellow fan of pajamas and fascinators. I’m delighted to sit down with her in pajamas (the official uniform of our writerly sisterhood) and chat about her book, releasing in paperback Feb. 9. Sara Gruen: Welcome Sarah! Sarah McCoy: Hello, dear friend, I’m equally thrilled and PJ-ed to be here with you! Yes, but I’m in footies, so I win. Moving on, let’s talk about your book. "The Mapmaker’s Children" moves back and forth between Eden Anderson in 2014 New Charlestown, West Virginia, and Sarah Brown, daughter of abolitionist John Brown in 1859 West Virginia. What was the spark of inspiration that connected these two over 150 years apart? The "spark" for each of my historical novels has come to me differently. Is it the same for you? Other author friends have told me how they are inspired through a consistent mode: a visual image, historical character, political agenda, emotional struggle, color, food, etc. My muse likes to throw her bolts in various forms. I’ve never had a story come to me the same way. "The Mapmaker’s Children" began with a sentence being spoken: “A dog is not a child,” the woman Eden Anderson said. And it was the way she said it that wouldn’t let me be. Confident, irked and, yet, deeply wounded by the words she spoke. I couldn’t shush her no matter what I did. Months of hearing this over and over in my head produced a wicked case of insomnia. I was worried I’d developed schizophrenia! (Hush, I read your thought bubble, sister.) I didn’t say a word! (LOL—in silent thought bubble.) (Moving on…) In an effort to reclaim my compos mentis, I wrote the sentence and its corresponding scene in my journal. I realized then that the statement was echoing through and out the front door of an old house. The house in New Charlestown was calling me to research its past and solve its Underground Railroad secret. A mystery set between Eden in present-day West Virginia and Sarah Brown 150 years ago. Looking back, I realize that from the first sentence, I was playing mapmaker to the Mapmaker. Sarah to Sarah, as creepy as that sounds. I methodically outlined both characters' narrative trajectory start-to-finish. Using that as my guide, I wrote the back and forth chapters, allowing that outline to guide me but also to transform, meander and lead me to new territory as the characters commanded. While we’re on the subject of structure—now from Sara to Sarah to Sarah—"The Mapmaker’s Children" weaves two dynamic voices, Eden and Sarah. A dual narrative, multiple POVs. How did you decide on that specific form: alternating chapters between 2014 and 1859. What challenges did you face? As a writer and reader, the historical-contemporary dual narrative is often my organic way of processing the past. Collectively, as human beings, we view history through our present-day lens and make connections and judgments based on that reflection. It’s similar in the fictional worlds I’m working in. I study history through a kind of "Alice in Wonderland" looking-glass with an eye to how the quiet details tell a greater story that then has a macro impact on the future. I wrote that way for "The Baker’s Daughter" and now again in "The Mapmaker’s Children." I’m fascinated by how the people of the past can reach across generations and impact the present; how mysteries of the present have their solutions in the past; how issues we face and decisions we make today are strikingly similar to ones our forbearers made—with good and bad outcomes. I’m riveted by this interplay. I think it’s important we don’t just read and compartmentalize the past as an “interesting story.” As writers, we want readers to see that history is a key, a manual, a lesson guidebook for us to learn and implement change in our present lives. In essence, Eden Anderson in "The Mapmaker’s Children" is being guided by Sarah Brown in 1859. Their struggles are mirrored and connected via significant and minor decisions. They develop each other: Eden’s life is changed as she (and we) discover Sarah’s secrets. That all being said, two books in one does not make for easy or simple novel writing. There were days when I could’ve sworn I really had fallen down that the white rabbit hole and lost my mind. Being the illustrious historical fiction writer you are, you know well that the challenge to writing historical fiction is being faithful to the facts while developing the fiction. It’s hard work—amen? Amen! The cardinal sin is to misinform or trick readers. We want readers to learn truth from our stories, be it a sequence of historical events or an emotional education. The characters must be authentic to their place and time. Sarah Brown was our kind of gal. A get-down-in-the-trenches pioneer woman who didn’t mind that her fingers were ink-stained with her life’s work. Eden Anderson is a manifestation of many women I know in real life who’ve struggled with infertility, having a career, maintaining a home, loving a spouse, and wanting to do it all at 110 percent! Both of these women sound uncannily familiar, right? I believe the key is to ensure that the storytelling is authentic to the characters’ spirits and honors their true lives transcribed into make-believe. While we have Sarahs on the brain, was it strange writing a character with your own name? Seeing “Sarah” everywhere you turned for the next three years while you researched and wrote the book? Not that anyone’s complaining … it’s a fine name, if I do say so myself. Ahem. It is a darn fine name, I wholeheartedly agree with you, Sara. Our mommas were obviously women of brilliant taste. Though, technically, Mary Day Brown (Sarah Brown’s momma) claimed it long before either of ours. It was a little bizarre writing “Sarah this, Sarah that” for all those years, but as an author, you sort of put on this Other Objective Person hardhat when it comes to your characters. I lose myself and become a conduit—a listener and translator—to their lives and not a direct participant in their business. The name commonality was one of those goosebumps experiences: fate unquestionably at work. Had John Brown’s only unmarried, artist daughter been named Dorcus, that would’ve been one of "The Mapmaker’s Children’s" protagonists’ names. It just so happens my name is Sarah, too. Perhaps that’s what made her story spirit seek me out—a sister Sarah. But I can confidently say she was and is her own autonomous person. I learned from her; I admire her greatly for the legacy she left behind. Through the writing of this novel, I’ve integrated aspects of her into my own life that I didn’t have on page 1. She inspired me to be a braver, bolder, stronger woman, unafraid to map my own life outside of the constraints of convention. She told me, You’re OK, Sarah. You’re OK, readers out there. We’re OK, sister women. That was her inheritance to me, and I pray to everyone who picks up this book. Well, I can tell you, she’s branded on my memory now, too. Sister Sara(h)s: I think we should form a club— a book club! Pajamas mandatory, fascinators still open for discussion. Speaking of, I think this novel would be a hit with book clubs. So many topics of discussion. What issues do you hope readers take away from the novel? That’s a tough question — there’s so much! I'll limit my answer to one of the overarching themes: nurturing and defining a family. As a global community, I believe we've allowed a worrisome stereotype to become the high mark of good family model. We've constructed a rigid mold for what a happy family looks like and anything different is somehow ... less. It weighed heavily on me and continues to. So I asked: Can you be a devoted parent without physical procreation? Does a loving, fulfilling family have to consist of children? Does being a parent only apply to humans or can you parent/nurture animals or a righteous cause? Who wrote the prototypical happily-ever-after and might each of us have the power to rewrite it? I noticed that a majority of my friends (men and women, couples to singles) were uncomfortable—even disgruntled—by my questioning of the status quo in group settings. Yet in private, they admitted that they internally battled these very constraints. It mystified me. Why weren't we able to have an open conversation? Why were people afraid to challenge the norm? And what happened to those who didn't attain the set parent-child-family vision—was their family and legacy not as good as those who did? Being an author, I sought answers through my characters. Likewise, I hope readers of "The Mapmaker's Children" are willing to ponder the questions and possibly discover keys to their own hearts, too. So true. Latching on to your question regarding being a parent/nurturer to animals— can we please talk puppy love? I love animals! Earlier you said that the spark of the book was Eden saying, “A dog is not a child,” so I don’t think I’m giving away anything to readers by mentioning there is a wonderful dog involved. You have a dog. In fact, he’s my Coco’s one true love! Tell us about him. First off, I must mention that this was one of the first things that brought us together and solidified our forever friendship— we are fur mamas! I swoon over the photos of your pets and love hearing all of your escapades with them. They are our children, too. As you know, I have a little king of the castle named Gilbert [Blythe]. We call him Gilly for short. He’s a 10-pound Coton de Tulear who rules our home with a furry fist. We adopted him from a breeder outside of Chicago after a heartbreaking experience with our much-loved first dog. His name was Gatsby, a darling cockapoo (Cocker Spaniel Poodle). At 2 years old, he developed stomach lymphoma—a grapefruit-sized malignant mass. We chose not to put him down but nurse him with chemotherapy and love to the very last minute. We were there for that, too. We held his tired body, rocked him, prayed over him, and watched as he slipped from this world to the next. It was an incredibly spiritual moment that neither my husband nor I will ever forget. It was sad, yes, but not in the devastating way we assumed. There was peace and beauty to it. Life so fragile, so fleeting, so powerful in its existence. About a year later Gilly was born on the day after my birthday. I have every confidence that Gilly met Gatsby before he came down to us. I grew up with dogs. My family is a huge animal-loving clan, but I was surprised by how different and potent the experience was as the primary nurturer. Pets are children, family members, beloved friends and so much more. Gilly has taught me patience, unconditional love, not to put too much stock in anything material because it can always be chewed, inexplicable joy that comes from nothing remarkable but a tail wag, and that the definition of motherhood extends beyond all conventional molds. You know I entirely agree. Another love we share is baking up fun dishes. I noticed there’s a dog treat recipe in the reading group activity packet in the back of the book. Yes! I’m so excited for this new paperback edition. It has a bevy of book club goodies. The Original CricKet BisKet recipe, the Author’s Note, a discussion guide, suggested reading group activities, a special feature Q&A, and more! One book club leader and friend who runs a wonderful literary event program in San Diego introduced me to her term, “the multi-sensorial book experience.” A brilliant way to define what I try to provide in every book I write. I hope readers enjoy bringing a taste of New Charlestown to their kitchens! It’ll be like Eden, Sarah Brown, sweet Cricket, and I are right there, too. Now, I want you to come over and help me bake up some treats for our pack. Before we go, give our friends a little teaser about what you’re working on next. Now, Sara. Sister. Pajama Princess of my fur-mama heart. You know I don’t breathe a word about my book’s subject until it’s reached a certain developmental stage. Like a gestational baby. But, I can never say no to you… I’m pushing out of my comfort zone in this next novel by giving over entirely to the historical voices. There’s a dual narrative, yes, but from a real-life man and woman. It’s a sparring tale of art, politics and love at the turn of the 20th century, set across New York, Europe and wild territories beyond. This story has me obsessed.
February 7, 2016
It’s a “touchy” subject: “Sticky: A (Self) Love Story” wants to get us talking about solo sex
Nicholas Tana’s new documentary begins with two questions: “Do you masturbate?” And, a few moments later, “Why is something most everybody does so hard to talk about?” The answers, as viewers of "Sticky: A (Self) Love Story" learn, are complicated. To fully understand masturbation, you’ve got to know that “A wide array of primates ... masturbate just like humans do,” as one primatologist explains during the film. You’ve got to travel to Alabama, where the sale of sex toys has been banned since 1998. (“I’m breaking the law every day I keep my doors open,” the owner of a drive-thru store called Pleasures says.) You’ve got to talk about watershed cultural events, like when Paul Reubens – aka Pee-wee Herman – was busted for allegedly jerkin’ it in a porn theater in 1991; or when, three years later, Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders lost her job for suggesting that kids ought to be taught about masturbating. You’ve got to wrap around the sheer size of the sex-toy business, which is expected to hit $52 billion in annual sales by 2020. You’ve got to talk to porn stars, psychologists, sociologists, magazine moguls and a rabbi who says, “If God didn’t want us to masturbate, he would have made our arms shorter.” Tana explores it all – from the Kinsey Reports, to the Fleshlight, to that famous scene in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" – in an ambitious film that’s sure to spark giggles and flushed cheeks wherever it’s screened upon its release, this week. The writer/director/producer/narrator recently discussed the 70-minute film with Salon. Our conversation has been edited and condensed. On
Facebook
, the film is billed as the “World’s first feature documentary on masturbation.” What took so long? After doing it I realized it’s because it’s the world’s most popular taboo. When I went in, I quickly, within two weeks, shot some key footage and was able to raise like $160,000 to do the film. But then, as you go, you realize that there are so many angles you can cover, and there are so many different ways you can go. And then also there’s people that won’t do interviews. For every one person that did an interview, I had like eight people that would say no. Why is it so taboo, still, in 2016? Well, I think a lot of it has to do with how vulnerable and how personal it is for many people, and that it taps into people’s fantasies and their notions of self. So, you’re dealing with the ego. You’re dealing with self-worth – you know, “Is this person going to find me attractive or not?” And then, with fantasies, you can go anywhere. In one’s fantasies, you can have sex with your neighbor’s wife. It’s possible to go places that you can’t go necessarily without major repercussions in the real world. So I think that’s part of our self-censorship around the subject matter. But it goes beyond that, too. Historically, people discouraged masturbation because it didn’t have to do with procreation. And procreation meant your tribe was bigger. And the bigger your tribe, the more likely it was you would survive. So I think it taps into a very fundamental notion of our survival. Did you wrestle with whether to make this a humorous film? Absolutely. That was part of the balance of tone that was very challenging. In fact, it delayed me to some extent. Because, at first, I had all these sketch comedy things I did because I felt like it needed to be funny. Because the first thing people do when I told them I was making it was laugh. And so I was like, “OK, well, clearly there’s this anticipation for this film. And clearly they expect to laugh. So, if I were to take that out of the movie, it would be bizarre and I think people would be disappointed.” So I knew I had to run with a certain sense of humor. But at the same time, as I delved into the subject matter, I realized how sensitive and actually interesting and profound and valuable was the information I was uncovering. Especially when you start looking at the future of masturbation. When I was a kid, [with] National Geographic, taking a look at some breasts was exciting, you know? It was a challenge to see some of the things kids can now see, today, in their own rooms, with their parents having no clue. And so you’ve got to figure, in the near future, there will be orgiastic environments of these virtual-reality worlds. You think you’re going to control all of it? I doubt it. And then what is that going to do to our sexuality? And how do you protect people and protect that sense of sexuality, but in a healthy way? Where does this dialogue come from? How are our laws going to evolve to manage this? And to what extent are we blurring the line between what is sex and what is masturbation? This is all fascinating stuff and we’re just on the cusp of it. And I think this movie, ideally, will open the dialogue for these big, important questions, moving forward. Let’s talk about that dialogue. What is your intended effect with this film? I want to see people talk more about it. I want to see people have fun and be entertained by it, too, without being ashamed. I want to know that, because I did a documentary like this, I can still do other projects, other movies, maybe even animation, and not be seen as, “No, there’s no way. Because this person did this doc on masturbation.” I think we live in a society that really censors and segments people. [People] don’t realize that Shel Silverstein wrote for Playboy, but he also was a children’s book writer. And you see [in the film] the tragedy that befell Paul Reubens, who’s now just coming back, [after] over a decade, with his Pee-wee shtick, after what happened to him for getting caught in a porn theater, masturbating, which was what people did back then before the Internet was so popular. And so I want to see that shame go away. How far do you think we are from widespread acceptance of masturbation? Well, it depends on where you live. If you live in Los Angeles or San Francisco, [things are] maybe a little further along than if you live in Alabama, let’s say. But it really has to do with what’s inculcated from, sometimes, a moral perspective on what it means to be a sexual person. There’s always been a concept that sexuality is only … for procreation. But now there’s a big sex-positive movement out, and it has existed for quite some time. In fact, I’ve interviewed some of the key members of the sex positive movement – Betty Dodson, Carol Queen – and that’s about ending that shame around it and just accepting us as sexual beings. [The idea that] whether you want to have children or not, it’s OK to be sexual. That’s part of what life’s all about. It’s like enjoying food. Are we allowed to enjoy food? Or do we just eat it, so that we live? “Abstinence only”… sort of [delayed] our efforts to teach children about sex. So what happens? As a modern nation, we have more STDs and teenage pregnancy than any modern nation in the world. And it was at an AIDS conference that Dr. Joycelyn Elders – the first female and black surgeon general, who’s in my film – said that we should talk about perhaps teaching kids about masturbation, as an alternative to sex. This was in a context of safe sex and she was forced to resign by a supposedly liberal president, [Bill Clinton]. The film takes an interesting look at how masturbation is depicted on TV and in films. Do you think depictions are getting any better? I think we’re doing it more. I’m seeing it more, for sure. But I think it’s tied in with the whole popularity around shock value right now. I think we live in an information-overload society. And, as such, it takes a lot to get attention. Is there a value in most of it? That’s a question of your taste. I do notice that every time I do see it, it’s usually couched in being a joke. It’s not necessarily taken seriously. It’s only in pornography, I think, or erotic movies where it’s taken in more of a sexual fashion. And even then … females masturbating [tends to be presented as] more erotic, in terms of mainstream media. The male is always seen as a joke. How much of a difference do you think exists between attitudes toward male and female masturbation? Do you think they’re equally taboo? I think it’s ever-evolving. But, in general, I think women have been suppressed sexually from a male-dominated society. And I think that’s very reflected in the Alabama law that prohibits the sale of sex toys. Yet they have the loosest gun laws, which is really interesting. Who are they protecting there? That’s the question. I received two preview links for this film: an “explicit” version and a “censored” version. Are you releasing two versions? Well, we’re going to start with the censored version. Because marketing and selling the film is also its own challenge. Obviously, tons of people want to see it. I’ve got hundreds and hundreds of emails from people wondering when the film is going to come out. But when you’re dealing with Comcast telling a distributor that they’ll never have a movie with masturbation in its title. And then … CNN, I think, recently said something similar; they were really concerned about the subject matter. But I’m like, “Give me a break!” We’ve got movies at Sundance about a guy with an erection who’s farting. And just [think of] the weird stuff that comes out on TV, too. Not just the weird, but extreme sexual stuff I’ve seen on Showtime and other stations. And I wonder, “Jeez, are we really that touchy about this?” It’s so funny to me. But it’s true. For years, I’d try to email about this and I’d have to say “self-love” and come up with a different title because “masturbation” would get stuck in their spam folder. Is this ultimately an anti-shame film? That’s part of it, but I think that’s a reduction of what it is. I think it’s much more mammoth than that. How do we present this topic in media today? We go through that. In music today? We go through that. I interviewed people representing four major religions of the world, from Islam, to Catholicism, to Judaism, to Buddhism. That covers a huge population. And we’re talking half of them say it’s a sin and half say it’s not. And actually it’s a little more than half say it’s a sin, when you think about the fact that there’s a distinction between the Talmud and the Torah, as to whether it’s a sin in Judaism. So, where are we? Have we accepted the fact that something so fundamental is an actual sin? Or do we have to reevaluate our moral standards?Nicholas Tana’s new documentary begins with two questions: “Do you masturbate?” And, a few moments later, “Why is something most everybody does so hard to talk about?” The answers, as viewers of "Sticky: A (Self) Love Story" learn, are complicated. To fully understand masturbation, you’ve got to know that “A wide array of primates ... masturbate just like humans do,” as one primatologist explains during the film. You’ve got to travel to Alabama, where the sale of sex toys has been banned since 1998. (“I’m breaking the law every day I keep my doors open,” the owner of a drive-thru store called Pleasures says.) You’ve got to talk about watershed cultural events, like when Paul Reubens – aka Pee-wee Herman – was busted for allegedly jerkin’ it in a porn theater in 1991; or when, three years later, Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders lost her job for suggesting that kids ought to be taught about masturbating. You’ve got to wrap around the sheer size of the sex-toy business, which is expected to hit $52 billion in annual sales by 2020. You’ve got to talk to porn stars, psychologists, sociologists, magazine moguls and a rabbi who says, “If God didn’t want us to masturbate, he would have made our arms shorter.” Tana explores it all – from the Kinsey Reports, to the Fleshlight, to that famous scene in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" – in an ambitious film that’s sure to spark giggles and flushed cheeks wherever it’s screened upon its release, this week. The writer/director/producer/narrator recently discussed the 70-minute film with Salon. Our conversation has been edited and condensed. On
Facebook
, the film is billed as the “World’s first feature documentary on masturbation.” What took so long? After doing it I realized it’s because it’s the world’s most popular taboo. When I went in, I quickly, within two weeks, shot some key footage and was able to raise like $160,000 to do the film. But then, as you go, you realize that there are so many angles you can cover, and there are so many different ways you can go. And then also there’s people that won’t do interviews. For every one person that did an interview, I had like eight people that would say no. Why is it so taboo, still, in 2016? Well, I think a lot of it has to do with how vulnerable and how personal it is for many people, and that it taps into people’s fantasies and their notions of self. So, you’re dealing with the ego. You’re dealing with self-worth – you know, “Is this person going to find me attractive or not?” And then, with fantasies, you can go anywhere. In one’s fantasies, you can have sex with your neighbor’s wife. It’s possible to go places that you can’t go necessarily without major repercussions in the real world. So I think that’s part of our self-censorship around the subject matter. But it goes beyond that, too. Historically, people discouraged masturbation because it didn’t have to do with procreation. And procreation meant your tribe was bigger. And the bigger your tribe, the more likely it was you would survive. So I think it taps into a very fundamental notion of our survival. Did you wrestle with whether to make this a humorous film? Absolutely. That was part of the balance of tone that was very challenging. In fact, it delayed me to some extent. Because, at first, I had all these sketch comedy things I did because I felt like it needed to be funny. Because the first thing people do when I told them I was making it was laugh. And so I was like, “OK, well, clearly there’s this anticipation for this film. And clearly they expect to laugh. So, if I were to take that out of the movie, it would be bizarre and I think people would be disappointed.” So I knew I had to run with a certain sense of humor. But at the same time, as I delved into the subject matter, I realized how sensitive and actually interesting and profound and valuable was the information I was uncovering. Especially when you start looking at the future of masturbation. When I was a kid, [with] National Geographic, taking a look at some breasts was exciting, you know? It was a challenge to see some of the things kids can now see, today, in their own rooms, with their parents having no clue. And so you’ve got to figure, in the near future, there will be orgiastic environments of these virtual-reality worlds. You think you’re going to control all of it? I doubt it. And then what is that going to do to our sexuality? And how do you protect people and protect that sense of sexuality, but in a healthy way? Where does this dialogue come from? How are our laws going to evolve to manage this? And to what extent are we blurring the line between what is sex and what is masturbation? This is all fascinating stuff and we’re just on the cusp of it. And I think this movie, ideally, will open the dialogue for these big, important questions, moving forward. Let’s talk about that dialogue. What is your intended effect with this film? I want to see people talk more about it. I want to see people have fun and be entertained by it, too, without being ashamed. I want to know that, because I did a documentary like this, I can still do other projects, other movies, maybe even animation, and not be seen as, “No, there’s no way. Because this person did this doc on masturbation.” I think we live in a society that really censors and segments people. [People] don’t realize that Shel Silverstein wrote for Playboy, but he also was a children’s book writer. And you see [in the film] the tragedy that befell Paul Reubens, who’s now just coming back, [after] over a decade, with his Pee-wee shtick, after what happened to him for getting caught in a porn theater, masturbating, which was what people did back then before the Internet was so popular. And so I want to see that shame go away. How far do you think we are from widespread acceptance of masturbation? Well, it depends on where you live. If you live in Los Angeles or San Francisco, [things are] maybe a little further along than if you live in Alabama, let’s say. But it really has to do with what’s inculcated from, sometimes, a moral perspective on what it means to be a sexual person. There’s always been a concept that sexuality is only … for procreation. But now there’s a big sex-positive movement out, and it has existed for quite some time. In fact, I’ve interviewed some of the key members of the sex positive movement – Betty Dodson, Carol Queen – and that’s about ending that shame around it and just accepting us as sexual beings. [The idea that] whether you want to have children or not, it’s OK to be sexual. That’s part of what life’s all about. It’s like enjoying food. Are we allowed to enjoy food? Or do we just eat it, so that we live? “Abstinence only”… sort of [delayed] our efforts to teach children about sex. So what happens? As a modern nation, we have more STDs and teenage pregnancy than any modern nation in the world. And it was at an AIDS conference that Dr. Joycelyn Elders – the first female and black surgeon general, who’s in my film – said that we should talk about perhaps teaching kids about masturbation, as an alternative to sex. This was in a context of safe sex and she was forced to resign by a supposedly liberal president, [Bill Clinton]. The film takes an interesting look at how masturbation is depicted on TV and in films. Do you think depictions are getting any better? I think we’re doing it more. I’m seeing it more, for sure. But I think it’s tied in with the whole popularity around shock value right now. I think we live in an information-overload society. And, as such, it takes a lot to get attention. Is there a value in most of it? That’s a question of your taste. I do notice that every time I do see it, it’s usually couched in being a joke. It’s not necessarily taken seriously. It’s only in pornography, I think, or erotic movies where it’s taken in more of a sexual fashion. And even then … females masturbating [tends to be presented as] more erotic, in terms of mainstream media. The male is always seen as a joke. How much of a difference do you think exists between attitudes toward male and female masturbation? Do you think they’re equally taboo? I think it’s ever-evolving. But, in general, I think women have been suppressed sexually from a male-dominated society. And I think that’s very reflected in the Alabama law that prohibits the sale of sex toys. Yet they have the loosest gun laws, which is really interesting. Who are they protecting there? That’s the question. I received two preview links for this film: an “explicit” version and a “censored” version. Are you releasing two versions? Well, we’re going to start with the censored version. Because marketing and selling the film is also its own challenge. Obviously, tons of people want to see it. I’ve got hundreds and hundreds of emails from people wondering when the film is going to come out. But when you’re dealing with Comcast telling a distributor that they’ll never have a movie with masturbation in its title. And then … CNN, I think, recently said something similar; they were really concerned about the subject matter. But I’m like, “Give me a break!” We’ve got movies at Sundance about a guy with an erection who’s farting. And just [think of] the weird stuff that comes out on TV, too. Not just the weird, but extreme sexual stuff I’ve seen on Showtime and other stations. And I wonder, “Jeez, are we really that touchy about this?” It’s so funny to me. But it’s true. For years, I’d try to email about this and I’d have to say “self-love” and come up with a different title because “masturbation” would get stuck in their spam folder. Is this ultimately an anti-shame film? That’s part of it, but I think that’s a reduction of what it is. I think it’s much more mammoth than that. How do we present this topic in media today? We go through that. In music today? We go through that. I interviewed people representing four major religions of the world, from Islam, to Catholicism, to Judaism, to Buddhism. That covers a huge population. And we’re talking half of them say it’s a sin and half say it’s not. And actually it’s a little more than half say it’s a sin, when you think about the fact that there’s a distinction between the Talmud and the Torah, as to whether it’s a sin in Judaism. So, where are we? Have we accepted the fact that something so fundamental is an actual sin? Or do we have to reevaluate our moral standards?Nicholas Tana’s new documentary begins with two questions: “Do you masturbate?” And, a few moments later, “Why is something most everybody does so hard to talk about?” The answers, as viewers of "Sticky: A (Self) Love Story" learn, are complicated. To fully understand masturbation, you’ve got to know that “A wide array of primates ... masturbate just like humans do,” as one primatologist explains during the film. You’ve got to travel to Alabama, where the sale of sex toys has been banned since 1998. (“I’m breaking the law every day I keep my doors open,” the owner of a drive-thru store called Pleasures says.) You’ve got to talk about watershed cultural events, like when Paul Reubens – aka Pee-wee Herman – was busted for allegedly jerkin’ it in a porn theater in 1991; or when, three years later, Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders lost her job for suggesting that kids ought to be taught about masturbating. You’ve got to wrap around the sheer size of the sex-toy business, which is expected to hit $52 billion in annual sales by 2020. You’ve got to talk to porn stars, psychologists, sociologists, magazine moguls and a rabbi who says, “If God didn’t want us to masturbate, he would have made our arms shorter.” Tana explores it all – from the Kinsey Reports, to the Fleshlight, to that famous scene in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" – in an ambitious film that’s sure to spark giggles and flushed cheeks wherever it’s screened upon its release, this week. The writer/director/producer/narrator recently discussed the 70-minute film with Salon. Our conversation has been edited and condensed. On
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, the film is billed as the “World’s first feature documentary on masturbation.” What took so long? After doing it I realized it’s because it’s the world’s most popular taboo. When I went in, I quickly, within two weeks, shot some key footage and was able to raise like $160,000 to do the film. But then, as you go, you realize that there are so many angles you can cover, and there are so many different ways you can go. And then also there’s people that won’t do interviews. For every one person that did an interview, I had like eight people that would say no. Why is it so taboo, still, in 2016? Well, I think a lot of it has to do with how vulnerable and how personal it is for many people, and that it taps into people’s fantasies and their notions of self. So, you’re dealing with the ego. You’re dealing with self-worth – you know, “Is this person going to find me attractive or not?” And then, with fantasies, you can go anywhere. In one’s fantasies, you can have sex with your neighbor’s wife. It’s possible to go places that you can’t go necessarily without major repercussions in the real world. So I think that’s part of our self-censorship around the subject matter. But it goes beyond that, too. Historically, people discouraged masturbation because it didn’t have to do with procreation. And procreation meant your tribe was bigger. And the bigger your tribe, the more likely it was you would survive. So I think it taps into a very fundamental notion of our survival. Did you wrestle with whether to make this a humorous film? Absolutely. That was part of the balance of tone that was very challenging. In fact, it delayed me to some extent. Because, at first, I had all these sketch comedy things I did because I felt like it needed to be funny. Because the first thing people do when I told them I was making it was laugh. And so I was like, “OK, well, clearly there’s this anticipation for this film. And clearly they expect to laugh. So, if I were to take that out of the movie, it would be bizarre and I think people would be disappointed.” So I knew I had to run with a certain sense of humor. But at the same time, as I delved into the subject matter, I realized how sensitive and actually interesting and profound and valuable was the information I was uncovering. Especially when you start looking at the future of masturbation. When I was a kid, [with] National Geographic, taking a look at some breasts was exciting, you know? It was a challenge to see some of the things kids can now see, today, in their own rooms, with their parents having no clue. And so you’ve got to figure, in the near future, there will be orgiastic environments of these virtual-reality worlds. You think you’re going to control all of it? I doubt it. And then what is that going to do to our sexuality? And how do you protect people and protect that sense of sexuality, but in a healthy way? Where does this dialogue come from? How are our laws going to evolve to manage this? And to what extent are we blurring the line between what is sex and what is masturbation? This is all fascinating stuff and we’re just on the cusp of it. And I think this movie, ideally, will open the dialogue for these big, important questions, moving forward. Let’s talk about that dialogue. What is your intended effect with this film? I want to see people talk more about it. I want to see people have fun and be entertained by it, too, without being ashamed. I want to know that, because I did a documentary like this, I can still do other projects, other movies, maybe even animation, and not be seen as, “No, there’s no way. Because this person did this doc on masturbation.” I think we live in a society that really censors and segments people. [People] don’t realize that Shel Silverstein wrote for Playboy, but he also was a children’s book writer. And you see [in the film] the tragedy that befell Paul Reubens, who’s now just coming back, [after] over a decade, with his Pee-wee shtick, after what happened to him for getting caught in a porn theater, masturbating, which was what people did back then before the Internet was so popular. And so I want to see that shame go away. How far do you think we are from widespread acceptance of masturbation? Well, it depends on where you live. If you live in Los Angeles or San Francisco, [things are] maybe a little further along than if you live in Alabama, let’s say. But it really has to do with what’s inculcated from, sometimes, a moral perspective on what it means to be a sexual person. There’s always been a concept that sexuality is only … for procreation. But now there’s a big sex-positive movement out, and it has existed for quite some time. In fact, I’ve interviewed some of the key members of the sex positive movement – Betty Dodson, Carol Queen – and that’s about ending that shame around it and just accepting us as sexual beings. [The idea that] whether you want to have children or not, it’s OK to be sexual. That’s part of what life’s all about. It’s like enjoying food. Are we allowed to enjoy food? Or do we just eat it, so that we live? “Abstinence only”… sort of [delayed] our efforts to teach children about sex. So what happens? As a modern nation, we have more STDs and teenage pregnancy than any modern nation in the world. And it was at an AIDS conference that Dr. Joycelyn Elders – the first female and black surgeon general, who’s in my film – said that we should talk about perhaps teaching kids about masturbation, as an alternative to sex. This was in a context of safe sex and she was forced to resign by a supposedly liberal president, [Bill Clinton]. The film takes an interesting look at how masturbation is depicted on TV and in films. Do you think depictions are getting any better? I think we’re doing it more. I’m seeing it more, for sure. But I think it’s tied in with the whole popularity around shock value right now. I think we live in an information-overload society. And, as such, it takes a lot to get attention. Is there a value in most of it? That’s a question of your taste. I do notice that every time I do see it, it’s usually couched in being a joke. It’s not necessarily taken seriously. It’s only in pornography, I think, or erotic movies where it’s taken in more of a sexual fashion. And even then … females masturbating [tends to be presented as] more erotic, in terms of mainstream media. The male is always seen as a joke. How much of a difference do you think exists between attitudes toward male and female masturbation? Do you think they’re equally taboo? I think it’s ever-evolving. But, in general, I think women have been suppressed sexually from a male-dominated society. And I think that’s very reflected in the Alabama law that prohibits the sale of sex toys. Yet they have the loosest gun laws, which is really interesting. Who are they protecting there? That’s the question. I received two preview links for this film: an “explicit” version and a “censored” version. Are you releasing two versions? Well, we’re going to start with the censored version. Because marketing and selling the film is also its own challenge. Obviously, tons of people want to see it. I’ve got hundreds and hundreds of emails from people wondering when the film is going to come out. But when you’re dealing with Comcast telling a distributor that they’ll never have a movie with masturbation in its title. And then … CNN, I think, recently said something similar; they were really concerned about the subject matter. But I’m like, “Give me a break!” We’ve got movies at Sundance about a guy with an erection who’s farting. And just [think of] the weird stuff that comes out on TV, too. Not just the weird, but extreme sexual stuff I’ve seen on Showtime and other stations. And I wonder, “Jeez, are we really that touchy about this?” It’s so funny to me. But it’s true. For years, I’d try to email about this and I’d have to say “self-love” and come up with a different title because “masturbation” would get stuck in their spam folder. Is this ultimately an anti-shame film? That’s part of it, but I think that’s a reduction of what it is. I think it’s much more mammoth than that. How do we present this topic in media today? We go through that. In music today? We go through that. I interviewed people representing four major religions of the world, from Islam, to Catholicism, to Judaism, to Buddhism. That covers a huge population. And we’re talking half of them say it’s a sin and half say it’s not. And actually it’s a little more than half say it’s a sin, when you think about the fact that there’s a distinction between the Talmud and the Torah, as to whether it’s a sin in Judaism. So, where are we? Have we accepted the fact that something so fundamental is an actual sin? Or do we have to reevaluate our moral standards?
Primary lessons of “Nashville”: Robert Altman’s noisy, tense, brilliant American epic is chicken soup for the weary election year soul
“Many Americans, especially party liners, wish that Hal Phillip Walker would go away … disappear like the frost and come again at a more convenient season. But wherever we may be going it seems sure that Hal Phillip Walker is not going away, for there is genuine appeal.” Sound familiar? This dialogue is 41 years old, recited by a newscaster, covering the crucial and fictional Tennessee primary in Robert Altman’s 1975 masterpiece "Nashville." In the film, Walker, candidate for the insurgent Replacement Party, has hired a car mounted with loudspeakers to spew his rhetoric around Music City at top volume. The car is a virtual member of this teeming cast. Walker’s platform bludgeons. Among his controversial policies: abolishing all lawyers from Congress, changing our national anthem, abolishing the Electoral College and taxing the church. Every out-there proposal seems to give the candidate increased momentum. Again, sound familiar? “Even those who pay close attention to politics probably saw Hal Phillip Walker and his Replacement Party as a bit of frost on the hillside… now summer is heavy upon us and the frost is still there. Perhaps we should take a closer look,” the newsman comments, “… Hal Phillip Walker is not going away…” If you are anything like me, and you’ve been following the primary and caucus season every day, via cable news or social media for three to five hours a day over the past year (I write with it on as white noise), you might want to take a closer look at the late Altman’s noisy, wry, tense and brilliant American epic. Walker began his political campaign with the support of a gaggle of college students (during a nutty commencement address), à la Bernie Sanders, and his unforeseen rise and promise to roll into town like a new sheriff is, of course, very Trumpian, but "Nashville" proves that when it comes to an election year, as David Byrne says, it's the same as it ever was. What President Obama has more than once called “the silly season” is something that may just require a work of prescient fiction to put it into context — and let’s face it, make it a little less disturbing. It’s easy to hide inside "Top Chef" or "Empire" if you really need a break, but while functional, these respites don’t seem as medicinal as "Nashville." It’s hard to laugh at what we’ve seen and heard over the past year, but "Nashville," passionately lauded by influential critics like Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert when it was released, and now residing in the National Film Registry, is pure catharsis to those who can’t quite take their eye off America because they don’t quite understand what the hell is happening to it — and perhaps a little bit of what Elvis Costello called a deep, dark truthful mirror to those who are certain that they do. As with many Altman films, "Nashville" meanders from enclave to enclave of eccentric and chattering characters, never silent but always arresting before we are forced to let go: singers and pickers both talented and famous, and talentless but aspiring (most memorably Henry Gibson’s Haven Hamilton, evangelicals, demagogues, cynics, hipsters (including a hunky Keith Carradine, a funky Shelly Duvall and a young, mute, chopper-riding Jeff Goldblum), a British tabloid journalist (Geraldine Chaplin) and Walker’s cynical canvassers, played by Michael Murphy and Ned Beatty, who would hit the prescient-'70s-film Daily Double with an unforgettable scene in the following year’s "Network." Watching Walker’s ground men try to amass support from the insular Nashville music community, it’s hard not to hear certain real-life candidates over the years dial up their Southern accents and down-home pantomime over the years. “They have a real grass roots appeal,” Murphy acknowledges, as he patiently manipulates the city’s suspicious power brokers in their cowboy hats and glittering Nudie-style suits. “They’re the people that elect the president.” When the film was released, there were some who felt that Altman, already a Hollywood institution, was making fun of the South. Some audience members were insulted, and the film can still polarize. But like the "Monty Python"/"SNL" Beatles send-up "The Rutles" (1978) or "This Is Spinal Tap" (1984) — both classic, music-driven satires — Nashville’s music (and every other scene seems to include a number) is rendered with at least a noticeable measure of affection and a real feel and respect for the culture. The songs, many by '70s pop singer/songwriter Richard Baskin, are uniformly believable and hummable, feel-good, patriotic, nostalgic ballads or stomps. And Keith Carradine’s melancholy “I’m Easy” was a genuine hit. Lily Tomlin's number with a large choir in an early scene, and the film’s unofficial theme song, “It Don’t Worry Me” (“You can say that I ain’t free but it don’t worry me…”), are more than just deliverers of verisimilitude — they're genuinely moving. "Nashville" seems even more haunted by the state of America than we are today, which provides yet another bit of sweet relief. Altman’s camera often lingers on the red, white and blue and the reverie of the upcoming Bicentennial as well as the pall of Watergate, the Kennedy assassinations (still) and the ascent of terrorism permeate the film. American violence is everywhere, ready to explode. It’s oddly soothing to be reminded that, you know, it’s not just us. The country of our elders was also a crazy, potentially catastrophic, duplicitous and power-jockeying realm … and we’ve been denying it with saccharine show business cheese for all time as well. So while you are glued to the returns and the anchors and the shock and shtick these next few weeks, perhaps you want to find time to watch or rewatch this film. It’s nearly three hours long (available as a Criterion two disc-er or on iTunes and Netflix DVDs) so you might want to pause for a Goo Goo candy bar (“It’s good”) while you are reminded that, as candidate Walker says, no matter what the election year or the state of the nation, “some very funny notions… (have) develop(ed) in American politics…” But don’t let it worry you.“Many Americans, especially party liners, wish that Hal Phillip Walker would go away … disappear like the frost and come again at a more convenient season. But wherever we may be going it seems sure that Hal Phillip Walker is not going away, for there is genuine appeal.” Sound familiar? This dialogue is 41 years old, recited by a newscaster, covering the crucial and fictional Tennessee primary in Robert Altman’s 1975 masterpiece "Nashville." In the film, Walker, candidate for the insurgent Replacement Party, has hired a car mounted with loudspeakers to spew his rhetoric around Music City at top volume. The car is a virtual member of this teeming cast. Walker’s platform bludgeons. Among his controversial policies: abolishing all lawyers from Congress, changing our national anthem, abolishing the Electoral College and taxing the church. Every out-there proposal seems to give the candidate increased momentum. Again, sound familiar? “Even those who pay close attention to politics probably saw Hal Phillip Walker and his Replacement Party as a bit of frost on the hillside… now summer is heavy upon us and the frost is still there. Perhaps we should take a closer look,” the newsman comments, “… Hal Phillip Walker is not going away…” If you are anything like me, and you’ve been following the primary and caucus season every day, via cable news or social media for three to five hours a day over the past year (I write with it on as white noise), you might want to take a closer look at the late Altman’s noisy, wry, tense and brilliant American epic. Walker began his political campaign with the support of a gaggle of college students (during a nutty commencement address), à la Bernie Sanders, and his unforeseen rise and promise to roll into town like a new sheriff is, of course, very Trumpian, but "Nashville" proves that when it comes to an election year, as David Byrne says, it's the same as it ever was. What President Obama has more than once called “the silly season” is something that may just require a work of prescient fiction to put it into context — and let’s face it, make it a little less disturbing. It’s easy to hide inside "Top Chef" or "Empire" if you really need a break, but while functional, these respites don’t seem as medicinal as "Nashville." It’s hard to laugh at what we’ve seen and heard over the past year, but "Nashville," passionately lauded by influential critics like Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert when it was released, and now residing in the National Film Registry, is pure catharsis to those who can’t quite take their eye off America because they don’t quite understand what the hell is happening to it — and perhaps a little bit of what Elvis Costello called a deep, dark truthful mirror to those who are certain that they do. As with many Altman films, "Nashville" meanders from enclave to enclave of eccentric and chattering characters, never silent but always arresting before we are forced to let go: singers and pickers both talented and famous, and talentless but aspiring (most memorably Henry Gibson’s Haven Hamilton, evangelicals, demagogues, cynics, hipsters (including a hunky Keith Carradine, a funky Shelly Duvall and a young, mute, chopper-riding Jeff Goldblum), a British tabloid journalist (Geraldine Chaplin) and Walker’s cynical canvassers, played by Michael Murphy and Ned Beatty, who would hit the prescient-'70s-film Daily Double with an unforgettable scene in the following year’s "Network." Watching Walker’s ground men try to amass support from the insular Nashville music community, it’s hard not to hear certain real-life candidates over the years dial up their Southern accents and down-home pantomime over the years. “They have a real grass roots appeal,” Murphy acknowledges, as he patiently manipulates the city’s suspicious power brokers in their cowboy hats and glittering Nudie-style suits. “They’re the people that elect the president.” When the film was released, there were some who felt that Altman, already a Hollywood institution, was making fun of the South. Some audience members were insulted, and the film can still polarize. But like the "Monty Python"/"SNL" Beatles send-up "The Rutles" (1978) or "This Is Spinal Tap" (1984) — both classic, music-driven satires — Nashville’s music (and every other scene seems to include a number) is rendered with at least a noticeable measure of affection and a real feel and respect for the culture. The songs, many by '70s pop singer/songwriter Richard Baskin, are uniformly believable and hummable, feel-good, patriotic, nostalgic ballads or stomps. And Keith Carradine’s melancholy “I’m Easy” was a genuine hit. Lily Tomlin's number with a large choir in an early scene, and the film’s unofficial theme song, “It Don’t Worry Me” (“You can say that I ain’t free but it don’t worry me…”), are more than just deliverers of verisimilitude — they're genuinely moving. "Nashville" seems even more haunted by the state of America than we are today, which provides yet another bit of sweet relief. Altman’s camera often lingers on the red, white and blue and the reverie of the upcoming Bicentennial as well as the pall of Watergate, the Kennedy assassinations (still) and the ascent of terrorism permeate the film. American violence is everywhere, ready to explode. It’s oddly soothing to be reminded that, you know, it’s not just us. The country of our elders was also a crazy, potentially catastrophic, duplicitous and power-jockeying realm … and we’ve been denying it with saccharine show business cheese for all time as well. So while you are glued to the returns and the anchors and the shock and shtick these next few weeks, perhaps you want to find time to watch or rewatch this film. It’s nearly three hours long (available as a Criterion two disc-er or on iTunes and Netflix DVDs) so you might want to pause for a Goo Goo candy bar (“It’s good”) while you are reminded that, as candidate Walker says, no matter what the election year or the state of the nation, “some very funny notions… (have) develop(ed) in American politics…” But don’t let it worry you.“Many Americans, especially party liners, wish that Hal Phillip Walker would go away … disappear like the frost and come again at a more convenient season. But wherever we may be going it seems sure that Hal Phillip Walker is not going away, for there is genuine appeal.” Sound familiar? This dialogue is 41 years old, recited by a newscaster, covering the crucial and fictional Tennessee primary in Robert Altman’s 1975 masterpiece "Nashville." In the film, Walker, candidate for the insurgent Replacement Party, has hired a car mounted with loudspeakers to spew his rhetoric around Music City at top volume. The car is a virtual member of this teeming cast. Walker’s platform bludgeons. Among his controversial policies: abolishing all lawyers from Congress, changing our national anthem, abolishing the Electoral College and taxing the church. Every out-there proposal seems to give the candidate increased momentum. Again, sound familiar? “Even those who pay close attention to politics probably saw Hal Phillip Walker and his Replacement Party as a bit of frost on the hillside… now summer is heavy upon us and the frost is still there. Perhaps we should take a closer look,” the newsman comments, “… Hal Phillip Walker is not going away…” If you are anything like me, and you’ve been following the primary and caucus season every day, via cable news or social media for three to five hours a day over the past year (I write with it on as white noise), you might want to take a closer look at the late Altman’s noisy, wry, tense and brilliant American epic. Walker began his political campaign with the support of a gaggle of college students (during a nutty commencement address), à la Bernie Sanders, and his unforeseen rise and promise to roll into town like a new sheriff is, of course, very Trumpian, but "Nashville" proves that when it comes to an election year, as David Byrne says, it's the same as it ever was. What President Obama has more than once called “the silly season” is something that may just require a work of prescient fiction to put it into context — and let’s face it, make it a little less disturbing. It’s easy to hide inside "Top Chef" or "Empire" if you really need a break, but while functional, these respites don’t seem as medicinal as "Nashville." It’s hard to laugh at what we’ve seen and heard over the past year, but "Nashville," passionately lauded by influential critics like Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert when it was released, and now residing in the National Film Registry, is pure catharsis to those who can’t quite take their eye off America because they don’t quite understand what the hell is happening to it — and perhaps a little bit of what Elvis Costello called a deep, dark truthful mirror to those who are certain that they do. As with many Altman films, "Nashville" meanders from enclave to enclave of eccentric and chattering characters, never silent but always arresting before we are forced to let go: singers and pickers both talented and famous, and talentless but aspiring (most memorably Henry Gibson’s Haven Hamilton, evangelicals, demagogues, cynics, hipsters (including a hunky Keith Carradine, a funky Shelly Duvall and a young, mute, chopper-riding Jeff Goldblum), a British tabloid journalist (Geraldine Chaplin) and Walker’s cynical canvassers, played by Michael Murphy and Ned Beatty, who would hit the prescient-'70s-film Daily Double with an unforgettable scene in the following year’s "Network." Watching Walker’s ground men try to amass support from the insular Nashville music community, it’s hard not to hear certain real-life candidates over the years dial up their Southern accents and down-home pantomime over the years. “They have a real grass roots appeal,” Murphy acknowledges, as he patiently manipulates the city’s suspicious power brokers in their cowboy hats and glittering Nudie-style suits. “They’re the people that elect the president.” When the film was released, there were some who felt that Altman, already a Hollywood institution, was making fun of the South. Some audience members were insulted, and the film can still polarize. But like the "Monty Python"/"SNL" Beatles send-up "The Rutles" (1978) or "This Is Spinal Tap" (1984) — both classic, music-driven satires — Nashville’s music (and every other scene seems to include a number) is rendered with at least a noticeable measure of affection and a real feel and respect for the culture. The songs, many by '70s pop singer/songwriter Richard Baskin, are uniformly believable and hummable, feel-good, patriotic, nostalgic ballads or stomps. And Keith Carradine’s melancholy “I’m Easy” was a genuine hit. Lily Tomlin's number with a large choir in an early scene, and the film’s unofficial theme song, “It Don’t Worry Me” (“You can say that I ain’t free but it don’t worry me…”), are more than just deliverers of verisimilitude — they're genuinely moving. "Nashville" seems even more haunted by the state of America than we are today, which provides yet another bit of sweet relief. Altman’s camera often lingers on the red, white and blue and the reverie of the upcoming Bicentennial as well as the pall of Watergate, the Kennedy assassinations (still) and the ascent of terrorism permeate the film. American violence is everywhere, ready to explode. It’s oddly soothing to be reminded that, you know, it’s not just us. The country of our elders was also a crazy, potentially catastrophic, duplicitous and power-jockeying realm … and we’ve been denying it with saccharine show business cheese for all time as well. So while you are glued to the returns and the anchors and the shock and shtick these next few weeks, perhaps you want to find time to watch or rewatch this film. It’s nearly three hours long (available as a Criterion two disc-er or on iTunes and Netflix DVDs) so you might want to pause for a Goo Goo candy bar (“It’s good”) while you are reminded that, as candidate Walker says, no matter what the election year or the state of the nation, “some very funny notions… (have) develop(ed) in American politics…” But don’t let it worry you.
The rise and fall of “family values”: How “religious freedom” became the rallying cry of the Christian right
From about 1970 until about 2000, American politics was largely driven by concern about the nuclear family. As established social hierarchies came under fire from the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement, second-wave feminism, and others, conservative advocacy groups and their political allies demanded a return to the idealized family of the past. “Family values” became the rallying cry of a countermovement bent on holding the traditional line. Seth Dowland is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at Pacific Lutheran University. His book,
Family Values and the Rise of the Christian Right
, charts the influence of Christian “family values” advocacy across three decades and a variety of issues. RD’s Eric C. Miller spoke with Dowland about the project, the politics, and the significance of family in the United States. You introduce “family values” as the key term of the Christian Right in the late twentieth-century United States. Why was this term so influential for this group in this place and time? Many of the political reforms enacted from the 1930s through the 1960s—particularly the expansion of the welfare state and the passage of civil rights legislation—attempted to expand equal rights to all people. Political liberals celebrated these developments, while conservatives looked around the nation at the beginning of the 1970s and saw economic stagnation, riots, sexual revolution, a decline in patriotism, and an increase in crime and drug use. Ministers and political conservatives argued that America was in decline. They believed that decline happened because of the demise of the “traditional family.” Scholar Stephanie Coontz has shown that the concept of a traditional family—breadwinning father, stay-at-home mother, and children who enjoy a lengthy and protected childhood—is a fiction. In fact, even idealizing this version of the traditional family is a fairly recent phenomenon. Democrats in the 1970s agreed with Republicans that they ought to promote families, but they wanted to broaden the concept of family to include single-parent families, multi-generational households, and, in some cases, gay couples. Political conservatives rejected the attempt to broaden the concept of family and placed defense of the traditional family at the center of their political agenda. This agenda—defending and promoting family values—resonated with evangelical Christians because it spoke to two of their central convictions. First, evangelicals believed that gender was part of the created order, that men and women were created by God to fulfill different roles. In traditional families, men provided and protected, while women bore, reared and nurtured children. Movements that viewed gender roles as the product of patriarchal social constructions—such as second-wave feminism—represented a denial of God’s good creation, which spelled out biologically appropriate roles for men and women. Second, evangelicals believed that God designed institutions like the family and the church to run under certain authority structures. While evangelicals voiced support for equal rights, they wanted to retain the authority structures that kept human sinfulness in check. Traditional families exemplified those godly authority structures: Husbands led their wives, and parents had authority over children. Promoting family values gave evangelicals a way to uphold their beliefs about gender and authority in the broader culture. If gender played an overt role in the rise of the Christian Right, class and race were implicit as well. The single breadwinner model of the family presumed middle-class stability, and the movement as a whole was almost entirely white. So is it fair to say that “family values” merged a diversity of issues that mattered specifically to conservative, middle-class, white, evangelical Christians? That’s exactly right. While I talk mostly about gender, certain assumptions about race and class were part of pro-family politics. Christian schools are a perfect example of this. During the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, the number of Christian schools opened by conservative evangelical Christians skyrocketed. By the early 1980s, evangelical ministers like Jerry Falwell were claiming that evangelicals opened three new Christian schools every day, ostensibly because public schools had become anti-Christian. Yet this surge in Christian school growth coincided with public school desegregation. The student bodies in most of these Christian schools were overwhelmingly or entirely white. Even so, viewing these schools simply as “segregation academies” obscures both diversity within the Christian school movement and the ways that segregationist schools changed over time. Falwell’s own K-12 school, Lynchburg (later Liberty) Christian Academy is a good example. Launched in 1967—the same year Lynchburg public schools desegregated—LCA was all-white for two years. But as desegregation became normalized in Lynchburg public schools (which had a small proportion of African-American students relative to other southern locales), LCA would need other rationales to sustain enrollment. The school found a winning strategy in promoting family values. LCA portrayed its mission as supporting Christian families and promised to shape young men and women who knew their place. A 1975 promotional brochure for the school advertised, “we have no hippies” and “you can tell our boys from our girls without a medical examination.” The relative lack of explicit racial rhetoric in the family values movement would later open the door for change among some conservative evangelicals. In 1990, University of Colorado football coach Bill McCartney founded Promise Keepers, an evangelical men’s organization that became one of the most important pro-family groups of the decade. As shown in the recent ESPN film “The Gospel According to Mac,” McCartney was talking about structural racism twenty years ago. He made racial reconciliation a centerpiece of Promise Keepers’ ministry. McCartney’s understanding of systemic injustice never prevailed among a majority of conservative white evangelicals, who insisted that racism was foremost a sin of the heart. This understanding constrained white evangelicals’ ability to forge interracial alliances in support of family values. The pro-family movement found some nonwhite allies among socially conservative minority Christians, but its normalization of white, middle-class values limited its reach. The book’s structure does a nice job of laying out family values activism as a species of identity politics, with issues apportioned to children, mothers, and fathers as fundamental political actors. Is “family values” the conservative rejoinder to the feminist claim that the personal is political? I never thought of family values in those terms, but I wish I had! I do think family values caught on because it spoke to the hopes and fears of conservative evangelicals in the midst of tectonic cultural shifts. For instance, the conservative evangelical and Catholic women who opposed second-wave feminists insisted that feminists didn’t speak for all women. When anti-feminist women read Betty Friedan calling suburban homes a “concentration camp” for women, they took it personally. They felt such a statement demeaned their highest calling as women: to serve as wives and mothers. Leaders of the anti-feminist coalition capitalized on conservative women’s frustration with feminists. Phyllis Schlafly insisted that the Equal Rights Amendment was “anti-family, anti-children, and pro-abortion.” She won broad support from conservative women because she highlighted her commitment to the family and to particular roles within the family: those of wife and mother. Ironically, identifying first as a wife and mother authorized conservative women to range far outside the home in order to defend their rights within it. Schlafly ran for Congress, authored a bestseller in support of Barry Goldwater, and campaigned across the country to defeat the ERA. Beverly LaHaye gave speeches to thousands. Texas public school watchdog Norma Gabler became a fixture at the annual textbook adoption hearings in Austin, claiming moral authority as a mother to revise curricula according to conservative beliefs. Stories of these and other women fill the book, suggesting that family values made the personal political for conservative women. They understood feminism as a misrepresentation of their hopes and values, and they rallied against feminist objectives like the ERA and reproductive rights. Being a woman, according to pro-family groups, entailed a noble calling to support one’s husband and nurture one’s children. Feminists who privileged other roles for women were undermining the created order. Of course, family values crusaders were not immune to the economic pressures that drove more and more women into the workplace in the late twentieth century. Pro-family political rhetoric subtly changed over time to accommodate this cultural shift. By the end of the century, few conservative evangelicals condemned women who worked outside the home. But they retained a belief that women ought to consider their roles as wives and mothers as primary. That accommodation is interesting. You’ve observed that the defense of the traditional family relied on a declension narrative about post-1960s American life, often with dire warnings about the future. So if the defenders changed with the times, did they ever make any significant concessions? Or, conversely, are there any metrics that they can cite today as evidence that they were right? The genius of narratives about national decline lies in their malleability. Each new year brought fresh examples of how America was losing its way. While some of the issues that the Christian Right had earlier identified as existential threats (like women in the workplace) became normal, there were always new concerns on the horizon. It helped that conservative evangelicals were speaking in the language of the times. In his book
All in the Family
, historian Robert Self demonstrates that the perceived failures of mid-century liberalism pushed family values to the center of American politics in the late 1960s. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, showed that even liberals thought we needed to bolster family life in America. What was at stake, then, was who would stand up for the family. We can see this in the abortion debate. Pro-life groups described their opposition to abortion as a defense of both life and motherhood. Obviously, arguing that life begins at conception was a central conviction for the pro-life movement. But a more subtle element of pro-life activism involved framing abortion as an assault on family values. Groups like the Moral Majority didn’t talk about women terminating pregnancies; they said abortions happen “when the mother wants the baby killed.” This rhetorical description infuriated pro-choice advocates, but it also painted them into a corner. They were defending women’s individual rights in an era saturated by family politics. Either they could defend abortion or they could defend motherhood. Family values crusaders weren’t always successful in their political campaigns—we still have legalized abortion, after all—but they constructed a vision of family values that brought together a large constituency of evangelicals and changed the way politicians pursued their agendas. This is one metric of their success. But conservative evangelicals did admit their disappointment at the relative lack of concrete political achievements made by pro-family politicians. They haven’t overturned Roe, returned prayer to public school classrooms, or held the line on gay marriage. At the end of both the Reagan administration and the second Bush administration, a faction of family values evangelicals decided to leave the political arena altogether. Family values rhetoric seemed to taper off around the turn of the century, to be replaced by “religious freedom” as the key term of the Christian Right. Presumably, though, the movement still thinks family is important. So why make this change now? And will “family values” be back? Conservative evangelicals have grown more circumspect about their position as political leaders in the last decade. In his book
Age of Evangelicalism
, Steven Miller shows how evangelical norms, language, and votes exerted a disproportionate influence on national politics until very recently. Miller makes a compelling case that Obama’s election, after running as an “unabashed social liberal,” marked the end of the age of evangelicalism. More than anything, the legalization of gay marriage signaled conservative evangelicals’ political exile. In the last few years, they have published a spate of books about the need for Christians to live as counter-cultural witnesses, and the battleground has shifted to religious freedom so that [in their view] churches and other Christian organizations can practice what they preach in peace. This is a far cry from the bombast of Jerry Falwell and James Dobson talking about taking back the nation for Christ. Conservative evangelicals obviously still exert considerable power, particularly in Republican politics. We’ll see that again in the Iowa caucuses and the South Carolina primary. There are still many Republican politicians and evangelical ministers who will get plenty of mileage sounding the alarm that they have been ringing for decades: America is going to hell in a handbasket, and only a return to God will save us. But will enough people heed the warning? I’m not sure religious freedom as a rallying cry will have much staying power as long as Christian Right leaders continue to apply it with such transparent selectivity. Franklin Graham, for one, has made clear his belief that religious freedom doesn’t extend to Muslims. Other members of the broad pro-family coalition, like Russell Moore, have called out Graham for this double standard. That’s similar to what’s happening with family values: enough Americans (and enough evangelicals) have decided that the way the Christian Right defined them in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s is too narrow. The pro-family movement is fragmenting. Family values aren’t going away as long as families exist. What’s at stake is how we conceive of families and their values. The cover of my book depicts a scene at the dinner table of a coal miner in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1971. It’s a visual encapsulation of how Americans thought about family values during this era: white, heterosexual, middle-class, Christian. The dominance of these demographics is waning. We’ll see the return of family values in our political debates, but they won’t be framed in the same way as they were during the late twentieth century. Over the next few decades, we may be talking about gentrification or incarceration or health care in a family values framework. We can’t predict exactly what shape those debates will take, but it’s a safe bet we’ll be fighting about family values for years to come.
From about 1970 until about 2000, American politics was largely driven by concern about the nuclear family. As established social hierarchies came under fire from the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement, second-wave feminism, and others, conservative advocacy groups and their political allies demanded a return to the idealized family of the past. “Family values” became the rallying cry of a countermovement bent on holding the traditional line. Seth Dowland is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at Pacific Lutheran University. His book,
Family Values and the Rise of the Christian Right
, charts the influence of Christian “family values” advocacy across three decades and a variety of issues. RD’s Eric C. Miller spoke with Dowland about the project, the politics, and the significance of family in the United States. You introduce “family values” as the key term of the Christian Right in the late twentieth-century United States. Why was this term so influential for this group in this place and time? Many of the political reforms enacted from the 1930s through the 1960s—particularly the expansion of the welfare state and the passage of civil rights legislation—attempted to expand equal rights to all people. Political liberals celebrated these developments, while conservatives looked around the nation at the beginning of the 1970s and saw economic stagnation, riots, sexual revolution, a decline in patriotism, and an increase in crime and drug use. Ministers and political conservatives argued that America was in decline. They believed that decline happened because of the demise of the “traditional family.” Scholar Stephanie Coontz has shown that the concept of a traditional family—breadwinning father, stay-at-home mother, and children who enjoy a lengthy and protected childhood—is a fiction. In fact, even idealizing this version of the traditional family is a fairly recent phenomenon. Democrats in the 1970s agreed with Republicans that they ought to promote families, but they wanted to broaden the concept of family to include single-parent families, multi-generational households, and, in some cases, gay couples. Political conservatives rejected the attempt to broaden the concept of family and placed defense of the traditional family at the center of their political agenda. This agenda—defending and promoting family values—resonated with evangelical Christians because it spoke to two of their central convictions. First, evangelicals believed that gender was part of the created order, that men and women were created by God to fulfill different roles. In traditional families, men provided and protected, while women bore, reared and nurtured children. Movements that viewed gender roles as the product of patriarchal social constructions—such as second-wave feminism—represented a denial of God’s good creation, which spelled out biologically appropriate roles for men and women. Second, evangelicals believed that God designed institutions like the family and the church to run under certain authority structures. While evangelicals voiced support for equal rights, they wanted to retain the authority structures that kept human sinfulness in check. Traditional families exemplified those godly authority structures: Husbands led their wives, and parents had authority over children. Promoting family values gave evangelicals a way to uphold their beliefs about gender and authority in the broader culture. If gender played an overt role in the rise of the Christian Right, class and race were implicit as well. The single breadwinner model of the family presumed middle-class stability, and the movement as a whole was almost entirely white. So is it fair to say that “family values” merged a diversity of issues that mattered specifically to conservative, middle-class, white, evangelical Christians? That’s exactly right. While I talk mostly about gender, certain assumptions about race and class were part of pro-family politics. Christian schools are a perfect example of this. During the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, the number of Christian schools opened by conservative evangelical Christians skyrocketed. By the early 1980s, evangelical ministers like Jerry Falwell were claiming that evangelicals opened three new Christian schools every day, ostensibly because public schools had become anti-Christian. Yet this surge in Christian school growth coincided with public school desegregation. The student bodies in most of these Christian schools were overwhelmingly or entirely white. Even so, viewing these schools simply as “segregation academies” obscures both diversity within the Christian school movement and the ways that segregationist schools changed over time. Falwell’s own K-12 school, Lynchburg (later Liberty) Christian Academy is a good example. Launched in 1967—the same year Lynchburg public schools desegregated—LCA was all-white for two years. But as desegregation became normalized in Lynchburg public schools (which had a small proportion of African-American students relative to other southern locales), LCA would need other rationales to sustain enrollment. The school found a winning strategy in promoting family values. LCA portrayed its mission as supporting Christian families and promised to shape young men and women who knew their place. A 1975 promotional brochure for the school advertised, “we have no hippies” and “you can tell our boys from our girls without a medical examination.” The relative lack of explicit racial rhetoric in the family values movement would later open the door for change among some conservative evangelicals. In 1990, University of Colorado football coach Bill McCartney founded Promise Keepers, an evangelical men’s organization that became one of the most important pro-family groups of the decade. As shown in the recent ESPN film “The Gospel According to Mac,” McCartney was talking about structural racism twenty years ago. He made racial reconciliation a centerpiece of Promise Keepers’ ministry. McCartney’s understanding of systemic injustice never prevailed among a majority of conservative white evangelicals, who insisted that racism was foremost a sin of the heart. This understanding constrained white evangelicals’ ability to forge interracial alliances in support of family values. The pro-family movement found some nonwhite allies among socially conservative minority Christians, but its normalization of white, middle-class values limited its reach. The book’s structure does a nice job of laying out family values activism as a species of identity politics, with issues apportioned to children, mothers, and fathers as fundamental political actors. Is “family values” the conservative rejoinder to the feminist claim that the personal is political? I never thought of family values in those terms, but I wish I had! I do think family values caught on because it spoke to the hopes and fears of conservative evangelicals in the midst of tectonic cultural shifts. For instance, the conservative evangelical and Catholic women who opposed second-wave feminists insisted that feminists didn’t speak for all women. When anti-feminist women read Betty Friedan calling suburban homes a “concentration camp” for women, they took it personally. They felt such a statement demeaned their highest calling as women: to serve as wives and mothers. Leaders of the anti-feminist coalition capitalized on conservative women’s frustration with feminists. Phyllis Schlafly insisted that the Equal Rights Amendment was “anti-family, anti-children, and pro-abortion.” She won broad support from conservative women because she highlighted her commitment to the family and to particular roles within the family: those of wife and mother. Ironically, identifying first as a wife and mother authorized conservative women to range far outside the home in order to defend their rights within it. Schlafly ran for Congress, authored a bestseller in support of Barry Goldwater, and campaigned across the country to defeat the ERA. Beverly LaHaye gave speeches to thousands. Texas public school watchdog Norma Gabler became a fixture at the annual textbook adoption hearings in Austin, claiming moral authority as a mother to revise curricula according to conservative beliefs. Stories of these and other women fill the book, suggesting that family values made the personal political for conservative women. They understood feminism as a misrepresentation of their hopes and values, and they rallied against feminist objectives like the ERA and reproductive rights. Being a woman, according to pro-family groups, entailed a noble calling to support one’s husband and nurture one’s children. Feminists who privileged other roles for women were undermining the created order. Of course, family values crusaders were not immune to the economic pressures that drove more and more women into the workplace in the late twentieth century. Pro-family political rhetoric subtly changed over time to accommodate this cultural shift. By the end of the century, few conservative evangelicals condemned women who worked outside the home. But they retained a belief that women ought to consider their roles as wives and mothers as primary. That accommodation is interesting. You’ve observed that the defense of the traditional family relied on a declension narrative about post-1960s American life, often with dire warnings about the future. So if the defenders changed with the times, did they ever make any significant concessions? Or, conversely, are there any metrics that they can cite today as evidence that they were right? The genius of narratives about national decline lies in their malleability. Each new year brought fresh examples of how America was losing its way. While some of the issues that the Christian Right had earlier identified as existential threats (like women in the workplace) became normal, there were always new concerns on the horizon. It helped that conservative evangelicals were speaking in the language of the times. In his book
All in the Family
, historian Robert Self demonstrates that the perceived failures of mid-century liberalism pushed family values to the center of American politics in the late 1960s. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, showed that even liberals thought we needed to bolster family life in America. What was at stake, then, was who would stand up for the family. We can see this in the abortion debate. Pro-life groups described their opposition to abortion as a defense of both life and motherhood. Obviously, arguing that life begins at conception was a central conviction for the pro-life movement. But a more subtle element of pro-life activism involved framing abortion as an assault on family values. Groups like the Moral Majority didn’t talk about women terminating pregnancies; they said abortions happen “when the mother wants the baby killed.” This rhetorical description infuriated pro-choice advocates, but it also painted them into a corner. They were defending women’s individual rights in an era saturated by family politics. Either they could defend abortion or they could defend motherhood. Family values crusaders weren’t always successful in their political campaigns—we still have legalized abortion, after all—but they constructed a vision of family values that brought together a large constituency of evangelicals and changed the way politicians pursued their agendas. This is one metric of their success. But conservative evangelicals did admit their disappointment at the relative lack of concrete political achievements made by pro-family politicians. They haven’t overturned Roe, returned prayer to public school classrooms, or held the line on gay marriage. At the end of both the Reagan administration and the second Bush administration, a faction of family values evangelicals decided to leave the political arena altogether. Family values rhetoric seemed to taper off around the turn of the century, to be replaced by “religious freedom” as the key term of the Christian Right. Presumably, though, the movement still thinks family is important. So why make this change now? And will “family values” be back? Conservative evangelicals have grown more circumspect about their position as political leaders in the last decade. In his book
Age of Evangelicalism
, Steven Miller shows how evangelical norms, language, and votes exerted a disproportionate influence on national politics until very recently. Miller makes a compelling case that Obama’s election, after running as an “unabashed social liberal,” marked the end of the age of evangelicalism. More than anything, the legalization of gay marriage signaled conservative evangelicals’ political exile. In the last few years, they have published a spate of books about the need for Christians to live as counter-cultural witnesses, and the battleground has shifted to religious freedom so that [in their view] churches and other Christian organizations can practice what they preach in peace. This is a far cry from the bombast of Jerry Falwell and James Dobson talking about taking back the nation for Christ. Conservative evangelicals obviously still exert considerable power, particularly in Republican politics. We’ll see that again in the Iowa caucuses and the South Carolina primary. There are still many Republican politicians and evangelical ministers who will get plenty of mileage sounding the alarm that they have been ringing for decades: America is going to hell in a handbasket, and only a return to God will save us. But will enough people heed the warning? I’m not sure religious freedom as a rallying cry will have much staying power as long as Christian Right leaders continue to apply it with such transparent selectivity. Franklin Graham, for one, has made clear his belief that religious freedom doesn’t extend to Muslims. Other members of the broad pro-family coalition, like Russell Moore, have called out Graham for this double standard. That’s similar to what’s happening with family values: enough Americans (and enough evangelicals) have decided that the way the Christian Right defined them in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s is too narrow. The pro-family movement is fragmenting. Family values aren’t going away as long as families exist. What’s at stake is how we conceive of families and their values. The cover of my book depicts a scene at the dinner table of a coal miner in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1971. It’s a visual encapsulation of how Americans thought about family values during this era: white, heterosexual, middle-class, Christian. The dominance of these demographics is waning. We’ll see the return of family values in our political debates, but they won’t be framed in the same way as they were during the late twentieth century. Over the next few decades, we may be talking about gentrification or incarceration or health care in a family values framework. We can’t predict exactly what shape those debates will take, but it’s a safe bet we’ll be fighting about family values for years to come.
From about 1970 until about 2000, American politics was largely driven by concern about the nuclear family. As established social hierarchies came under fire from the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement, second-wave feminism, and others, conservative advocacy groups and their political allies demanded a return to the idealized family of the past. “Family values” became the rallying cry of a countermovement bent on holding the traditional line. Seth Dowland is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at Pacific Lutheran University. His book,
Family Values and the Rise of the Christian Right
, charts the influence of Christian “family values” advocacy across three decades and a variety of issues. RD’s Eric C. Miller spoke with Dowland about the project, the politics, and the significance of family in the United States. You introduce “family values” as the key term of the Christian Right in the late twentieth-century United States. Why was this term so influential for this group in this place and time? Many of the political reforms enacted from the 1930s through the 1960s—particularly the expansion of the welfare state and the passage of civil rights legislation—attempted to expand equal rights to all people. Political liberals celebrated these developments, while conservatives looked around the nation at the beginning of the 1970s and saw economic stagnation, riots, sexual revolution, a decline in patriotism, and an increase in crime and drug use. Ministers and political conservatives argued that America was in decline. They believed that decline happened because of the demise of the “traditional family.” Scholar Stephanie Coontz has shown that the concept of a traditional family—breadwinning father, stay-at-home mother, and children who enjoy a lengthy and protected childhood—is a fiction. In fact, even idealizing this version of the traditional family is a fairly recent phenomenon. Democrats in the 1970s agreed with Republicans that they ought to promote families, but they wanted to broaden the concept of family to include single-parent families, multi-generational households, and, in some cases, gay couples. Political conservatives rejected the attempt to broaden the concept of family and placed defense of the traditional family at the center of their political agenda. This agenda—defending and promoting family values—resonated with evangelical Christians because it spoke to two of their central convictions. First, evangelicals believed that gender was part of the created order, that men and women were created by God to fulfill different roles. In traditional families, men provided and protected, while women bore, reared and nurtured children. Movements that viewed gender roles as the product of patriarchal social constructions—such as second-wave feminism—represented a denial of God’s good creation, which spelled out biologically appropriate roles for men and women. Second, evangelicals believed that God designed institutions like the family and the church to run under certain authority structures. While evangelicals voiced support for equal rights, they wanted to retain the authority structures that kept human sinfulness in check. Traditional families exemplified those godly authority structures: Husbands led their wives, and parents had authority over children. Promoting family values gave evangelicals a way to uphold their beliefs about gender and authority in the broader culture. If gender played an overt role in the rise of the Christian Right, class and race were implicit as well. The single breadwinner model of the family presumed middle-class stability, and the movement as a whole was almost entirely white. So is it fair to say that “family values” merged a diversity of issues that mattered specifically to conservative, middle-class, white, evangelical Christians? That’s exactly right. While I talk mostly about gender, certain assumptions about race and class were part of pro-family politics. Christian schools are a perfect example of this. During the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, the number of Christian schools opened by conservative evangelical Christians skyrocketed. By the early 1980s, evangelical ministers like Jerry Falwell were claiming that evangelicals opened three new Christian schools every day, ostensibly because public schools had become anti-Christian. Yet this surge in Christian school growth coincided with public school desegregation. The student bodies in most of these Christian schools were overwhelmingly or entirely white. Even so, viewing these schools simply as “segregation academies” obscures both diversity within the Christian school movement and the ways that segregationist schools changed over time. Falwell’s own K-12 school, Lynchburg (later Liberty) Christian Academy is a good example. Launched in 1967—the same year Lynchburg public schools desegregated—LCA was all-white for two years. But as desegregation became normalized in Lynchburg public schools (which had a small proportion of African-American students relative to other southern locales), LCA would need other rationales to sustain enrollment. The school found a winning strategy in promoting family values. LCA portrayed its mission as supporting Christian families and promised to shape young men and women who knew their place. A 1975 promotional brochure for the school advertised, “we have no hippies” and “you can tell our boys from our girls without a medical examination.” The relative lack of explicit racial rhetoric in the family values movement would later open the door for change among some conservative evangelicals. In 1990, University of Colorado football coach Bill McCartney founded Promise Keepers, an evangelical men’s organization that became one of the most important pro-family groups of the decade. As shown in the recent ESPN film “The Gospel According to Mac,” McCartney was talking about structural racism twenty years ago. He made racial reconciliation a centerpiece of Promise Keepers’ ministry. McCartney’s understanding of systemic injustice never prevailed among a majority of conservative white evangelicals, who insisted that racism was foremost a sin of the heart. This understanding constrained white evangelicals’ ability to forge interracial alliances in support of family values. The pro-family movement found some nonwhite allies among socially conservative minority Christians, but its normalization of white, middle-class values limited its reach. The book’s structure does a nice job of laying out family values activism as a species of identity politics, with issues apportioned to children, mothers, and fathers as fundamental political actors. Is “family values” the conservative rejoinder to the feminist claim that the personal is political? I never thought of family values in those terms, but I wish I had! I do think family values caught on because it spoke to the hopes and fears of conservative evangelicals in the midst of tectonic cultural shifts. For instance, the conservative evangelical and Catholic women who opposed second-wave feminists insisted that feminists didn’t speak for all women. When anti-feminist women read Betty Friedan calling suburban homes a “concentration camp” for women, they took it personally. They felt such a statement demeaned their highest calling as women: to serve as wives and mothers. Leaders of the anti-feminist coalition capitalized on conservative women’s frustration with feminists. Phyllis Schlafly insisted that the Equal Rights Amendment was “anti-family, anti-children, and pro-abortion.” She won broad support from conservative women because she highlighted her commitment to the family and to particular roles within the family: those of wife and mother. Ironically, identifying first as a wife and mother authorized conservative women to range far outside the home in order to defend their rights within it. Schlafly ran for Congress, authored a bestseller in support of Barry Goldwater, and campaigned across the country to defeat the ERA. Beverly LaHaye gave speeches to thousands. Texas public school watchdog Norma Gabler became a fixture at the annual textbook adoption hearings in Austin, claiming moral authority as a mother to revise curricula according to conservative beliefs. Stories of these and other women fill the book, suggesting that family values made the personal political for conservative women. They understood feminism as a misrepresentation of their hopes and values, and they rallied against feminist objectives like the ERA and reproductive rights. Being a woman, according to pro-family groups, entailed a noble calling to support one’s husband and nurture one’s children. Feminists who privileged other roles for women were undermining the created order. Of course, family values crusaders were not immune to the economic pressures that drove more and more women into the workplace in the late twentieth century. Pro-family political rhetoric subtly changed over time to accommodate this cultural shift. By the end of the century, few conservative evangelicals condemned women who worked outside the home. But they retained a belief that women ought to consider their roles as wives and mothers as primary. That accommodation is interesting. You’ve observed that the defense of the traditional family relied on a declension narrative about post-1960s American life, often with dire warnings about the future. So if the defenders changed with the times, did they ever make any significant concessions? Or, conversely, are there any metrics that they can cite today as evidence that they were right? The genius of narratives about national decline lies in their malleability. Each new year brought fresh examples of how America was losing its way. While some of the issues that the Christian Right had earlier identified as existential threats (like women in the workplace) became normal, there were always new concerns on the horizon. It helped that conservative evangelicals were speaking in the language of the times. In his book
All in the Family
, historian Robert Self demonstrates that the perceived failures of mid-century liberalism pushed family values to the center of American politics in the late 1960s. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, showed that even liberals thought we needed to bolster family life in America. What was at stake, then, was who would stand up for the family. We can see this in the abortion debate. Pro-life groups described their opposition to abortion as a defense of both life and motherhood. Obviously, arguing that life begins at conception was a central conviction for the pro-life movement. But a more subtle element of pro-life activism involved framing abortion as an assault on family values. Groups like the Moral Majority didn’t talk about women terminating pregnancies; they said abortions happen “when the mother wants the baby killed.” This rhetorical description infuriated pro-choice advocates, but it also painted them into a corner. They were defending women’s individual rights in an era saturated by family politics. Either they could defend abortion or they could defend motherhood. Family values crusaders weren’t always successful in their political campaigns—we still have legalized abortion, after all—but they constructed a vision of family values that brought together a large constituency of evangelicals and changed the way politicians pursued their agendas. This is one metric of their success. But conservative evangelicals did admit their disappointment at the relative lack of concrete political achievements made by pro-family politicians. They haven’t overturned Roe, returned prayer to public school classrooms, or held the line on gay marriage. At the end of both the Reagan administration and the second Bush administration, a faction of family values evangelicals decided to leave the political arena altogether. Family values rhetoric seemed to taper off around the turn of the century, to be replaced by “religious freedom” as the key term of the Christian Right. Presumably, though, the movement still thinks family is important. So why make this change now? And will “family values” be back? Conservative evangelicals have grown more circumspect about their position as political leaders in the last decade. In his book
Age of Evangelicalism
, Steven Miller shows how evangelical norms, language, and votes exerted a disproportionate influence on national politics until very recently. Miller makes a compelling case that Obama’s election, after running as an “unabashed social liberal,” marked the end of the age of evangelicalism. More than anything, the legalization of gay marriage signaled conservative evangelicals’ political exile. In the last few years, they have published a spate of books about the need for Christians to live as counter-cultural witnesses, and the battleground has shifted to religious freedom so that [in their view] churches and other Christian organizations can practice what they preach in peace. This is a far cry from the bombast of Jerry Falwell and James Dobson talking about taking back the nation for Christ. Conservative evangelicals obviously still exert considerable power, particularly in Republican politics. We’ll see that again in the Iowa caucuses and the South Carolina primary. There are still many Republican politicians and evangelical ministers who will get plenty of mileage sounding the alarm that they have been ringing for decades: America is going to hell in a handbasket, and only a return to God will save us. But will enough people heed the warning? I’m not sure religious freedom as a rallying cry will have much staying power as long as Christian Right leaders continue to apply it with such transparent selectivity. Franklin Graham, for one, has made clear his belief that religious freedom doesn’t extend to Muslims. Other members of the broad pro-family coalition, like Russell Moore, have called out Graham for this double standard. That’s similar to what’s happening with family values: enough Americans (and enough evangelicals) have decided that the way the Christian Right defined them in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s is too narrow. The pro-family movement is fragmenting. Family values aren’t going away as long as families exist. What’s at stake is how we conceive of families and their values. The cover of my book depicts a scene at the dinner table of a coal miner in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1971. It’s a visual encapsulation of how Americans thought about family values during this era: white, heterosexual, middle-class, Christian. The dominance of these demographics is waning. We’ll see the return of family values in our political debates, but they won’t be framed in the same way as they were during the late twentieth century. Over the next few decades, we may be talking about gentrification or incarceration or health care in a family values framework. We can’t predict exactly what shape those debates will take, but it’s a safe bet we’ll be fighting about family values for years to come.
Babies see things we can’t: The incredible science behind our evolving vision
Take a look at the red chips on the two Rubik cubes below. They are actually orange on the left and purple on the right, if you look at them in isolation. They only appear more or less equally red across the images because your brain is interpreting them as red chips lit by either yellow or blue light. This kind of misperception is an example of perceptual constancy, the mechanism that allows you to recognize an object as being the same in different environments, and under very diverse lighting conditions. 
© BEAU LOTTO AND DALE PURVES Constancy illusions are adaptive: consider what would have happened if your ancestors thought a friend became a foe whenever a cloud hid the sun, or if they lost track of their belongings–and even their own children—every time they stepped out of the cave and into the sunlight. Why, they might have even eaten their own kids! You are here because the perceptual systems of your predecessors were resistant to annoying changes in the physical reality–as is your own (adult) perception. There are many indications that constancy effects must have helped us survive (and continue to do so). One such clue is that we are not born with perceptual constancy, but develop it many months after birth. So at first we see all differences, and then we learn to ignore certain types of differences so that we can recognize the same object as unchanging in many varied scenarios. When perceptual constancy arises, we lose the ability to detect multiple contradictions that are nevertheless highly noticeable to young babies. Observe the three snail images below and choose the two that are most similar. The two glossy snails are virtually identical, right? Wrong! If a 4-month old infant could talk, she would tell you that you are crazy (well, she’d probably actually call you “cwazy”, or maybe “dummy poopypants”): clearly, the middle and right images are most alike! 
COMPUTER-GENERATED RENDITIONS OF THE SAME 3D OBJECT. A AND B WERE RENDERED FROM DIFFERENT LIGHT FIELDS BUT LOOK SIMILAR. C LOOKS MATTE AND VERY DIFFERENT FROM B, BUT IN REALITY B AND C ARE CLOSER THAN A AND B. FROM YANG ET AL, CURRENT BIOLOGY, 2015. The left and middle snails look nearly identical to you, but in reality are hugely dissimilar in terms of their pixel intensity. For babies it is a piece of cake to tell them apart. We adults instead have no trouble seeing that the middle and right snails are different, even though their physical discrepancy is much smaller than between the middle and left snails. In a study published last December in Current Biology, a team of psychologists led by Jiale Yang, of Chuo University in Japan, found the exact opposite for infants of up to 3-4 months of age. The scientists studied how 42 babies, aged 3 to 8 months, looked at pairs of images rendered from real 3D objects. Because infants cannot describe what they see, the team measured how long the babies looked at each image. Previous research had shown that babies look for longer times at novel objects than at objects they are familiar with. This meant that the scientists could know, based on how much time a baby spent on an image, if she thought that image was similar to, or different from, the previous picture. If the baby spent less time looking at the second image than the first image, it indicated that she thought she had just seen the same image before (she was bored by it, so she didn’t need to look at it for very long). But if the baby looked at the second image for an equivalent time to what she spent on the first image, it indicated that she found both images equally interesting and surprising. The data revealed that, before developing perceptual constancy, 3- to 4-month-old babies have a “striking ability” to discriminate image differences due to changes in illumination that are not salient for adults. They lose this superior skill around the age of 5 months. Then, at 7-8 months of age, they develop the ability to discriminate surface properties such as glossy vs matte (which they maintain until adulthood), so they end up perceiving glossy surfaces as very different from matte ones (just as we adults do), even if most of their physical properties remain otherwise unchanged. The discrimination of surfaces is not the only perceptual domain where we abandon reality for illusion as we grow up. During the first year of life, infants suffer the loss of a myriad discriminatory powers: among them, the ability to recognize differences in monkey faces that are hardly detectable to adult humans, and the ability to distinguish speech sounds in languages other than spoken by their own families. Objective differences become subjective similitudes. The loss of sensitivity to variant information that we all experienced as babies created an unbreachable gap between us and the physical world. At the same time, it served to tune our perception to our environment, allowing us to navigate it efficiently and successfully... even if it left a large portion of reality forever outside our reach.
Take a look at the red chips on the two Rubik cubes below. They are actually orange on the left and purple on the right, if you look at them in isolation. They only appear more or less equally red across the images because your brain is interpreting them as red chips lit by either yellow or blue light. This kind of misperception is an example of perceptual constancy, the mechanism that allows you to recognize an object as being the same in different environments, and under very diverse lighting conditions. © BEAU LOTTO AND DALE PURVES Constancy illusions are adaptive: consider what would have happened if your ancestors thought a friend became a foe whenever a cloud hid the sun, or if they lost track of their belongings–and even their own children—every time they stepped out of the cave and into the sunlight. Why, they might have even eaten their own kids! You are here because the perceptual systems of your predecessors were resistant to annoying changes in the physical reality–as is your own (adult) perception. There are many indications that constancy effects must have helped us survive (and continue to do so). One such clue is that we are not born with perceptual constancy, but develop it many months after birth. So at first we see all differences, and then we learn to ignore certain types of differences so that we can recognize the same object as unchanging in many varied scenarios. When perceptual constancy arises, we lose the ability to detect multiple contradictions that are nevertheless highly noticeable to young babies. Observe the three snail images below and choose the two that are most similar. The two glossy snails are virtually identical, right? Wrong! If a 4-month old infant could talk, she would tell you that you are crazy (well, she’d probably actually call you “cwazy”, or maybe “dummy poopypants”): clearly, the middle and right images are most alike! COMPUTER-GENERATED RENDITIONS OF THE SAME 3D OBJECT. A AND B WERE RENDERED FROM DIFFERENT LIGHT FIELDS BUT LOOK SIMILAR. C LOOKS MATTE AND VERY DIFFERENT FROM B, BUT IN REALITY B AND C ARE CLOSER THAN A AND B. FROM YANG ET AL, CURRENT BIOLOGY, 2015. The left and middle snails look nearly identical to you, but in reality are hugely dissimilar in terms of their pixel intensity. For babies it is a piece of cake to tell them apart. We adults instead have no trouble seeing that the middle and right snails are different, even though their physical discrepancy is much smaller than between the middle and left snails. In a study published last December in Current Biology, a team of psychologists led by Jiale Yang, of Chuo University in Japan, found the exact opposite for infants of up to 3-4 months of age. The scientists studied how 42 babies, aged 3 to 8 months, looked at pairs of images rendered from real 3D objects. Because infants cannot describe what they see, the team measured how long the babies looked at each image. Previous research had shown that babies look for longer times at novel objects than at objects they are familiar with. This meant that the scientists could know, based on how much time a baby spent on an image, if she thought that image was similar to, or different from, the previous picture. If the baby spent less time looking at the second image than the first image, it indicated that she thought she had just seen the same image before (she was bored by it, so she didn’t need to look at it for very long). But if the baby looked at the second image for an equivalent time to what she spent on the first image, it indicated that she found both images equally interesting and surprising. The data revealed that, before developing perceptual constancy, 3- to 4-month-old babies have a “striking ability” to discriminate image differences due to changes in illumination that are not salient for adults. They lose this superior skill around the age of 5 months. Then, at 7-8 months of age, they develop the ability to discriminate surface properties such as glossy vs matte (which they maintain until adulthood), so they end up perceiving glossy surfaces as very different from matte ones (just as we adults do), even if most of their physical properties remain otherwise unchanged. The discrimination of surfaces is not the only perceptual domain where we abandon reality for illusion as we grow up. During the first year of life, infants suffer the loss of a myriad discriminatory powers: among them, the ability to recognize differences in monkey faces that are hardly detectable to adult humans, and the ability to distinguish speech sounds in languages other than spoken by their own families. Objective differences become subjective similitudes. The loss of sensitivity to variant information that we all experienced as babies created an unbreachable gap between us and the physical world. At the same time, it served to tune our perception to our environment, allowing us to navigate it efficiently and successfully... even if it left a large portion of reality forever outside our reach. 
The guys who won’t hear “no”: Movies, masculinity and the toxic myth of the romantic stalker
When I was young, I remember hearing a number of variations of the same story. You’ve probably heard a version of it, too. It’s the one about the guy who meets the love of his life, but she doesn’t know it yet. The woman is initially uninterested, rebuffing his advances. He’s just not her type. But he isn’t so easily dissuaded. He shows up to her office every single day to ask her out—until she finally says yes. No matter which version you hear (maybe he’s in the Navy or she’s already got a boyfriend), there’s one constant: They always end up married at the end. These stories of romantic pursuit have been so canonized in our collective psyche that in 2004, we even got an entire movie about them: “The Notebook.” In the film, Noah (Ryan Gosling) meets Allie (Rachel McAdams), an upper-class girl who treats his interest with side-eye. To win her over, Noah climbs a Ferris wheel for her. It works, of course, until her family breaks the pair up. Not only does he then build his ex-girlfriend a house, Noah writes to her every day for a year. If these scenarios sound suspiciously like stalking to you, they are. And according to a recent study, continuing to romanticize these narratives may be incredibly dangerous. Published in the academic journal “Communication Research,” the University of Michigan’s Julia Lippman looked at how Hollywood movies depict “persistent pursuit.” When the media tells us it’s OK for a man to risk his life—and those of everyone around him—by climbing an amusement park ride to chase a girl who doesn’t want you, audiences are more likely to accept these actions as appropriate, too. After all, we’ve been told this behavior is acceptable all our lives. If a movie showed the act of being stalked as “scary” (see: “Single White Female”), Lippman found that exposure to such narratives “led participants to endorse fewer stalking-supportive beliefs.” But watching Hollywood romances had the opposite result. Lippman writes, “[T]he romanticized pursuit behaviors commonly featured in the media as a part of normative courtship can lead to an increase in stalking-supportive beliefs.” The connection between stalking and love is pervasive throughout Hollywood films—from the afore-mentioned Nicholas Sparks adaptation to romantic comedies like “Say Anything,” “Crazy, Stupid, Love,” and “(500) Days of Summer.” In a prominent example, the popular British rom-com “Love Actually” famously features a subplot in which Mark (Andrew Lincoln of “The Walking Dead”) lusts after his best friend’s bride-to-be (played by Keira Knightley), despite the fact that he appears to despise her. After she discovers that Mark has been secretly filming her during wedding rehearsals (in masturbatory close-up), Mark shows up at her house with a set of giant cue cards to confess his love via posterboard. Mark is not only a terrible friend, he exhibits most of the common characteristics of a stalker. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. In the Adam Sandler vehicle “50 First Dates,” Sandler’s character, Henry, meets Lucy (Drew Barrymore), who cannot form new memories due to an accident. As Refinery 29’s Molly Horan writes, Henry responds by using her tragedy to his benefit—“learning her schedule, putting her in new and exciting situations over which he has complete control, marrying her and raising children with her on a boat where she can't escape.” In “About Time,” Tim (Domnhall Gleeson) goes to even greater lengths to woo Mary (Rachel McAdams): Born into a family of time-travelers, Tim uses his magic powers to reverse-engineer a whirlwind romance with Mary. He’s able to become her dream man by routinely fixing his mistakes by going back to erase them from history. Rather than problematizing this situation—or having Tim inform his beloved that he’s tricked her into romantic bliss—the film considers this a completely normal way to get the girl. A classic Onion article from 1999 parodied these films by showing what would happen if men behaved this way in real life. Showing up at someone’s house blasting loud music outside their house isn’t romantic—and might get you arrested:
“[Denny] Marzano was taken into custody after violating a restraining order filed against him by Kellie Hamilton, 25, an attractive, unmarried kindergarten teacher who is new to the L.A. area. According to Hamilton, Marzano has stalked her for the past two months, spying on her, tapping her phone, serenading her with The Carpenters' ‘Close To You’ at her place of employment, and tricking her into boarding Caribbean-bound jets. … Marzano, who broke his leg last week falling off a ladder leaning against Hamilton's second-story bedroom window, said he was ‘extremely surprised’ that his plan to woo Hamilton had failed.”This news story isn’t hypothetical. The Tumblr account When Women Refuse documents what actually happens to women when men won’t take no for an answer. That rejection becomes life-threatening. “I refused him repeatedly, and one time he got violent,” one poster writes. “He took a pocket knife out and tried to stab me, but luckily a nearby stranger rescued me.” That man continued to stalk and harass her for three more years. Late last month, a Pittsburgh woman—29-year-old Janese Talton-Jackson—was shot to death by a man whose advances she rebuffed in a bar. In 2012, two men stopped a female passerby in Jamtara, India, and ordered the young woman to have sex with them. When she turned them down, her pursuers threw acid in her face, disfiguring her for life. These are shocking stories, and they are hardly unique. There are hundreds like them every year. According to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control, 24 people are abused or raped by their partners every single minute, and that’s just in the United States. The CDC also estimates that 7.5 million people are stalked each year, and women are 2.5 times more likely than men to be followed or receive unwanted attention from strangers or intimate partners in their lifetimes. It would be absurd to suggest that romantic comedies are solely responsible for stalking and harassment—or our society’s toxic masculinity problem. (Remember when Washington Post critic Ann Hornaday blamed the Isla Vista, California, shooting on the Seth Rogen comedy “Neighbors”?) Instead, they are merely part of the problem. Although Lippman found that rom-coms play a role in normalizing certain behaviors, they are also a reflection of wider ideas about what constitutes appropriate behavior. From an early age, we’re taught bumper-sticker-ready lessons “never give up” and “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” They offer us necessary lessons about the value of perseverance, but rarely do they illustrate the importance of consent. Rarely are we taught that it’s OK to try your best and not get what you want—because your desires aren’t the only ones that are important. Rarely are we taught that "no" deserves respect. I can understand why people are drawn to stories like the “Romantic Pursuit” myth: We like success stories in which the little guy overcomes great odds to get what he wants, whether it’s working his way to the top of a Fortune 500 company or finally landing a date with the prettiest girl in the room. By championing these stories, we hope that will we be that underdog. But while teaching tenacity is good, these myths have a dangerous side effect: They tell us love is something not that we earn but that we deserve simply through hard work. If we persist and do what we are told to do, we must be rewarded for our efforts—often at any cost. I can’t help wondering whether Janese Talton-Jackson’s killer initially pictured their fateful interaction as a story he might tell his grandkids someday. Rather than continuing to promote a toxic mix of romantic entitlement and “Nice Guy” logic, we need a new narrative. What about this one instead? A young man meets a gorgeous woman in a bar. He asks to buy her a drink and she says, “No, thank you.” He respects her boundaries and moves on to chat with another eligible woman, who enthusiastically accepts his offer of a free beverage. Maybe they do end up together, maybe they don’t, but they both go home feeling good about having an interaction that didn’t involve harassment or manipulating space-time. They might not make big-budget Hollywood epics about that version of the story—ones featuring Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams making out in the rain—but it’s the one we need.When I was young, I remember hearing a number of variations of the same story. You’ve probably heard a version of it, too. It’s the one about the guy who meets the love of his life, but she doesn’t know it yet. The woman is initially uninterested, rebuffing his advances. He’s just not her type. But he isn’t so easily dissuaded. He shows up to her office every single day to ask her out—until she finally says yes. No matter which version you hear (maybe he’s in the Navy or she’s already got a boyfriend), there’s one constant: They always end up married at the end. These stories of romantic pursuit have been so canonized in our collective psyche that in 2004, we even got an entire movie about them: “The Notebook.” In the film, Noah (Ryan Gosling) meets Allie (Rachel McAdams), an upper-class girl who treats his interest with side-eye. To win her over, Noah climbs a Ferris wheel for her. It works, of course, until her family breaks the pair up. Not only does he then build his ex-girlfriend a house, Noah writes to her every day for a year. If these scenarios sound suspiciously like stalking to you, they are. And according to a recent study, continuing to romanticize these narratives may be incredibly dangerous. Published in the academic journal “Communication Research,” the University of Michigan’s Julia Lippman looked at how Hollywood movies depict “persistent pursuit.” When the media tells us it’s OK for a man to risk his life—and those of everyone around him—by climbing an amusement park ride to chase a girl who doesn’t want you, audiences are more likely to accept these actions as appropriate, too. After all, we’ve been told this behavior is acceptable all our lives. If a movie showed the act of being stalked as “scary” (see: “Single White Female”), Lippman found that exposure to such narratives “led participants to endorse fewer stalking-supportive beliefs.” But watching Hollywood romances had the opposite result. Lippman writes, “[T]he romanticized pursuit behaviors commonly featured in the media as a part of normative courtship can lead to an increase in stalking-supportive beliefs.” The connection between stalking and love is pervasive throughout Hollywood films—from the afore-mentioned Nicholas Sparks adaptation to romantic comedies like “Say Anything,” “Crazy, Stupid, Love,” and “(500) Days of Summer.” In a prominent example, the popular British rom-com “Love Actually” famously features a subplot in which Mark (Andrew Lincoln of “The Walking Dead”) lusts after his best friend’s bride-to-be (played by Keira Knightley), despite the fact that he appears to despise her. After she discovers that Mark has been secretly filming her during wedding rehearsals (in masturbatory close-up), Mark shows up at her house with a set of giant cue cards to confess his love via posterboard. Mark is not only a terrible friend, he exhibits most of the common characteristics of a stalker. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. In the Adam Sandler vehicle “50 First Dates,” Sandler’s character, Henry, meets Lucy (Drew Barrymore), who cannot form new memories due to an accident. As Refinery 29’s Molly Horan writes, Henry responds by using her tragedy to his benefit—“learning her schedule, putting her in new and exciting situations over which he has complete control, marrying her and raising children with her on a boat where she can't escape.” In “About Time,” Tim (Domnhall Gleeson) goes to even greater lengths to woo Mary (Rachel McAdams): Born into a family of time-travelers, Tim uses his magic powers to reverse-engineer a whirlwind romance with Mary. He’s able to become her dream man by routinely fixing his mistakes by going back to erase them from history. Rather than problematizing this situation—or having Tim inform his beloved that he’s tricked her into romantic bliss—the film considers this a completely normal way to get the girl. A classic Onion article from 1999 parodied these films by showing what would happen if men behaved this way in real life. Showing up at someone’s house blasting loud music outside their house isn’t romantic—and might get you arrested:
“[Denny] Marzano was taken into custody after violating a restraining order filed against him by Kellie Hamilton, 25, an attractive, unmarried kindergarten teacher who is new to the L.A. area. According to Hamilton, Marzano has stalked her for the past two months, spying on her, tapping her phone, serenading her with The Carpenters' ‘Close To You’ at her place of employment, and tricking her into boarding Caribbean-bound jets. … Marzano, who broke his leg last week falling off a ladder leaning against Hamilton's second-story bedroom window, said he was ‘extremely surprised’ that his plan to woo Hamilton had failed.”This news story isn’t hypothetical. The Tumblr account When Women Refuse documents what actually happens to women when men won’t take no for an answer. That rejection becomes life-threatening. “I refused him repeatedly, and one time he got violent,” one poster writes. “He took a pocket knife out and tried to stab me, but luckily a nearby stranger rescued me.” That man continued to stalk and harass her for three more years. Late last month, a Pittsburgh woman—29-year-old Janese Talton-Jackson—was shot to death by a man whose advances she rebuffed in a bar. In 2012, two men stopped a female passerby in Jamtara, India, and ordered the young woman to have sex with them. When she turned them down, her pursuers threw acid in her face, disfiguring her for life. These are shocking stories, and they are hardly unique. There are hundreds like them every year. According to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control, 24 people are abused or raped by their partners every single minute, and that’s just in the United States. The CDC also estimates that 7.5 million people are stalked each year, and women are 2.5 times more likely than men to be followed or receive unwanted attention from strangers or intimate partners in their lifetimes. It would be absurd to suggest that romantic comedies are solely responsible for stalking and harassment—or our society’s toxic masculinity problem. (Remember when Washington Post critic Ann Hornaday blamed the Isla Vista, California, shooting on the Seth Rogen comedy “Neighbors”?) Instead, they are merely part of the problem. Although Lippman found that rom-coms play a role in normalizing certain behaviors, they are also a reflection of wider ideas about what constitutes appropriate behavior. From an early age, we’re taught bumper-sticker-ready lessons “never give up” and “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” They offer us necessary lessons about the value of perseverance, but rarely do they illustrate the importance of consent. Rarely are we taught that it’s OK to try your best and not get what you want—because your desires aren’t the only ones that are important. Rarely are we taught that "no" deserves respect. I can understand why people are drawn to stories like the “Romantic Pursuit” myth: We like success stories in which the little guy overcomes great odds to get what he wants, whether it’s working his way to the top of a Fortune 500 company or finally landing a date with the prettiest girl in the room. By championing these stories, we hope that will we be that underdog. But while teaching tenacity is good, these myths have a dangerous side effect: They tell us love is something not that we earn but that we deserve simply through hard work. If we persist and do what we are told to do, we must be rewarded for our efforts—often at any cost. I can’t help wondering whether Janese Talton-Jackson’s killer initially pictured their fateful interaction as a story he might tell his grandkids someday. Rather than continuing to promote a toxic mix of romantic entitlement and “Nice Guy” logic, we need a new narrative. What about this one instead? A young man meets a gorgeous woman in a bar. He asks to buy her a drink and she says, “No, thank you.” He respects her boundaries and moves on to chat with another eligible woman, who enthusiastically accepts his offer of a free beverage. Maybe they do end up together, maybe they don’t, but they both go home feeling good about having an interaction that didn’t involve harassment or manipulating space-time. They might not make big-budget Hollywood epics about that version of the story—ones featuring Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams making out in the rain—but it’s the one we need.
