The Writing Men Want You To Know They've Been Very, Very Bad Boys

July 1, 2016 11:56 AM

"The personal essay format demands that women reveal everything, often to the point of absurdity, while also allowing men to get away with vague metaphors and platitudes. On one end of the spectrum you have “I’m Glad My Friend Killed Herself,” and on the other end you have, "I Did Some Bad Shit, But All You Need To Know Is That I’m Dealing With It, Manfully."
posted by roomthreeseventeen (19 comments total)

am i being dumb, or is the link at "As Genius editor Leah Finnegan points out" not the correct one?

which is a pity, because that seems to be where the idea behind this piece comes from.
posted by andrewcooke at 12:06 PM on July 1, 2016

No, the link is correct. Here's what it says:

Dude if you aren’t gonna give up the goods and you’re just gonna hide your personal foibles behind your trip to Roswell well–this essay is not worth reading to me (and, I’m guessing, the people in your life you’ve wronged). This is also a marked difference in how men and women write personal essays, and how the Internet reacts. Women, the perceptive, emotional creatures they are, are like: “Here are the specific things I did and why I am bad!” And the Internet is like, YOU WHORE MAKE BETTER CHOICES. Men, who tend to be narcissists who think writing in metaphor serves some greater good are like, “I did some bad shit. Let me speak in platitudes about it.” And the Internet is like, YOU BRAVE STRONG MAN.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 12:08 PM on July 1, 2016 [17 favorites]

You know, writing about ongoing personal stuff publicly can have bad consequences for people other than the author sometimes. I'm not a big fan of this new thing where people try to actively blog about experiences and conflicts while they're still happening. It can be really irresponsible and manipulative. You're not going to learn anything or get anything else constructive out of tapping straight into anyone's spleen, man, woman, or somewhere in the middle. I personally don't want to read anything someone has to say about their personal lives that isn't told at a great distance removed or that isn't serving to remedy some ongoing wrong. People's personal lives--even writers--should be personal, not internet entertainment.
posted by saulgoodman at 12:13 PM on July 1, 2016 [30 favorites]

that text is not at http://genius.it/9942885/www.mtv.com/news/interactive/lost-highway (it's a prime example of this man writing stuff).

is my browser doing something weird?! sorry if i'm having a brain-fart.
posted by andrewcooke at 12:13 PM on July 1, 2016

ohhhhhh! ok, so i had no idea what genius.it is. and privacy plugins stop it fromm working for me. so it looks identical to the site it is portaling.

so, if anyone else is similarly confused, disable plugins (disconnect in my case).

sorry.
posted by andrewcooke at 12:16 PM on July 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

This is why a red flag shoots straight into the air for me whenever I see a personal essay praised as "honest." It's the secular version of evangelical "testimony" detailing their lives before they were "saved." It's actually just an extended humblebrag where people get to talk about all the terrible things they did that their audience wasn't willing to give in to.

There's an undercurrent of, "if I hadn't done all these bad things, the essay/testimony you're experiencing today would be much less interesting, so you should be thankful there are people like me who do this." And both of them lack the important part: repentance and humility. It's always, "I did X (and Y and Z) and it was terrible and I hurt myself and others, but I learned a Very Important Lesson without which I wouldn't be here today to impart to you and shouldn't you be thankful to me for that?"
posted by deanc at 12:18 PM on July 1, 2016 [28 favorites]

I personally don't want to read anything someone has to say about their personal lives that isn't told at a great distance removed or that isn't serving to remedy some ongoing wrong. People's personal lives--even writers--should be personal, not internet entertainment.

It's fine if the writer doesn't want to overshare the details of their personal life, but this article is more about writers who use deliberately vague implications to give their writing a delicious confessional vibe. Ley is arguing that this is a cheap tactic - at best it makes an author's boring transgressions seem more dangerous, at worst it uses the cachet of being an antihero while avoiding the specific consequences of their awfulness.
posted by Think_Long at 12:19 PM on July 1, 2016 [11 favorites]

I think the link is technically correct but Genius's annotation interface is godawful and keeps screwing up pretty much everything. When I tried to read this last night, it helpfully reloaded the entire page every 15 seconds, whereas when I was trying to look at something on there a week ago, it refused to load anything but the very first annotation. Throwing your own complicated UI thing on top of whatever nightmare of junk that places like ESPN are already running is going to lead to bad results.

That said, I appreciated the Deadspin article anyway. I have greatly enjoyed Brian Phillips's writing before (the Pro Vercelli saga is a total delight), but his more recent writing has been more about himself, and it turns out that's something I find much less interesting as a subject than Roger Federer or soccer video games. It's also tended to get longer than my favorite of his pieces, and the combination of having much more space and talking more about himself with that extra space means I've stalled out on a lot of his stuff as he's moved into professional feature writing territory, which is a shame because I think there's probably material in there that I'd enjoy. Instead it sits in my tabs for weeks and weeks because I can't quite bring myself to push through the stuff I find boring to get to what I actually want.

I hope that whatever bad thing is going on in his life that he's being cagily mysterious about is resolvable into something less bad than he's implying it might be at the most extreme and that whatever wounds he, or others, or the universe, or whatever have caused can be healed.
posted by Copronymus at 12:49 PM on July 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

It’s opposite writing. Great writing tells you what happens and lets you infer how people feel. These examples tell you exactly how you should feel and forces you to guess what happened. The writers know they’re only supposed to do one of the two things but they keep guessing incorrectly.
89


This was a pretty interesting comment from a fairly amusing comment thread.
posted by Thistledown at 12:51 PM on July 1, 2016 [18 favorites]

That "opposite writing" is a great description of what annoys me about the Clarice Lispector book I am reading right now.

It's clear that it isn't just men that do this, and maybe there's some place in the literary world for this kind of inside-out style? I mean this is a good book and there's some great writing in it but I mean really I sometimes wish she would stop with the telling in excruciating detail how all of it feels and just spend a moment describing the thing itself too. And 100 pages describing the emotions that come up when squishing a cockroach is just too much sorry but I digress.

Maybe it's some kind of artistic variation of boundary issues, like when someone thinks telling you random facts about a dream will convey the emotional resonance it had for them. Maybe its something that happens when people have been tolerated excessively, and they would cut that shit out if more people they met at parties had blatantly yawned or checked their watches?

Sorry, this is rambling too, it's a trap.
posted by idiopath at 1:11 PM on July 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

Speaking as a straight cis white male who is ever increasingly more ashamed of all aspects of my privileged identity, I have come to realize that Women write Confessions, Men write Humblebrags. And as someone who has long compartmentalized my life experience into Anecdotes (since 2000, re-labeled as Blog-Post-Length-Stories), I've found that even my most long-winded and rambling 'personal essays' never have a single connecting theme, but each paragraph represents a single picture worth well less than 1000 words. But I have failed badly at the 140-character Twitter format (I can't simplify anything that much without adding a postscript that "this is oversimplified"). Anyway, I have never really mastered anything close to a truly "personal essay", and in every attempt to read others' attempts at doing so, I can't find anyone else who has gotten much closer without thick layers of varnish or whitewash (usually for male-based essays), or globs of caustic paint removers that eat into the wood itself. Also silly analogies.
posted by oneswellfoop at 2:56 PM on July 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

Great writing tells you what happens and lets you infer how people feel.

"We know what art is! It's paintings of horses!"
posted by DaDaDaDave at 3:12 PM on July 1, 2016 [7 favorites]

Insert comment making generalization in response to FPP awash in generalization.
posted by armoir from antproof case at 3:23 PM on July 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

I confess that I'm a little puzzled. A little while back we had this thread on emotional honesty in men about how men often end up ashamed of their emotional lives and unable to talk about it in an open and honest fashion, and how this lack of openness ends up reinforcing toxic norms about masculinity.

So okay, then you have essays like this one which is admittedly not the greatest example of a personal essay, but it's not actively harmful, is it? It's a guy trying to acknowledge some kind of emotional life more nuanced than the rather narrow range in which men's inner lives are typically expected to be expressed. That seems a pretty sensible thing to do to me?

Under the circumstances, I've gotta say that the person who comes across as the arsehole isn't the guy writing the not-stellar-but-okay essay about his fairly ordinary life, it's the guy deciding to paraphrase that essay as an exercise in "calling down the gods on your squalid and banal fuckups" and referring to men's lives as "inherently uninteresting". Seriously mate, if you want men to stop writing stuff on the internet you're always welcome to take the lead on that front.
posted by langtonsant at 4:52 PM on July 1, 2016 [20 favorites]

So many issues with this passage:

This is also a marked difference in how men and women write personal essays, and how the Internet reacts. Women, the perceptive, emotional creatures they are, are like: “Here are the specific things I did and why I am bad!” And the Internet is like, YOU WHORE MAKE BETTER CHOICES. Men, who tend to be narcissists who think writing in metaphor serves some greater good are like, “I did some bad shit. Let me speak in platitudes about it.” And the Internet is like, YOU BRAVE STRONG MAN.

>Women, the perceptive, emotional creatures they are
>Men, who tend to be narcissists

Generalize much?

>And the Internet is like

The Internet is not a thing that reacts - it's people, people!

On the whole - just a shitload of projection and stereotyping.
posted by kcds at 6:28 AM on July 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

I think discussing that women actually might have general differences than men, should be something we should be able to discuss. Part of women's advocacy is that women's experiences and behaviors and even possibly biology might generate different needs, different ways of thinking, and that these differences should be ok.

I know that part of feminism should involve challenging the idea that women are biologically one way, or that women should culturally be one way- but due to a complex mingling of the biology, hormones, experiences of giving birth and being at risk of giving birth that are, while NOT universal, common to women- there are going to be generalized differences present that I think in order to effective argue for better tolerance and understanding of women we need to find a way to talk about without immediately calling the discussion sexism or something we can't discuss because it involves generalizations.

It's an issue I've found weird when I try to talk about the needs of mothers because we spend more time talking about the smaller percent of women who deviate from having needs relating to being mothers to the point we can't actually discuss the needs of mothers in women's rights advocacy because we have to talk about how not all women are mothers, not all people who give birth are women, all of which are valid conversation points but yet detract from being able to unite working for the rights of mothers as a women's issue and it is a women's issue. There's a point where if we want to challenge words and gender itself we can turn on ourselves and say the word "feminism" is sexist because what does female even mean, does it exist, isn't is sexist to lock people in boxes? I get that.

Yet feminism and women's right's issues still have a place and what terms do we want to use so that we can have these conversations given that people who identify as female exist and people dealing with issues related to the biology of having a uterus, breasts, and hormones related to have xx genetics in addition to all the sociocultural issues that have evolved along with that still have issues of having difficulties that need addressing. And yes, whether biologically or culturally originating a lot of studies DO find both biological and emotional and functional differences between men and women, and part of feminism is digging into the fact that "male" is the default and that ways women tend to do things or think about things or behave might actually be ok or sometimes better than how men (problematic word, generalized concept) do.
posted by xarnop at 8:49 AM on July 2, 2016 [11 favorites]

kcds: The Internet is not a thing that reacts - it's people, people!

And according to Thatcher, there's no such thing as society. Please. If the internet was just a few billion individual, disconnected people without any internal structure or dynamics, there'd be no reason to name it. Yet there is, and it does. The internet is people and a large set of social, political, technical, economic and psychological phenomena that those people create and interact with, in aggregate.

Denying the existence of structures larger-than-people, that emerge-from and are composed-of people, is about as silly as denying the existence of structures that emerge-from and are composed-of atoms. Surely when someone says "the milk spilled" you do not counter with "milk is not a thing that spills, it's atoms, atoms!"

xarnop: we need to find a way to talk about without immediately calling the discussion sexism or something we can't discuss because it involves generalizations

100% agree. I think that in terms of discourse the "way to talk about" it is to hedge early and often (as you're doing). Acknowledge the exceptions, explicitly and verbally. Make it clear you're not essentializing, overgeneralizing, erasing difference. Also hedge around descriptive vs. prescriptive, is vs. ought. Acknowledging the existence of people you're leaving out of a topic goes a long way!

Otherwise the people in the room who have sat through a few too many conversations that started off reasonable and feministy, and suddenly turned woman-as-baby-robot / man-as-protector-bison-hunter, are going to hear the creeping edge of essentialist framing, roll their eyes and nope out. There's only so many times you want to hear a biological essentialist argument delivered with the voice of Let's Be Real Now pseudoscientific authority.
posted by ead at 2:00 PM on July 3, 2016 [1 favorite]

I've been trying to absorb the criticism of the Lost Highway article for a few days, and... mostly it just seems off to me, like it caught the attention of Ley and/or the interloping Genius annotator at the same time as their thesis about gender and confessionals did and they ended up in the same vehicle even if they're not really going the same place.

The Lost Highway piece doesn't appear to try to be about the author's personal foibles. Even the characterization that the author "is on a journey to find answers" doesn't seem right. It's a travelogue. It's mostly about the experience of the places. There is certainly a genre of travelogues as a catalyst or an outer parallel for an inner personal journey, and probably another subgenre of such journeys as a form of redemption or recovery. But this doesn't seem to fit either classification.

And because he spends a few sentences on part of why he was drawn to the desert, he's somehow required to give us the full goods, let us know what his sins really were, or it makes him dishonest or obfuscatory writer? I don't know. To the extent that an author is catching flak for merely hinting at his misdeeds, maybe it might make a lot of sense to wonder if would be interrogators are really frustrated about the limits of disclosure because they're holding their breath for a bravely fuller exploration of the breadth of human experience, or if this is mostly like a police investigator encourages suspects to the redemption that comes from honesty.

The piece is already pretty long. The infrastructure of the travelogue might well support a relationship history -- and maybe after reading this incisive criticism, he'll get brave and turn it into his own Eat Pray Love or Wild and we can find out if/how privilege protects him from drawing the career-ruining abuse and shame the authors of those have received -- but it certainly doesn't require that to be an interesting piece. The editorial criticism you could just as easily make (and at least our adequateman friend acknowledges) is that his reasons for choosing to wander the desert are a distraction and should be pared down even further. It sure seemed to keep at least our annotating interrogator from actually reading the piece, though it's hard to say if that's really about the text or the different conversation the reader clearly wanted to have with it.

The Beta Male piece seems a little more aptly fitted to the criticism, but even there langtonsant's reading makes a lot more sense to me.
posted by wildblueyonder at 10:37 AM on July 6, 2016

oneswellfoop: "I have come to realize that Women write Confessions, Men write Humblebrags."

"The Humblebrags of St. Augustine."
posted by Chrysostom at 9:19 AM on July 7, 2016