Literary Classics Support Incels & Misogyny
June 6, 2018 7:26 PM Subscribe
Great essay.
Initially I was puzzled that Spampinato chose to reflect on "The Things They Carried", and then I learned "the book has become a staple in middle schools and high schools".
posted by JamesBay at 7:38 PM on June 6, 2018 [1 favorite]
Initially I was puzzled that Spampinato chose to reflect on "The Things They Carried", and then I learned "the book has become a staple in middle schools and high schools".
posted by JamesBay at 7:38 PM on June 6, 2018 [1 favorite]
Not buying it. Unrequited love is cannon for many books and movies and songs for both genders.
The incel difference is the entitlement.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 7:45 PM on June 6, 2018 [56 favorites]
The incel difference is the entitlement.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 7:45 PM on June 6, 2018 [56 favorites]
I learned in a recent Replay All that apparently the incel "community" was actually invented by a lesbian. She's of course not responsible for what it became, but it's a surprising fact all on its own.
posted by axiom at 7:45 PM on June 6, 2018 [7 favorites]
posted by axiom at 7:45 PM on June 6, 2018 [7 favorites]
Ehhhhh... I don’t think most of them read books.
Victims of rom-coms where stalking is acceptable seems more likely?
Or possibly not victims, just a bunch of needy jerks who watch too many Nazis on YouTube.
posted by Artw at 7:49 PM on June 6, 2018 [13 favorites]
Victims of rom-coms where stalking is acceptable seems more likely?
Or possibly not victims, just a bunch of needy jerks who watch too many Nazis on YouTube.
posted by Artw at 7:49 PM on June 6, 2018 [13 favorites]
I learned in a recent Replay All that apparently the incel "community" was actually invented by a lesbian.
She's bisexual - she's involved with bisexual activism in Toronto.
posted by jb at 7:55 PM on June 6, 2018 [8 favorites]
She's bisexual - she's involved with bisexual activism in Toronto.
posted by jb at 7:55 PM on June 6, 2018 [8 favorites]
I like this essay a lot, but I think it's stronger point is that what we teach in literature classes is upholding a very specific way of looking at the world that is incredibly alienating to half the people in the class.
"As a teenager I had read many fictional accounts of men’s rape fantasies long before I had ever read a literary account from the woman’s perspective of rape, or even of consensual sex."
or
"We regularly ask teenage girls to read books in which characters degrade women, expecting them to understand that the book’s other merits outweigh its misogyny. To set such an expectation and not consider its effect on young women is foolish and hypocritical; we rarely expect young men to do the same, and hardy ever expect young white men to read extensively in traditions where their identities aren’t represented or are degraded. We need to reflect on the way the literature we celebrate supports the idea that women who are sexually frustrated create problems for themselves, while men in the same situation create problems for the world. Though the links are subtle, our celebration of a canon of sad white boy literature affects the way we think."
I realize that classic literature is steeped in misogyny is not exactly a new take, but I like how she links it as yet another way that shapes how we view the world. It's another ingredient in the toxic soup that we're all cooking in.
posted by JustKeepSwimming at 7:57 PM on June 6, 2018 [133 favorites]
"As a teenager I had read many fictional accounts of men’s rape fantasies long before I had ever read a literary account from the woman’s perspective of rape, or even of consensual sex."
or
"We regularly ask teenage girls to read books in which characters degrade women, expecting them to understand that the book’s other merits outweigh its misogyny. To set such an expectation and not consider its effect on young women is foolish and hypocritical; we rarely expect young men to do the same, and hardy ever expect young white men to read extensively in traditions where their identities aren’t represented or are degraded. We need to reflect on the way the literature we celebrate supports the idea that women who are sexually frustrated create problems for themselves, while men in the same situation create problems for the world. Though the links are subtle, our celebration of a canon of sad white boy literature affects the way we think."
I realize that classic literature is steeped in misogyny is not exactly a new take, but I like how she links it as yet another way that shapes how we view the world. It's another ingredient in the toxic soup that we're all cooking in.
posted by JustKeepSwimming at 7:57 PM on June 6, 2018 [133 favorites]
She's also really amazing and involved in all sorts of interesting things - art and information management and strategic thinking.
She's also started a new project - Love Not Anger - she wants to help people who struggle with finding relationships, but to do so in a healthy way.
posted by jb at 7:58 PM on June 6, 2018 [13 favorites]
She's also started a new project - Love Not Anger - she wants to help people who struggle with finding relationships, but to do so in a healthy way.
posted by jb at 7:58 PM on June 6, 2018 [13 favorites]
Incel is bizarro world feminism. They gathered together stacks of 1960s feminist and counterculture texts (Chad and Stacy, really?), threw them into a machine which swap their conclusions with exact bizarro superman equivalents ("coverture good, abolitionism bad"), and then spent the rest of the evening reading Otto Weininger on BrainyQuotes.
posted by TwelveTwo at 7:59 PM on June 6, 2018 [4 favorites]
posted by TwelveTwo at 7:59 PM on June 6, 2018 [4 favorites]
Well I have heard their god, Jordan Peterson, described as the male Camille Paglia, so that fits.
posted by Artw at 8:04 PM on June 6, 2018 [12 favorites]
posted by Artw at 8:04 PM on June 6, 2018 [12 favorites]
"After revisiting the books that I was first introduced to as “great novels”, I see that many of them rehearse and even promote the idea that male sexual suffering (often represented by deprivation) is a public concern, while female sexual suffering (often represented by trauma) is a private, psychological issue. In literature, time and again, men – both writers and characters – elevate their pathos by revealing it. By contrast, female pathos marks a text as niche, as “confessional”, as minor."
We need a word for this - that gasp of awareness when something so blindingly true you know in your bones becomes true and becomes truly known when wrapped in the fire of words.
posted by hapaxes.legomenon at 8:07 PM on June 6, 2018 [73 favorites]
We need a word for this - that gasp of awareness when something so blindingly true you know in your bones becomes true and becomes truly known when wrapped in the fire of words.
posted by hapaxes.legomenon at 8:07 PM on June 6, 2018 [73 favorites]
We regularly ask teenage girls to read books in which characters degrade women, expecting them to understand that the book’s other merits outweigh its misogyny.
I’m still mad about having to read Updike’s “A&P” more than once in high school, with its teenage narrator wondering if girls had thoughts or just a buzzing in their skull. Oh but you have to understand him. Oh but you have to let in new ideas. I understood him, all right, and I let in a new idea, which was that boys were monsters who might not consider me human. And I believed it for years. But it does not have to be true. It never did.
male Camille Paglia
A Camille Paglia for men? That’s redundant.
posted by Countess Elena at 8:09 PM on June 6, 2018 [66 favorites]
I’m still mad about having to read Updike’s “A&P” more than once in high school, with its teenage narrator wondering if girls had thoughts or just a buzzing in their skull. Oh but you have to understand him. Oh but you have to let in new ideas. I understood him, all right, and I let in a new idea, which was that boys were monsters who might not consider me human. And I believed it for years. But it does not have to be true. It never did.
male Camille Paglia
A Camille Paglia for men? That’s redundant.
posted by Countess Elena at 8:09 PM on June 6, 2018 [66 favorites]
As I recall, back in English Lit 12 -- a survey course that started with Beowulf and ended with the Victorian Poets -- the first time we encountered a female author was Mary Shelley, but only because she spent a weekend in Geneva with Percy Shelley and Lord Byron; middle-aged me tends to think of Percy Shelley as a bit of a tool. After that we encountered Elizabeth Barrett Browning. And that was it.
Besides that, Lit 12 was one of my happier memories from high school. We read The Skylark by John Keats towards the end of May. At one time the area around our school had been just fields, and many skylarks had nested there, soaring into the sky in early summer.
Jane Campion has directed a great movie about John Keats and his lover and creative influence Fanny Brawne. The movie is a more human and equitable portrayal of love and attraction between men and women.
posted by JamesBay at 8:12 PM on June 6, 2018 [4 favorites]
Besides that, Lit 12 was one of my happier memories from high school. We read The Skylark by John Keats towards the end of May. At one time the area around our school had been just fields, and many skylarks had nested there, soaring into the sky in early summer.
Jane Campion has directed a great movie about John Keats and his lover and creative influence Fanny Brawne. The movie is a more human and equitable portrayal of love and attraction between men and women.
posted by JamesBay at 8:12 PM on June 6, 2018 [4 favorites]
This quote:
"As a teenager I had read many fictional accounts of men’s rape fantasies long before I had ever read a literary account from the woman’s perspective of rape, or even of consensual sex."
It had never occurred to me before, but this is absolutely true. I was a voracious young reader and really it wasn’t until college that I read books where the women actually expressed sexual desire. I had read a ton about rape though. That’s kind of sickening.
posted by samthemander at 8:13 PM on June 6, 2018 [67 favorites]
"As a teenager I had read many fictional accounts of men’s rape fantasies long before I had ever read a literary account from the woman’s perspective of rape, or even of consensual sex."
It had never occurred to me before, but this is absolutely true. I was a voracious young reader and really it wasn’t until college that I read books where the women actually expressed sexual desire. I had read a ton about rape though. That’s kind of sickening.
posted by samthemander at 8:13 PM on June 6, 2018 [67 favorites]
I saw this article a couple of days ago and thought the framing was a bit off considering that the dudes in question are spending their time with 4chan instead of Dickens. The basic idea here is good, women writers should be read by everyone and their work shouldn’t be considered less universal and relevant than male writers, but the “incel” problem isn’t going to be solved by taking away their Jordan Peterson and handing out copies of I Love Dick.
(Which is a great book, but not a good swap for American Psycho. That would have to be Kathy Acker.)
posted by betweenthebars at 8:14 PM on June 6, 2018 [4 favorites]
(Which is a great book, but not a good swap for American Psycho. That would have to be Kathy Acker.)
posted by betweenthebars at 8:14 PM on June 6, 2018 [4 favorites]
Ehhhhh... I don’t think most of them read books.
Did you even read the linked article? These aren't deep cuts that require some sort of cultural erudition to know about - they're the (and you can get this from a knowledgeable perusal of the title) essential elements of how our stupid culture defines literature.
posted by codacorolla at 8:18 PM on June 6, 2018 [10 favorites]
Did you even read the linked article? These aren't deep cuts that require some sort of cultural erudition to know about - they're the (and you can get this from a knowledgeable perusal of the title) essential elements of how our stupid culture defines literature.
posted by codacorolla at 8:18 PM on June 6, 2018 [10 favorites]
I wonder when I was first taught about a book regarding a woman’s expression of desire. Maybe you could count A Lost Lady, although everyone completely slept through that — what the hell anyone thought that book had to offer 15-year-olds, I don’t know. I only vaguely understood that the lady liked adultery and hence was Lost. Certainly I don’t remember being taught a story in which a woman’s desire isn’t ultimately foolish or tragic, but to be fair that’s literature for you. I certainly found books like that, God knows.
posted by Countess Elena at 8:18 PM on June 6, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by Countess Elena at 8:18 PM on June 6, 2018 [3 favorites]
She's bisexual - she's involved with bisexual activism in Toronto.
My mistake, thanks for the correction.
posted by axiom at 8:27 PM on June 6, 2018 [1 favorite]
My mistake, thanks for the correction.
posted by axiom at 8:27 PM on June 6, 2018 [1 favorite]
I'm sympathetic to the spirit of the essay, but at the same time this seems basically the same as arguing that violent videogames cause violence, so I'm skeptical.
posted by oulipian at 8:31 PM on June 6, 2018 [9 favorites]
posted by oulipian at 8:31 PM on June 6, 2018 [9 favorites]
The Deadly Incel Culture's Absurd Pop Culture Roots, by Sady Doyle.
posted by eviemath at 8:42 PM on June 6, 2018 [22 favorites]
posted by eviemath at 8:42 PM on June 6, 2018 [22 favorites]
I think that it is not that the incel assholes are reading Updike and Mailer and "female ingenue grad student seduces her male professor in a loveless marriage with a harridan shrew" by frustrated MFA instructor, but that these guys set the tone and culture for "highbrow" America. This then means that these things are read in middle and high schools. Which is the last place that many people are exposed to literature and the western canon. If they make it to college, there is the potential for more of the same. Beyond that, it provides cover for asshats like Douthat to pontificate about how taxation is akin to sexual violence. Douthat's words get fed into Fox News and things like Breitbart. Which speaks to the alt-right, including incels. (I do count them as part of the alt-right, given the terrorist acts and reactionary views.)
I don't think that the author is arguing that these books cause violence, but rather that they are one of the things that normalizes rape culture. They are not inspiring anyone to rape, but rather they help create an environment in which men joke about rape and can be persuaded that maybe she was leading him on and deserved whatever happened. By excluding women's perspectives from the canon (and the perspectives of POC), the white male rage and desires are normalized. It gives us "plenty of fine people on both sides" narratives.
The only book by a woman I can remember reading from my junior year English class, which was focused on American literature was The Awakening, which to my teenage mind, was weird and dumb and did not apply to me. We also read The Yellow Wallpaper and The Lottery, which to my credit I did enjoy. But for a survey class on American literature, why did we not read Le Guin, or an actual novel by Jackson or Alcott or Morison or Angelou or any other fantastic woman writer from the US?
posted by Hactar at 8:44 PM on June 6, 2018 [42 favorites]
I don't think that the author is arguing that these books cause violence, but rather that they are one of the things that normalizes rape culture. They are not inspiring anyone to rape, but rather they help create an environment in which men joke about rape and can be persuaded that maybe she was leading him on and deserved whatever happened. By excluding women's perspectives from the canon (and the perspectives of POC), the white male rage and desires are normalized. It gives us "plenty of fine people on both sides" narratives.
The only book by a woman I can remember reading from my junior year English class, which was focused on American literature was The Awakening, which to my teenage mind, was weird and dumb and did not apply to me. We also read The Yellow Wallpaper and The Lottery, which to my credit I did enjoy. But for a survey class on American literature, why did we not read Le Guin, or an actual novel by Jackson or Alcott or Morison or Angelou or any other fantastic woman writer from the US?
posted by Hactar at 8:44 PM on June 6, 2018 [42 favorites]
One of my very good friends is a middle class cishetwhitedude, and he jokes I've ruined his life by making him more woke, and now he can't like watch a movie without thinking "well that gay joke/stereotype/behavior/whatever is super problematic!" and I laugh manically.
Anyways, we've had a lot of long discussions about books and literature, and recommend each other books all the time, and one of our discussions was about whether or not my plan to not read any books by cishetwhitedudes for a year was a good plan (it was, duh).
I made sure to text him this link, and these two pullquotes:
"We regularly ask teenage girls to read books in which characters degrade women, expecting them to understand that the book’s other merits outweigh its misogyny. To set such an expectation and not consider its effect on young women is foolish and hypocritical; we rarely expect young men to do the same, and hardy ever expect young white men to read extensively in traditions where their identities aren’t represented or are degraded. We need to reflect on the way the literature we celebrate supports the idea that women who are sexually frustrated create problems for themselves, while men in the same situation create problems for the world. Though the links are subtle, our celebration of a canon of sad white boy literature affects the way we think."
"As a teenager I had read many fictional accounts of men’s rape fantasies long before I had ever read a literary account from the woman’s perspective of rape, or even of consensual sex."
Those two quotes for me capture it, capture what the average cishetwhitedude wouldn't really ever notice about The Canon, but other folks sure notice.
posted by Grandysaur at 8:50 PM on June 6, 2018 [44 favorites]
Anyways, we've had a lot of long discussions about books and literature, and recommend each other books all the time, and one of our discussions was about whether or not my plan to not read any books by cishetwhitedudes for a year was a good plan (it was, duh).
I made sure to text him this link, and these two pullquotes:
"We regularly ask teenage girls to read books in which characters degrade women, expecting them to understand that the book’s other merits outweigh its misogyny. To set such an expectation and not consider its effect on young women is foolish and hypocritical; we rarely expect young men to do the same, and hardy ever expect young white men to read extensively in traditions where their identities aren’t represented or are degraded. We need to reflect on the way the literature we celebrate supports the idea that women who are sexually frustrated create problems for themselves, while men in the same situation create problems for the world. Though the links are subtle, our celebration of a canon of sad white boy literature affects the way we think."
"As a teenager I had read many fictional accounts of men’s rape fantasies long before I had ever read a literary account from the woman’s perspective of rape, or even of consensual sex."
Those two quotes for me capture it, capture what the average cishetwhitedude wouldn't really ever notice about The Canon, but other folks sure notice.
posted by Grandysaur at 8:50 PM on June 6, 2018 [44 favorites]
I think one of the primary shaping things for who I am was reading The Awakening with my mom when I was like 9 because it was part of her course work to become a teacher (which she just retired from after 33 years last week.. go mom! [she hates the idea of retirement, fyi]) At least I got that bit of "whoa, what?" as a young lad. (And I had to spend a lot of time digging through the Yellow Wallpaper to think about thematic additions when I shot a student film version of it)
Even still, as a lonely young nerd, I can totally get the attraction of the expression of rage that the whole incel thing carries for men with fundamental breakages in expectations of how society should treat them and how they should treat society.
Will some of this change with the de-emphasis on dead white dude canon? With the hopefully increased voices and opportunities of women and poc's? (recognizing that things being things, it's still not close to fair representation)
(And boy I damn near had a heart attack about The Things They Carried, because I don't think Jimmy's fantasy was a thing an intelligent reader (yeah, I know teenagers) was supposed to think good things about. (But at the same time, damnit O'Brien, did you have to go full "Professor with mid life crisis trying to screw everything to demonstrate he's not pathetic [though he is]" with Tomcat in Love)
posted by drewbage1847 at 8:55 PM on June 6, 2018
Even still, as a lonely young nerd, I can totally get the attraction of the expression of rage that the whole incel thing carries for men with fundamental breakages in expectations of how society should treat them and how they should treat society.
Will some of this change with the de-emphasis on dead white dude canon? With the hopefully increased voices and opportunities of women and poc's? (recognizing that things being things, it's still not close to fair representation)
(And boy I damn near had a heart attack about The Things They Carried, because I don't think Jimmy's fantasy was a thing an intelligent reader (yeah, I know teenagers) was supposed to think good things about. (But at the same time, damnit O'Brien, did you have to go full "Professor with mid life crisis trying to screw everything to demonstrate he's not pathetic [though he is]" with Tomcat in Love)
posted by drewbage1847 at 8:55 PM on June 6, 2018
Will some of this change with the de-emphasis on dead white dude canon?
Suspect “Serious” TV with an emphasis on Manpain McFeels might be the new equivalent of DWDC.
posted by Artw at 9:02 PM on June 6, 2018 [14 favorites]
Suspect “Serious” TV with an emphasis on Manpain McFeels might be the new equivalent of DWDC.
posted by Artw at 9:02 PM on June 6, 2018 [14 favorites]
This makes a lot of good points, except for the main one. The cause and effect. This sounds more like "here are some things that are bad, they must be connected" which is really common, and has been throughout history. How does this explain the big shift in the last few years, are we saying only new books have this problem?
Entitlement among certain groups is on the rise right now though.
posted by bongo_x at 9:25 PM on June 6, 2018 [2 favorites]
Entitlement among certain groups is on the rise right now though.
posted by bongo_x at 9:25 PM on June 6, 2018 [2 favorites]
It’s not just literature, at least not in the book sense. Stalking for Love is a standard romantic trope in movies.
posted by DoctorFedora at 9:38 PM on June 6, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by DoctorFedora at 9:38 PM on June 6, 2018 [2 favorites]
We regularly ask teenage girls to read books in which characters degrade women, expecting them to understand that the book’s other merits outweigh its misogyny. To set such an expectation and not consider its effect on young women is foolish and hypocritical; we rarely expect young men to do the same, and hardy ever expect young white men to read extensively in traditions where their identities aren’t represented or are degraded.
And if any such work should cross their radar by accident, the ensuing precious snowflake outrage is just blizzardous.
posted by flabdablet at 9:41 PM on June 6, 2018 [3 favorites]
And if any such work should cross their radar by accident, the ensuing precious snowflake outrage is just blizzardous.
posted by flabdablet at 9:41 PM on June 6, 2018 [3 favorites]
bongo_x, this degree of shaming and attacking women isn't historically unusual. It comes and goes. Historians often say it's economic anxiety that increases it; perhaps apprentices revolt against women in the guild when widows and daughters have been successful for decades, or there is an increase in violent charivari when older men remarry, or women work outside the home but there's "Eve-teasing" to "keep them in their place".
posted by clew at 9:49 PM on June 6, 2018 [10 favorites]
posted by clew at 9:49 PM on June 6, 2018 [10 favorites]
this degree of shaming and attacking women isn't historically unusual. It comes and goes.
Yes, which doesn't really seem to be the argument of the article.
posted by bongo_x at 10:02 PM on June 6, 2018 [5 favorites]
Yes, which doesn't really seem to be the argument of the article.
posted by bongo_x at 10:02 PM on June 6, 2018 [5 favorites]
I recently got asked to comment on a colleague's syllabus for his undergraduate unit on "introduction to literature", which is a compulsory class for all students at our university who take the BA, no matter what their major.
I looked through the weekly reading list, and the lecture outlines, and I was like, "So it's an introduction to western European literature?" And he said, oh no, we also include Sophocles.
And so I suggested he might want to consider adding in some texts from other traditions, especially given a huge percentage of our students are middle eastern and Asian, and perhaps they'd appreciate seeing their own traditions reflected in the curriculum.
Then he answered, "The problem is, there's only 14 weeks in the semester, and I already had to cut out Shakespeare, because the university said I had to include something written by a woman. So I could replace that, I guess. What do you think is more important, reading something by a woman, or something by a non-European?"
My friends, I couldn't even.
posted by lollusc at 10:35 PM on June 6, 2018 [104 favorites]
I looked through the weekly reading list, and the lecture outlines, and I was like, "So it's an introduction to western European literature?" And he said, oh no, we also include Sophocles.
And so I suggested he might want to consider adding in some texts from other traditions, especially given a huge percentage of our students are middle eastern and Asian, and perhaps they'd appreciate seeing their own traditions reflected in the curriculum.
Then he answered, "The problem is, there's only 14 weeks in the semester, and I already had to cut out Shakespeare, because the university said I had to include something written by a woman. So I could replace that, I guess. What do you think is more important, reading something by a woman, or something by a non-European?"
My friends, I couldn't even.
posted by lollusc at 10:35 PM on June 6, 2018 [104 favorites]
And the shameful thing is that on first glance I hadn't even noticed that there was literally one single text by a woman in that curriculum.
posted by lollusc at 10:37 PM on June 6, 2018 [4 favorites]
posted by lollusc at 10:37 PM on June 6, 2018 [4 favorites]
So, the reading-list example is another case of "official `Culture' is male-centered". The belief that only men's fulfilment really counts in the good state or the good life is always available. But it's only sometimes pulled out to direct social stresses away from class or economic tensions and towards women instead. Like other misdirections, e.g. militarism, it's more useful sometimes than others.
posted by clew at 11:24 PM on June 6, 2018 [6 favorites]
posted by clew at 11:24 PM on June 6, 2018 [6 favorites]
I learned in a recent Replay All that apparently the incel "community" was actually invented by a lesbian.
Bisexual, but yeah. Alanisally enough, when she coined the word for herself and the supportive community she was growing for people like her, she was actually referring to something more like MeFi's Crone Island notion.
Hijacked.
posted by rokusan at 11:52 PM on June 6, 2018 [8 favorites]
I think about this stuff a lot because I teach intro literature courses. I have an English lit degree. Except for a couple of notable exceptions, we read very little that wasn't by white men. I also remember being in a university lit course where the prof didn't assign a single work written by a woman, and when someone dared question him about it, sneered that there were no good women authors in that time period. Let me assure you, I am not that old and this took place in the 1990s, not the 1950s. We are all affected by the normalization of the male canon, and male experience as written in the canon, as THE ONLY viewpoint. Many years and a women's studies degree later, and yet I know that shit is still rattling around in there. I grew up viewing myself through the male gaze and I have to work hard to undo that.
I have colleagues who think talking about underrepresentation of women/POC authors and discussions of privilege are tiresome bullshit. I am so sick of it. Lately I've basically gone rogue, said fuck it, and, in an effort to redress the imbalance, started assigning almost all texts by women and especially women of colour--short stories, plays, poems, novels. No one has complained yet, but it's probably only a matter of time.
Recently my department received funds to buy assigned texts, so our students can sign them out for the semester, reducing their textbook costs. I was given about 24 hours to decide what books to purchase. My friends, I ordered three different novel sets and two plays, and each and every one was written by a woman of colour. It felt really, really good.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 12:02 AM on June 7, 2018 [57 favorites]
I have colleagues who think talking about underrepresentation of women/POC authors and discussions of privilege are tiresome bullshit. I am so sick of it. Lately I've basically gone rogue, said fuck it, and, in an effort to redress the imbalance, started assigning almost all texts by women and especially women of colour--short stories, plays, poems, novels. No one has complained yet, but it's probably only a matter of time.
Recently my department received funds to buy assigned texts, so our students can sign them out for the semester, reducing their textbook costs. I was given about 24 hours to decide what books to purchase. My friends, I ordered three different novel sets and two plays, and each and every one was written by a woman of colour. It felt really, really good.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 12:02 AM on June 7, 2018 [57 favorites]
I'm sympathetic to the spirit of the essay, but at the same time this seems basically the same as arguing that violent videogames cause violence, so I'm skeptical.
Try switching out the word "causes" for the phrase "normalizes harmful values towards" or "inculcates acceptance of" violence as a way to resolve conflict or any of a number of other terms that carry the idea that representation matters. Any given video games or books alone may not "cause" hate and violence, but when the whole of the culture is saturated with the same sorts of images and attitudes, the result in increased hate and violence is hardly unpredictable.
Forget the usual categorizing of things like movies, video games, and books into genres based on setting or style, there is one exceedingly dominant American genre, an emotionally stunted tough guy who finally learns to feel, so someone has to die.
That is the core story and imagery that animates a huge percentage of all mass audience works., Some stories may elide the killing for tonal reasons, but the hard man who finds salvation through attachment to a "pure" girl and in aggressively vanquishing his/her adversaries is the beating heart of popular culture in the US and has been for decades. There are some variations where a psychologically damaged woman threatens social order due to her impure desires, but the basic premise is still the same and creates a vision of society that people clearly have taken on as meaningful and true, as can be judged by simply looking at the culture and listening to how people talk about it.
Denying these connections for reasons of lack of absolute and traceable cause and effect to any given work or because one likes the video games, books, or movies and doesn't want to think themselves affected is disingenuous. The effect of cultural works on people isn't felt identically and won't show itself in the same terms in everyone since our personal histories and attributes are more complex than that. But to doubt any effect because it isn't all the same effect given how pervasive the narrative is and how it comes up over and over in the culture is simply ludicrous.
posted by gusottertrout at 12:13 AM on June 7, 2018 [42 favorites]
Try switching out the word "causes" for the phrase "normalizes harmful values towards" or "inculcates acceptance of" violence as a way to resolve conflict or any of a number of other terms that carry the idea that representation matters. Any given video games or books alone may not "cause" hate and violence, but when the whole of the culture is saturated with the same sorts of images and attitudes, the result in increased hate and violence is hardly unpredictable.
Forget the usual categorizing of things like movies, video games, and books into genres based on setting or style, there is one exceedingly dominant American genre, an emotionally stunted tough guy who finally learns to feel, so someone has to die.
That is the core story and imagery that animates a huge percentage of all mass audience works., Some stories may elide the killing for tonal reasons, but the hard man who finds salvation through attachment to a "pure" girl and in aggressively vanquishing his/her adversaries is the beating heart of popular culture in the US and has been for decades. There are some variations where a psychologically damaged woman threatens social order due to her impure desires, but the basic premise is still the same and creates a vision of society that people clearly have taken on as meaningful and true, as can be judged by simply looking at the culture and listening to how people talk about it.
Denying these connections for reasons of lack of absolute and traceable cause and effect to any given work or because one likes the video games, books, or movies and doesn't want to think themselves affected is disingenuous. The effect of cultural works on people isn't felt identically and won't show itself in the same terms in everyone since our personal histories and attributes are more complex than that. But to doubt any effect because it isn't all the same effect given how pervasive the narrative is and how it comes up over and over in the culture is simply ludicrous.
posted by gusottertrout at 12:13 AM on June 7, 2018 [42 favorites]
Try switching out the word "causes" for the phrase "normalizes harmful values towards" or "inculcates acceptance of" violence as a way to resolve conflict or any of a number of other terms that carry the idea that representation matters.
I agree. Spampinato is literally talking about "culture", that thing we live in and shapes us from a multitude of sources.
posted by JamesBay at 12:46 AM on June 7, 2018 [8 favorites]
I agree. Spampinato is literally talking about "culture", that thing we live in and shapes us from a multitude of sources.
posted by JamesBay at 12:46 AM on June 7, 2018 [8 favorites]
Now I'm grumpy all over again about how in high school English I wanted to write my term paper on Anne Sexton and my teacher made me write about William Wordsworth instead because Sexton wasn't in the curriculum and Wordsworth was. I had discovered Sexton on my own, because of a Peter Gabriel song.
Sexton > Gabriel > Wordsworth.
posted by eustacescrubb at 12:49 AM on June 7, 2018 [5 favorites]
Sexton > Gabriel > Wordsworth.
posted by eustacescrubb at 12:49 AM on June 7, 2018 [5 favorites]
Isn't the change that mattered over the last few decades the prevalence of the internet? Without the web then these guys would have remained isolated cranks. With the web they have a community, an evolving ideology, a visible history, and a direction. Misogyny has been with us forever. You need the web to create a cohesive group of people that idolize Elliot Rogers.
posted by rdr at 12:56 AM on June 7, 2018 [9 favorites]
posted by rdr at 12:56 AM on June 7, 2018 [9 favorites]
I also remember being in a university lit course where the prof didn't assign a single work written by a woman, and when someone dared question him about it, sneered that there were no good women authors in that time period.
Curious: what was the period, and did you supply him with a corrective reading list after graduating?
posted by rokusan at 1:03 AM on June 7, 2018 [2 favorites]
Curious: what was the period, and did you supply him with a corrective reading list after graduating?
posted by rokusan at 1:03 AM on June 7, 2018 [2 favorites]
I'm sympathetic to the spirit of the essay, but at the same time this seems basically the same as arguing that violent videogames cause violence, so I'm skeptical.
posted by oulipian
I think this is interesting because I'd argue it's actually one, under discussed, way in which video games do support violence. Generally the argument for video games cause violence is one of modelling or training. I.e. by simulating carrying out violent actions in a game predisposes someone to be violent in the real world.
Critics of video games from the right/video-games-cause-violence angle rarely take the same argument given in this essay. It's almost never discussed. That's because they don't take video games seriously as art, they think of them as mindless child's games. But if we do takes games seriously as something which conveys meaning (which I do) then we might find problems of the above. There are a lot of games which show war as glamorous or heroic, a very dangerous idea which is also generally supported by a lot of right wing anti-videogame politicians.
An example of these kinds of critiques would be Anita Sarkeesian's works. Grand Theft Auto might be an interesting counter case. As an activity it involves a lot of violence. But the viewpoint of the series is definitely satirical and pokes fun at a lot of ideologies which support violence.
There was a good piece on rock paper shotgun ages ago which I can't find.
posted by Erberus at 1:23 AM on June 7, 2018 [11 favorites]
posted by oulipian
I think this is interesting because I'd argue it's actually one, under discussed, way in which video games do support violence. Generally the argument for video games cause violence is one of modelling or training. I.e. by simulating carrying out violent actions in a game predisposes someone to be violent in the real world.
Critics of video games from the right/video-games-cause-violence angle rarely take the same argument given in this essay. It's almost never discussed. That's because they don't take video games seriously as art, they think of them as mindless child's games. But if we do takes games seriously as something which conveys meaning (which I do) then we might find problems of the above. There are a lot of games which show war as glamorous or heroic, a very dangerous idea which is also generally supported by a lot of right wing anti-videogame politicians.
An example of these kinds of critiques would be Anita Sarkeesian's works. Grand Theft Auto might be an interesting counter case. As an activity it involves a lot of violence. But the viewpoint of the series is definitely satirical and pokes fun at a lot of ideologies which support violence.
There was a good piece on rock paper shotgun ages ago which I can't find.
posted by Erberus at 1:23 AM on June 7, 2018 [11 favorites]
A thoughtful piece... but pointless because none of the incels have ever read any of the books the author accuses of causing the problem. If they haven't been "radicalized" by this literary canon, then there's something else going on. MAYBE, JUST MAYBE it's Youtube and 4chan and 8chan and the right-wing noise machine?
posted by Docrailgun at 1:46 AM on June 7, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by Docrailgun at 1:46 AM on June 7, 2018 [2 favorites]
If we're on the tipping point of becoming a matriarchy once again, I'm all for it. If, in the process, we are going to draw a thick line, burn all previous books and begin writing a new canon, heck, whatever, I already read some of those books and I decided I'm not into fiction anyway. Winner's takers. But it's not going to be easy and with mounting pressure there is bound to be mounting opposition. Long story short, radicalization on this side of the river (I mean the MeFi site) is sure to bring radicalization on the other one. Just saying.
posted by Laotic at 2:06 AM on June 7, 2018
posted by Laotic at 2:06 AM on June 7, 2018
I think the idea that Hamlet has anything to do with this is daft. In fact literary legitimation of male sexual frustration seems a very twentieth century phenomenon to me. Earlier novels were typically about women getting married, and where male sexual frustration was implicit I think it was shown as dangerous, wicked, and contemptible.
Heroes, in older books, did not suffer sexual frustration, because they were effortless alphas who had no difficulty attracting mates. I think that is the root of the phenomenon which some of these books express and possibly help reinforce. Our times have seen a progressive and generally benign retreat of shame, replaced by a general affirmation that all kinds of desire, given consent, are legitimate. Of course incel stuff is not in the mainstream of this trend; it links with traditional male power and violence and above all it’s not about being free, but about taking the freedom of others. Nevertheless my guess is that its emergence is in part an unpleasant side effect of the wider social context which means young males no longer feel their sexual failure is a shameful and embarrassing fact about them, but rather a defect in society.
posted by Segundus at 2:34 AM on June 7, 2018 [7 favorites]
Heroes, in older books, did not suffer sexual frustration, because they were effortless alphas who had no difficulty attracting mates. I think that is the root of the phenomenon which some of these books express and possibly help reinforce. Our times have seen a progressive and generally benign retreat of shame, replaced by a general affirmation that all kinds of desire, given consent, are legitimate. Of course incel stuff is not in the mainstream of this trend; it links with traditional male power and violence and above all it’s not about being free, but about taking the freedom of others. Nevertheless my guess is that its emergence is in part an unpleasant side effect of the wider social context which means young males no longer feel their sexual failure is a shameful and embarrassing fact about them, but rather a defect in society.
posted by Segundus at 2:34 AM on June 7, 2018 [7 favorites]
A thoughtful piece... but pointless because none of the incels have ever read any of the books the author accuses of causing the problem..... MAYBE, JUST MAYBE it's Youtube and 4chan and 8chan and the right-wing noise machine?
First it's weird to assume that books assigned in high school haven't been read by any "incels", as if people like that never read or something, but more importantly, what do you think the author is describing if it isn't a masculine noise machine? Where do you think the Trumps and O'Reillys, not to mention the Weinsteins and Cosbys, and all the rest got their ideas on women from?
Misogyny isn't just some right wing issue. The more vocal "incels" may group with the right due to the ease of communicating their beliefs there, but it isn't simply political affiliation involved. Certainly the internet is shaping how some men are responding to their personal feelings of humiliation, but that humiliation comes as much from the internet giving greater voice to their "enemies", women and minorities, matched against their own fading sense of possibility given their confusion, anger, fear, and unwillingness to change.
posted by gusottertrout at 2:51 AM on June 7, 2018 [31 favorites]
First it's weird to assume that books assigned in high school haven't been read by any "incels", as if people like that never read or something, but more importantly, what do you think the author is describing if it isn't a masculine noise machine? Where do you think the Trumps and O'Reillys, not to mention the Weinsteins and Cosbys, and all the rest got their ideas on women from?
Misogyny isn't just some right wing issue. The more vocal "incels" may group with the right due to the ease of communicating their beliefs there, but it isn't simply political affiliation involved. Certainly the internet is shaping how some men are responding to their personal feelings of humiliation, but that humiliation comes as much from the internet giving greater voice to their "enemies", women and minorities, matched against their own fading sense of possibility given their confusion, anger, fear, and unwillingness to change.
posted by gusottertrout at 2:51 AM on June 7, 2018 [31 favorites]
We need a word for this - that gasp of awareness when something so blindingly true you know in your bones becomes true and becomes truly known when wrapped in the fire of words.
epiphany
posted by pyramid termite at 3:21 AM on June 7, 2018 [18 favorites]
epiphany
posted by pyramid termite at 3:21 AM on June 7, 2018 [18 favorites]
I think the idea that Hamlet has anything to do with this is daft.
Hmm, Hamlet sexually harasses Ophelia before the play within the play, tells her "get the to a nunnery" later, talks to her father about a desire to end all sexual relationships in the world going from that point on, insinuates the man's daughter is a whore, attacks his own mother for her sexual relationships using the image of his father a "real man" who was cucked as contrast to her current lover, contemplates suicide because he believes he was charged with setting things right which means a bloodbath where Hamlet and almost everyone he knows is dead, save for his best buddy who praises his actions. Nope, can't see any possible way an "incel" could take Hamlet the wrong way.
posted by gusottertrout at 3:59 AM on June 7, 2018 [43 favorites]
Hmm, Hamlet sexually harasses Ophelia before the play within the play, tells her "get the to a nunnery" later, talks to her father about a desire to end all sexual relationships in the world going from that point on, insinuates the man's daughter is a whore, attacks his own mother for her sexual relationships using the image of his father a "real man" who was cucked as contrast to her current lover, contemplates suicide because he believes he was charged with setting things right which means a bloodbath where Hamlet and almost everyone he knows is dead, save for his best buddy who praises his actions. Nope, can't see any possible way an "incel" could take Hamlet the wrong way.
posted by gusottertrout at 3:59 AM on June 7, 2018 [43 favorites]
This is incisive and effective, laying bare how deep and how far a particular cultural logic of misogyny is embedded in "the canon of Western culture." It must be read carefully, being newspaper-column in length: leaps must be made quickly, and the unsavvy or casual reader may not put together all the underlying linkages. I had to read it more than once. (The only bit I really quibble with is the gloss on Lolita, and it's not like that isn't just shorthand for the very real and deep problems in Nabokov's oeuvre.)
I teach literature a little, and in exactly the kind of survey course where this problem is particularly fraught. I aim to teach a body of texts that honestly reflects the culture and human experience within it: in a word, inclusively. And I often, often have difficulty with issues like the one this article so wonderfully interrogates.
It leaves me with many thoughts, but here are two questions I find I'm asking myself after this, and which I (perhaps wrongly) think the article suggests are critical ones for instructors of literature:
Is it effective to teach works from a wide variety of perspectives and positions and treat all of it as situated -- teach women's writing as women's writing, and the writing of people of color as writing that partakes in a specific heritage and tradition in its relation to other groups, but also insistently teach white male writing as writing that is from a position of "whiteness" and "maleness" -- or does this still "steer into" the problem because the default position of whiteness is already so embedded for the students?
Does teaching works that are explicitly responses to cultural defaults invariably position them as secondary, as echoes or "non-mainstream" in some way? Is it wiser to avoid, say Wide Sargasso Sea and its direct intertextual connection with Jane Eyre in favor of a text that centers women and is less likely to be framed as a response to a problematic text?
Is the "subversive" paradigm -- this work subverts a dominant cultural logic -- essentially a harmful one that invariably creates this sense of a work as "secondary" to that dominant logic?
Spampinato seems to me to argue -- compellingly, convincingly -- that even an inclusive syllabus has to keep these sorts of questions in view. I don't know that I can answer these questions, but this article make some want to get my students to think about them with me.
posted by kewb at 4:01 AM on June 7, 2018 [4 favorites]
I teach literature a little, and in exactly the kind of survey course where this problem is particularly fraught. I aim to teach a body of texts that honestly reflects the culture and human experience within it: in a word, inclusively. And I often, often have difficulty with issues like the one this article so wonderfully interrogates.
It leaves me with many thoughts, but here are two questions I find I'm asking myself after this, and which I (perhaps wrongly) think the article suggests are critical ones for instructors of literature:
Is it effective to teach works from a wide variety of perspectives and positions and treat all of it as situated -- teach women's writing as women's writing, and the writing of people of color as writing that partakes in a specific heritage and tradition in its relation to other groups, but also insistently teach white male writing as writing that is from a position of "whiteness" and "maleness" -- or does this still "steer into" the problem because the default position of whiteness is already so embedded for the students?
Does teaching works that are explicitly responses to cultural defaults invariably position them as secondary, as echoes or "non-mainstream" in some way? Is it wiser to avoid, say Wide Sargasso Sea and its direct intertextual connection with Jane Eyre in favor of a text that centers women and is less likely to be framed as a response to a problematic text?
Is the "subversive" paradigm -- this work subverts a dominant cultural logic -- essentially a harmful one that invariably creates this sense of a work as "secondary" to that dominant logic?
Spampinato seems to me to argue -- compellingly, convincingly -- that even an inclusive syllabus has to keep these sorts of questions in view. I don't know that I can answer these questions, but this article make some want to get my students to think about them with me.
posted by kewb at 4:01 AM on June 7, 2018 [4 favorites]
I thought she had important things to say about the effect our traditional canon of literature has on culture, but the link to "incels" seemed a bit weak. Many of us of all sexes and orientations have the experience of an unrequited infatuation without being or becoming entitled jerks -- that's why it's a theme which often shows up in literature.
Also, Great Expectations is about class and not sex, and I can't believe that anyone would teach Lolita without ensuring that students understand the narrator is a monster clothed in fair words.
posted by Slothrup at 4:26 AM on June 7, 2018 [3 favorites]
Also, Great Expectations is about class and not sex, and I can't believe that anyone would teach Lolita without ensuring that students understand the narrator is a monster clothed in fair words.
posted by Slothrup at 4:26 AM on June 7, 2018 [3 favorites]
but pointless because none of the incels have ever read any of the books the author accuses of causing the problem.....
It not so much that incels-per-se have or haven't read them read them, than that these narratives have been widely read in general, often due to canonisation through myopic modes of culture transmission (mandated reading lists, publishing houses issuing 'classics' etc). Which leads to pervasive normalisation of worldviews which de-legitimise the agency or perspective of anyone other than the default primary character (aka cishetwhitedude).
So this single perspective gets a disproportionate amount of heed-paying in wider culture because everyone, regardless of their own context, is subtly groomed from an early age to pay attention to the mens.
You don't have to be aware of the cause in order to benefit from the effect.
posted by freya_lamb at 4:43 AM on June 7, 2018 [31 favorites]
It not so much that incels-per-se have or haven't read them read them, than that these narratives have been widely read in general, often due to canonisation through myopic modes of culture transmission (mandated reading lists, publishing houses issuing 'classics' etc). Which leads to pervasive normalisation of worldviews which de-legitimise the agency or perspective of anyone other than the default primary character (aka cishetwhitedude).
So this single perspective gets a disproportionate amount of heed-paying in wider culture because everyone, regardless of their own context, is subtly groomed from an early age to pay attention to the mens.
You don't have to be aware of the cause in order to benefit from the effect.
posted by freya_lamb at 4:43 AM on June 7, 2018 [31 favorites]
We regularly ask teenage girls to read books in which characters degrade women, expecting them to understand that the book’s other merits outweigh its misogyny. To set such an expectation and not consider its effect on young women is foolish and hypocritical; we rarely expect young men to do the same, and hardy ever expect young white men to read extensively in traditions where their identities aren’t represented or are degraded.
I will never forget the bewilderment and outrage expressed the day that my 18th c Novels class first discussed Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded by Samuel Richardson.
I mean, I guess I'm glad I read it so I can say it's really not worth reading. I'm also very grateful that, while the professor was male, the students were mostly female, and he did not push back on our outrage at all. Certainly there were popular women novelists in the 18th c. that would have been better choices than that one.
posted by maggiemaggie at 4:54 AM on June 7, 2018 [7 favorites]
I will never forget the bewilderment and outrage expressed the day that my 18th c Novels class first discussed Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded by Samuel Richardson.
I mean, I guess I'm glad I read it so I can say it's really not worth reading. I'm also very grateful that, while the professor was male, the students were mostly female, and he did not push back on our outrage at all. Certainly there were popular women novelists in the 18th c. that would have been better choices than that one.
posted by maggiemaggie at 4:54 AM on June 7, 2018 [7 favorites]
Long story short, radicalization on this side of the river (I mean the MeFi site) is sure to bring radicalization on the other one. Just saying.
What radical ideas have you seen here? Like, if you limit women's participation in culture that people won't understand their lives because of a lack of opportunity to hear about them? Or something else? And what radicalisation do you think will happen that is worse than the mass killings already perpetrated by incels?
posted by harriet vane at 5:43 AM on June 7, 2018 [11 favorites]
What radical ideas have you seen here? Like, if you limit women's participation in culture that people won't understand their lives because of a lack of opportunity to hear about them? Or something else? And what radicalisation do you think will happen that is worse than the mass killings already perpetrated by incels?
posted by harriet vane at 5:43 AM on June 7, 2018 [11 favorites]
Long story short, radicalization on this side of the river (I mean the MeFi site) is sure to bring radicalization on the other one. Just saying.
I've mentioned this before, but a few months ago I turned all of the spines of the male authors in my book collection to the wall. I have a TON of books. I let all the women spine-out, and moved them front and centre to make them easy to find for my 2018 women-only reading project.
I didn't think it was radical, but every woman has stared in awe at the 3/4 white pages and 1/4 (if that) colorful, color-coded spines of women authors. They're moved at how refreshing it is to see, and our "position" in the cannon (and I'm a feminist - I used to pride myself on how many women authors I've read).
My dad came down to visit and asked why I had turned the books around - I told him that only women authors for this year - this year only - and he scoffed and said "You gotta stop this" "Stop what?" "this... this is... too much. You're going overboard... You're turning into a fanatic. This [feminism] is an obsession"
Seriously? My very personal decision to display the books in my own home, by authors I choose to read after having had to read WAY MORE (10x more?) male authors over the course of my Academic career (which includes a PhD in English) is that threatening? It's symptomatic of fanaticism? Give me strength. #masculinitysofragile
posted by Dressed to Kill at 5:56 AM on June 7, 2018 [71 favorites]
I've mentioned this before, but a few months ago I turned all of the spines of the male authors in my book collection to the wall. I have a TON of books. I let all the women spine-out, and moved them front and centre to make them easy to find for my 2018 women-only reading project.
I didn't think it was radical, but every woman has stared in awe at the 3/4 white pages and 1/4 (if that) colorful, color-coded spines of women authors. They're moved at how refreshing it is to see, and our "position" in the cannon (and I'm a feminist - I used to pride myself on how many women authors I've read).
My dad came down to visit and asked why I had turned the books around - I told him that only women authors for this year - this year only - and he scoffed and said "You gotta stop this" "Stop what?" "this... this is... too much. You're going overboard... You're turning into a fanatic. This [feminism] is an obsession"
Seriously? My very personal decision to display the books in my own home, by authors I choose to read after having had to read WAY MORE (10x more?) male authors over the course of my Academic career (which includes a PhD in English) is that threatening? It's symptomatic of fanaticism? Give me strength. #masculinitysofragile
posted by Dressed to Kill at 5:56 AM on June 7, 2018 [71 favorites]
Long story short, radicalization on this side of the river (I mean the MeFi site) is sure to bring radicalization on the other one
"Please proceed, Governor."
posted by PMdixon at 6:08 AM on June 7, 2018 [3 favorites]
"Please proceed, Governor."
posted by PMdixon at 6:08 AM on June 7, 2018 [3 favorites]
What radical ideas have you seen here? Like, if you limit women's participation in culture that people won't understand their lives because of a lack of opportunity to hear about them? Or something else? And what radicalisation do you think will happen that is worse than the mass killings already perpetrated by incels?
Is it not obvious that the radicalism of the spooky SJWs with the gall to speak out against misogyny and get murdered for it is to blame for the radicalism of the misogynists murdering them? And really: how can you not see that a website dependent on donations with one admin, an actual handful of moderators, and maybe a couple thousand regular users (a minority of whom actually engage in anti-misogynist activism) should be held to blame for the radicalization of millions of misogynists across enormous social media platforms where both users and revenue number in the hundreds of millions to billions?
Wake up, sheeple!
posted by zombieflanders at 6:17 AM on June 7, 2018 [15 favorites]
Is it not obvious that the radicalism of the spooky SJWs with the gall to speak out against misogyny and get murdered for it is to blame for the radicalism of the misogynists murdering them? And really: how can you not see that a website dependent on donations with one admin, an actual handful of moderators, and maybe a couple thousand regular users (a minority of whom actually engage in anti-misogynist activism) should be held to blame for the radicalization of millions of misogynists across enormous social media platforms where both users and revenue number in the hundreds of millions to billions?
Wake up, sheeple!
posted by zombieflanders at 6:17 AM on June 7, 2018 [15 favorites]
Wow, this reminds me anew of a term reading list in high school (in the decidedly un-woke 80s) which included Tess of the D'Ubervilles (and yes, we watched the Roman Polanski film, brrr), Sons and Lovers, Wuthering Heights, Great Expectations, The Turn of the Screw, A Midsummer Night's Dream (at least it wasn't Troilus and Cressida, right?) and our one feminist text was...The Handmaid's Tale. (Canadian private high school) I think The Great Gatsby was a different year.
Of course in an earlier year it was Anthem, Brave New World, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The Chocolate War, 1984 AND Animal Farm, and A Separate Peace, so you know, it looked downright cheery at the time.
Great literary hot take, thanks for sharing.
posted by warriorqueen at 6:28 AM on June 7, 2018 [3 favorites]
Of course in an earlier year it was Anthem, Brave New World, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The Chocolate War, 1984 AND Animal Farm, and A Separate Peace, so you know, it looked downright cheery at the time.
Great literary hot take, thanks for sharing.
posted by warriorqueen at 6:28 AM on June 7, 2018 [3 favorites]
Once again the phonies blame Holden Caulfield
posted by Damienmce at 6:41 AM on June 7, 2018 [11 favorites]
posted by Damienmce at 6:41 AM on June 7, 2018 [11 favorites]
I didn't take the argument in the piece to be "the male-centric canon directly causes men to identify as incels" but "misogynists calling themselves incels isn't a totally foreign problem but are wrought from central aspects of our culture".
Like others, this sentence stopped me in my tracks with an incredible flash of recognition:
"As a teenager I had read many fictional accounts of men’s rape fantasies long before I had ever read a literary account from the woman’s perspective of rape, or even of consensual sex."
posted by Emmy Rae at 7:18 AM on June 7, 2018 [19 favorites]
Like others, this sentence stopped me in my tracks with an incredible flash of recognition:
"As a teenager I had read many fictional accounts of men’s rape fantasies long before I had ever read a literary account from the woman’s perspective of rape, or even of consensual sex."
posted by Emmy Rae at 7:18 AM on June 7, 2018 [19 favorites]
I just completed one of those 100 best loved poems or whatever and they were almost all men and almost all talking about women as an object, with men and male desire as the subject, and they were almost all self-pitying entitlement, and they may not have actually inspired the incel movement, but they sure could have been authored by incels, and the whole experience was very depressing.
They did have Elizabeth Bishop's The Fish, maybe as a sop to the fact that there are women who are poets, and it was the only poem I didn't actively feel nauseated about.
posted by maxsparber at 7:26 AM on June 7, 2018 [6 favorites]
They did have Elizabeth Bishop's The Fish, maybe as a sop to the fact that there are women who are poets, and it was the only poem I didn't actively feel nauseated about.
posted by maxsparber at 7:26 AM on June 7, 2018 [6 favorites]
I didn't take the argument in the piece to be "the male-centric canon directly causes men to identify as incels" but "misogynists calling themselves incels isn't a totally foreign problem but are wrought from central aspects of our culture".
I don't think there is any other way to read the peace. The word "cause" only appears once in the piece, and not to say literature causes radicalized misogyny. I presume people who are arguing with a case that was not made -- that the misogyny of the Western literary canon led to incels -- are arguing with the subtitle, which I am sure the author did not write.
posted by maxsparber at 7:29 AM on June 7, 2018 [4 favorites]
I don't think there is any other way to read the peace. The word "cause" only appears once in the piece, and not to say literature causes radicalized misogyny. I presume people who are arguing with a case that was not made -- that the misogyny of the Western literary canon led to incels -- are arguing with the subtitle, which I am sure the author did not write.
posted by maxsparber at 7:29 AM on June 7, 2018 [4 favorites]
Recently pulled down my copy of Ovid's Metamorphosis. Good translation, but after the umpteenth pursuit, capture and rape it went back on the shelf. A seminal work indeed...
posted by jim in austin at 7:30 AM on June 7, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by jim in austin at 7:30 AM on June 7, 2018 [2 favorites]
I just tweeted about this but this made think about the novel Snow Crash, which was recommended to me by a bunch of male friends and acquaintances not a single one of whom mentioned that it includes a scene where a fifteen year old has extremely good and satisfying sex with a guy in his thirties. Like it just literally didn't occur to anyone to bring that up as a thing of interest about the novel so I wondered while reading that bit if maybe I was imagining it? No one I've talked to before or since has ever brought up that aspect of the book, it's just in there.
I am also very much on team "this affects how women and girls view themselves". For years when I was young I figured the best thing I could be was a muse or manic pixie dream girl, someone interesting and worthwhile because she was an object of desire for older men. I read a lot and took "literature" seriously and I didn't have a framework for conceptualizing a female interior life. It took me years to relate to myself as a person and not as an object of the male gaze.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 7:38 AM on June 7, 2018 [52 favorites]
I am also very much on team "this affects how women and girls view themselves". For years when I was young I figured the best thing I could be was a muse or manic pixie dream girl, someone interesting and worthwhile because she was an object of desire for older men. I read a lot and took "literature" seriously and I didn't have a framework for conceptualizing a female interior life. It took me years to relate to myself as a person and not as an object of the male gaze.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 7:38 AM on June 7, 2018 [52 favorites]
"As a teenager I had read many fictional accounts of men’s rape fantasies long before I had ever read a literary account from the woman’s perspective of rape, or even of consensual sex."
Also, the first few books I read in literature class to stray from this were The Awakening and Madame Bovary. Both books have female protagonists who exhibit desire, but it is from a trapped position and they are ultimately doomed. Their journey of self-discovery could only end in tragedy because they had no way to create a life for themselves.
I am happy to say that both my high school and college instructors embraced a wide canon and by my senior year of high school I had read widely across cultures, genders and to some extent sexual orientations, but that is partly because I took advanced literature courses, not because that was a mainstream approach to education.
posted by Emmy Rae at 7:50 AM on June 7, 2018 [1 favorite]
Also, the first few books I read in literature class to stray from this were The Awakening and Madame Bovary. Both books have female protagonists who exhibit desire, but it is from a trapped position and they are ultimately doomed. Their journey of self-discovery could only end in tragedy because they had no way to create a life for themselves.
I am happy to say that both my high school and college instructors embraced a wide canon and by my senior year of high school I had read widely across cultures, genders and to some extent sexual orientations, but that is partly because I took advanced literature courses, not because that was a mainstream approach to education.
posted by Emmy Rae at 7:50 AM on June 7, 2018 [1 favorite]
I can't believe that anyone would teach Lolita without ensuring that students understand the narrator is a monster clothed in fair words.
Have you MET a male literature professor? You may recognize them from the fiction they write about themselves? No, that's not what they teach about a book whose title in our culture means "jailbait temptress". We can't be acknowledging monsters to women, they might catch some agency.
I wish I could calculate the cost to me that, as mid-late teen, I somehow absorbed the nugget that Updike was Literature and I had to read it. I can only assume that my mostly-baffled perusal of The New Yorker in the library did that to me, but it's likely where I truly internalized the idea that I couldn't be a writer and honestly why would I want to even?
posted by Lyn Never at 8:13 AM on June 7, 2018 [16 favorites]
Have you MET a male literature professor? You may recognize them from the fiction they write about themselves? No, that's not what they teach about a book whose title in our culture means "jailbait temptress". We can't be acknowledging monsters to women, they might catch some agency.
I wish I could calculate the cost to me that, as mid-late teen, I somehow absorbed the nugget that Updike was Literature and I had to read it. I can only assume that my mostly-baffled perusal of The New Yorker in the library did that to me, but it's likely where I truly internalized the idea that I couldn't be a writer and honestly why would I want to even?
posted by Lyn Never at 8:13 AM on June 7, 2018 [16 favorites]
Hamlet sexually harasses Ophelia before the play within the play, tells her "get the to a nunnery" later, talks to her father about a desire to end all sexual relationships in the world going from that point on, insinuates the man's daughter is a whore, attacks his own mother for her sexual relationships using the image of his father a "real man" who was cucked as contrast to her current lover, contemplates suicide because he believes he was charged with setting things right which means a bloodbath where Hamlet and almost everyone he knows is dead, save for his best buddy who praises his actions. Nope, can't see any possible way an "incel" could take Hamlet the wrong way.
Hamlet is not just chock full of crises of masculinity, the history of Hamlet in performance is instructive in the ways those fears and crises are articulated. After many years of performances portraying Hamlet as effete and indecisive, Zeffirelli's 1990 Hamlet, starring, of all people, Mel Gibson, cranks the rage to 11. Gibson's Hamlet pretty much foregrounds every aspect of character and story that might be called "toxic masculinity."
(And I say that as someone who actually loves Zeffirelli's Hamlet and who has always thought that Gibson is a fucking hunk in it.)
But this is a really good piece. Reading it, I was reminded or the line from High Fidelity, another sad white boy story
posted by octobersurprise at 8:13 AM on June 7, 2018 [10 favorites]
Hamlet is not just chock full of crises of masculinity, the history of Hamlet in performance is instructive in the ways those fears and crises are articulated. After many years of performances portraying Hamlet as effete and indecisive, Zeffirelli's 1990 Hamlet, starring, of all people, Mel Gibson, cranks the rage to 11. Gibson's Hamlet pretty much foregrounds every aspect of character and story that might be called "toxic masculinity."
(And I say that as someone who actually loves Zeffirelli's Hamlet and who has always thought that Gibson is a fucking hunk in it.)
But this is a really good piece. Reading it, I was reminded or the line from High Fidelity, another sad white boy story
“What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?"(My only quibble with it is that while I'd be content to let Ellis and Wallace slide into obscurity, I think Hemingway continues to be instructive: partly for his (still brilliant, imo) prose, largely because his issues with masculinity are so foregrounded that he's basically a walking teachable moment.)
posted by octobersurprise at 8:13 AM on June 7, 2018 [10 favorites]
The Deadly Incel Movement’s Absurd Pop Culture Roots
posted by Artw at 8:26 AM on June 7, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by Artw at 8:26 AM on June 7, 2018 [1 favorite]
I can't believe that anyone would teach Lolita without ensuring that students understand the narrator is a monster clothed in fair words.
One of the grossest things in the world is when Delores Haze, a literal child, is presented as sexy in movies and on movie posters.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 8:30 AM on June 7, 2018 [11 favorites]
One of the grossest things in the world is when Delores Haze, a literal child, is presented as sexy in movies and on movie posters.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 8:30 AM on June 7, 2018 [11 favorites]
Snow Crash, which was recommended to me by a bunch of male friends and acquaintances not a single one of whom mentioned that it includes a scene where a fifteen year old has extremely good and satisfying sex with a guy in his thirties.
Wait seriously? There goes whatever impulse I had to finally check out Stephenson's body of work
posted by PMdixon at 8:32 AM on June 7, 2018 [2 favorites]
Wait seriously? There goes whatever impulse I had to finally check out Stephenson's body of work
posted by PMdixon at 8:32 AM on June 7, 2018 [2 favorites]
Recently pulled down my copy of Ovid's Metamorphosis. Good translation, but after the umpteenth pursuit, capture and rape it went back on the shelf. A seminal work indeed...
Not long ago I was visiting a major art museum with someone who remarked in passing about how hard it was to connect with the Mesoamerican art. I kept thinking about this on another floor, as I stood in front of a white 18th-century British porcelain depiction of a nymph being carried off by a Greek god. It was a frankly hideous piece, distinguished, to me, only by its provenance and expense. I've always disliked classicizing European art because it is generally so doughy and dull. And yet I could suddenly see it -- see the kind of thing I hadn't been looking at for years. The terror in the girl's eyes; the triumphant leer on the god's face. Say what you will about Xipe Totec, but he never pulled this shit.
I just tweeted about this but this made think about the novel Snow Crash, which was recommended to me by a bunch of male friends and acquaintances not a single one of whom mentioned that it includes a scene where a fifteen year old has extremely good and satisfying sex with a guy in his thirties.
Oh man. I feel significantly better about never finishing a Neal Stephenson novel. I've either put them down out of boredom or a deep sense of skeeziness, and both times I've felt I was failing as a reader somehow. No more.
posted by Countess Elena at 8:32 AM on June 7, 2018 [11 favorites]
Not long ago I was visiting a major art museum with someone who remarked in passing about how hard it was to connect with the Mesoamerican art. I kept thinking about this on another floor, as I stood in front of a white 18th-century British porcelain depiction of a nymph being carried off by a Greek god. It was a frankly hideous piece, distinguished, to me, only by its provenance and expense. I've always disliked classicizing European art because it is generally so doughy and dull. And yet I could suddenly see it -- see the kind of thing I hadn't been looking at for years. The terror in the girl's eyes; the triumphant leer on the god's face. Say what you will about Xipe Totec, but he never pulled this shit.
I just tweeted about this but this made think about the novel Snow Crash, which was recommended to me by a bunch of male friends and acquaintances not a single one of whom mentioned that it includes a scene where a fifteen year old has extremely good and satisfying sex with a guy in his thirties.
Oh man. I feel significantly better about never finishing a Neal Stephenson novel. I've either put them down out of boredom or a deep sense of skeeziness, and both times I've felt I was failing as a reader somehow. No more.
posted by Countess Elena at 8:32 AM on June 7, 2018 [11 favorites]
More on the way that this literary canon normalizes marginalization: The Things They Carried actually has no Vietnamese people in it. And relatedly, I have colleagues who absolutely believe--and have stated in department meetings on multiple occasions--that discussing race and gender in literature is "a passing trend" or "sociology, and not literary study." All of this inculcates the toxic white masculine fragility that's poisoning the world.
(Readers, sometimes I design syllabi explicity under the organizing principle of "what would most appall my terrible -ist colleagues?")
posted by TwoStride at 8:39 AM on June 7, 2018 [21 favorites]
(Readers, sometimes I design syllabi explicity under the organizing principle of "what would most appall my terrible -ist colleagues?")
posted by TwoStride at 8:39 AM on June 7, 2018 [21 favorites]
And on the assertion that the American literary canon has been built on the glorification of the sexual frustrations of men, it's maybe worth noting that this was pretty much the conclusion Leslie Fiedler came to 50 years ago in Love and Death in the American Novel.
(There's a lot in that book that seems icky or obtuse now, but he was definitely on to something:
(There's a lot in that book that seems icky or obtuse now, but he was definitely on to something:
"That is the essential point about Love and Death, I think, that it treats issues which, since they were really living when fictionally imagined, can never die: the absence of vivid and convincing female characters in our greatest novels; the odd love affair, pure and physical at once, between males, colored and white, which makes the sentimental center of those books; our tormenting ambivalence toward the natural world, conceived alternately (or even sometimes simultaneously) as paradise and hell; the transformations and inversions of the European prototypes of the novel on this side of the ocean-so that one is tempted to say our literature is in essence "camp"; the predominance of the Gothic tradition, of terror and death and violence, in the works we loved best; and finally the blessed blindness with which we continue to regard our eccentric and terrible books as "children's literature"-or worse, maybe, the sense in which they are "children's literature," after all."posted by octobersurprise at 8:41 AM on June 7, 2018 [5 favorites]
— "Second Thoughts on "Love and Death in the American Novel": My First Gothic Novel," NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Autumn, 1967.
More on the way that this literary canon normalizes marginalization: The Things They Carried actually has no Vietnamese people in it.
I feel terrible that I never noticed this. I do still vividly remember the reading experience, the descriptions of death that were unlike anything I had ever encountered before (or even since). But so much was missing that I did not see was missing. I appreciate your passing this along.
posted by Countess Elena at 8:46 AM on June 7, 2018 [5 favorites]
I feel terrible that I never noticed this. I do still vividly remember the reading experience, the descriptions of death that were unlike anything I had ever encountered before (or even since). But so much was missing that I did not see was missing. I appreciate your passing this along.
posted by Countess Elena at 8:46 AM on June 7, 2018 [5 favorites]
(I also wonder if that book hasn't become a staple on curricula not just because of quality, but because it's got a lot of war and death in it and teachers want to push boys towards actually finishing and enjoying a piece of literary fiction without thinking it's for pussies.)
posted by Countess Elena at 8:49 AM on June 7, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by Countess Elena at 8:49 AM on June 7, 2018 [3 favorites]
lollusc: And the shameful thing is that on first glance I hadn't even noticed that there was literally one single text by a woman in that curriculum.
When I can't sleep I run through alphabetical lists in my head- and a particularly knotty one is always an alphabet of women writers. (I can do male writers almost without a pause.) As a fairly well read older person, thanks both to my education and my work, I find this shameful.
posted by Jody Tresidder at 9:02 AM on June 7, 2018 [2 favorites]
When I can't sleep I run through alphabetical lists in my head- and a particularly knotty one is always an alphabet of women writers. (I can do male writers almost without a pause.) As a fairly well read older person, thanks both to my education and my work, I find this shameful.
posted by Jody Tresidder at 9:02 AM on June 7, 2018 [2 favorites]
Wading through this thread has been exhausting. So much "Hamlet (or whatever piece or pieces of canon literature) couldn't have caused incel violence because they probably never read it! Hah!" and so much effort spent patiently and articulately explaining how that's missing the whole point and did you even RTFA?
Those of you in the "hah, gotcha!" camp, you can do better than that. Please try. There's a lot at stake these days, even in relatively civil discussions in small corners of the internet like this one.
All that said, there are some great things in this thread and the article really caused a "whoa" moment for me. And it's already been posted twice but The Deadly Incel Culture's Absurd Pop Culture Roots is a really insightful and chilling read that makes a great companion piece to this article. It's too bad it's one of the "your first three are on the house" Medium articles because it really deserves as wide of an audience as possible. (And I'll happily PM the text to anyone who can't access it and wants to read it).
posted by treepour at 9:03 AM on June 7, 2018 [15 favorites]
Those of you in the "hah, gotcha!" camp, you can do better than that. Please try. There's a lot at stake these days, even in relatively civil discussions in small corners of the internet like this one.
All that said, there are some great things in this thread and the article really caused a "whoa" moment for me. And it's already been posted twice but The Deadly Incel Culture's Absurd Pop Culture Roots is a really insightful and chilling read that makes a great companion piece to this article. It's too bad it's one of the "your first three are on the house" Medium articles because it really deserves as wide of an audience as possible. (And I'll happily PM the text to anyone who can't access it and wants to read it).
posted by treepour at 9:03 AM on June 7, 2018 [15 favorites]
Snow Crash, which was recommended to me by a bunch of male friends and acquaintances not a single one of whom mentioned that it includes a scene where a fifteen year old has extremely good and satisfying sex with a guy in his thirties.
Wait seriously?
Seriously. I'd like to be able to say that there's more to it than that—I mean I remember being fifteen and I certainly had a sexuality back then, and fifteen-year-olds don't always make good decisions, and the guy who she sleeps with is the main villain, and she pretty much kills him with her vagina—but eh. It's not exactly the kind of book that invites the reader to think deep thoughts about the complicated intersection of youth and sexuality, or about feminine power. It's a book about techbros with katanas fucking shit up in a dystopian future, and that scene is extremely gross.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 9:13 AM on June 7, 2018 [10 favorites]
Wait seriously?
Seriously. I'd like to be able to say that there's more to it than that—I mean I remember being fifteen and I certainly had a sexuality back then, and fifteen-year-olds don't always make good decisions, and the guy who she sleeps with is the main villain, and she pretty much kills him with her vagina—but eh. It's not exactly the kind of book that invites the reader to think deep thoughts about the complicated intersection of youth and sexuality, or about feminine power. It's a book about techbros with katanas fucking shit up in a dystopian future, and that scene is extremely gross.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 9:13 AM on June 7, 2018 [10 favorites]
I also want to reiterate the link to The Deadly Incel Culture's Absurd Pop Culture Roots for those looking for a description or analysis of more proximal causes of the rise of the group of men who currently call themselves incels (as opposed to a discussion of how this particularly violent end of misogyny is on a spectrum and part of the same overall culture as the rest of misogyny is Western culture). (I should have included more description with it the first time I posted - sorry.)
posted by eviemath at 9:20 AM on June 7, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by eviemath at 9:20 AM on June 7, 2018 [2 favorites]
The Reply All was interesting. It makes total sense that the people who could do something else or were more emotionally healthy eventually didn't need the "support group" and the bitter, angry people stayed. Newcomers would bounce off that unless they were also angry or open to it. It was a cycle that turned into what we got now.
posted by OnTheLastCastle at 9:28 AM on June 7, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by OnTheLastCastle at 9:28 AM on June 7, 2018 [1 favorite]
rokusan: Curious: what was the period, and did you supply him with a corrective reading list after graduation?
It was Modern British lit...and no, I didn't ever interact with him after passing that class; I avoided his classes after that. Of course now that I'm not a timid 19 year old undergrad, I know what I'd say to him. However, I do remember being in awe of the slightly older woman (looking back, she was probably only in her mid-20s) who challenged him in front of the whole class.
The good news is, he was of an age where he has likely retired now. The bad news is, I work with 40 year olds who are barely more enlightened and a lot better at subtle, insidious misogyny.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 9:52 AM on June 7, 2018 [4 favorites]
It was Modern British lit...and no, I didn't ever interact with him after passing that class; I avoided his classes after that. Of course now that I'm not a timid 19 year old undergrad, I know what I'd say to him. However, I do remember being in awe of the slightly older woman (looking back, she was probably only in her mid-20s) who challenged him in front of the whole class.
The good news is, he was of an age where he has likely retired now. The bad news is, I work with 40 year olds who are barely more enlightened and a lot better at subtle, insidious misogyny.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 9:52 AM on June 7, 2018 [4 favorites]
"As a teenager I had read many fictional accounts of men’s rape fantasies long before I had ever read a literary account from the woman’s perspective of rape, or even of consensual sex."
This is fascinating to me. As a teenager, I was steeped in stories of women's desire - I started reading romances at the age of 9, and by the time I was 15, I knew which Harlequin lines I liked and which I didn't, although I couldn't articulate the differences. And I read science fiction, pretty much everything I could get my hands on, and mythic fantasy, and horror (because it was tied to those two; I've since figured out that I don't actually like horror), and mainstream YA novels when I ran out of those. I read everything.
I knew that most people read what they were assigned, and maybe once in a while something that was very popular. I had never stopped to think about what themes were strongly present in such a narrow collection of works, what messages were absorbed by the kids, especially the boys, who didn't hate reading but also didn't seek it out for leisure.
....Wow. I need to take a solid look at "classics of science fiction" lists and consider what themes they carry when they're not on a reading list that alternates them with romance novels. This puts the the old-white-men SF community into a different light; the whole "puppygate" thing had been baffling me for years.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 10:00 AM on June 7, 2018 [9 favorites]
This is fascinating to me. As a teenager, I was steeped in stories of women's desire - I started reading romances at the age of 9, and by the time I was 15, I knew which Harlequin lines I liked and which I didn't, although I couldn't articulate the differences. And I read science fiction, pretty much everything I could get my hands on, and mythic fantasy, and horror (because it was tied to those two; I've since figured out that I don't actually like horror), and mainstream YA novels when I ran out of those. I read everything.
I knew that most people read what they were assigned, and maybe once in a while something that was very popular. I had never stopped to think about what themes were strongly present in such a narrow collection of works, what messages were absorbed by the kids, especially the boys, who didn't hate reading but also didn't seek it out for leisure.
....Wow. I need to take a solid look at "classics of science fiction" lists and consider what themes they carry when they're not on a reading list that alternates them with romance novels. This puts the the old-white-men SF community into a different light; the whole "puppygate" thing had been baffling me for years.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 10:00 AM on June 7, 2018 [9 favorites]
Golden Age sci-fi is incredibly misogynist, in a totally unexamined, this-is-all-absolutely-normal kind of way. I grew up on my dad's shelf of old paperbacks and while I definitely got a lot out of that stuff (including a lifelong love of science fiction and fantasy) there's a whole lot of it that I know I can never ever go back to.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 10:13 AM on June 7, 2018 [19 favorites]
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 10:13 AM on June 7, 2018 [19 favorites]
I remember how much the guys in my high school English class complained about reading The Awakening, the sole female-authored work we read the entire year. My (female) teacher half-heartedly apologized for making the dudes slog through all those yucky girl feelings until I pointed out that we girls had already read several books about manfeels and manly man things. That year, we also read The Sound and the Fury--which features extensive rumination over an adolescent woman's body and sexual habits; Brave New World--again, extensive rumination over a woman's body and sexual habits; and The Grapes of Wrath--which featured, you guessed it, rumination over a woman's body and sexual habits with a heavy dose of Madonna-Whore complex. And dudes couldn't deal with a story about a woman trying to get some agency in her life. Thank goddess I was reading female-gaze-y "trash" like Clan of the Cave Bear, Tanith Lee, and Anne Rice in my free time to see at least a glimpse of a woman's perspective represented in literature. My extracurricular reading was the only place I encountered depictions of female desire, consent, agency, the experience of being a woman or non-binary or queer. If I hadn't sought out this type of material (which of course was labeled "genre" fiction to keep it from tainting the precious and serious field of Real Literature) I certainly would not have seen a consensual sexual experience described in literature.
Misogyny is the water we swim in. Of course it's in our literature. It's everywhere. Incels aren't just getting their ideology online. They're getting it everywhere because it pervades our whole society.
posted by Kitty Stardust at 10:16 AM on June 7, 2018 [38 favorites]
Misogyny is the water we swim in. Of course it's in our literature. It's everywhere. Incels aren't just getting their ideology online. They're getting it everywhere because it pervades our whole society.
posted by Kitty Stardust at 10:16 AM on June 7, 2018 [38 favorites]
Jo Walton on The Suck Fairy, which frequently visits those older SF works.
posted by Artw at 10:23 AM on June 7, 2018 [10 favorites]
posted by Artw at 10:23 AM on June 7, 2018 [10 favorites]
As a teenager, I was steeped in stories of women's desire - I started reading romances at the age of 9
I didn't read romance as a teenager because I wanted to read "smart" books. This is sexist bullshit, of course - but as a teenager I wasn't yet mature enough to see all of the reasons why. I also didn't have guidance from more experienced readers who could encourage me to look past the stigma surrounding romance, or make recommendations. I looked toward popular culture for guidance, and as a result, my reading at that age was a bro-fest.
I don't think it was good for me - but what really bothers me is how many male readers have the same experience.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 10:42 AM on June 7, 2018 [7 favorites]
I didn't read romance as a teenager because I wanted to read "smart" books. This is sexist bullshit, of course - but as a teenager I wasn't yet mature enough to see all of the reasons why. I also didn't have guidance from more experienced readers who could encourage me to look past the stigma surrounding romance, or make recommendations. I looked toward popular culture for guidance, and as a result, my reading at that age was a bro-fest.
I don't think it was good for me - but what really bothers me is how many male readers have the same experience.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 10:42 AM on June 7, 2018 [7 favorites]
The median violent misogynist may not have read Lolita or Don Quixote or St Jerome, but they get a lot of cover from people who have.
The suck fairy hasn't visited Synners afaict, and I recommend it in place of Snow Crash. It's a better hackers' adventure, too. And preëmptively, because I think the sex scenes in The System of the World are far far worse than in Snow Crash, all the good stuff in SotW is in Braudel's Civilization and Capitalism AND the latter has great illustrations.
posted by clew at 10:57 AM on June 7, 2018 [2 favorites]
The suck fairy hasn't visited Synners afaict, and I recommend it in place of Snow Crash. It's a better hackers' adventure, too. And preëmptively, because I think the sex scenes in The System of the World are far far worse than in Snow Crash, all the good stuff in SotW is in Braudel's Civilization and Capitalism AND the latter has great illustrations.
posted by clew at 10:57 AM on June 7, 2018 [2 favorites]
I am surprised by the commentors who claim to know which books the incel terrorists and their web chat brothers have and haven't read. Where is your evidence that these gents carefully tippoed around avoiding misogeny in literature, in movies, in their educational curriculums.... and why is any book not directly in the hand of a murderer at the time they do the killing somehow disqualified from being an indirect influence.
The gents doth protest too much. Incels aren't an isolated incident, they are the active and malignent tip of a larger, older iceberg.
posted by Anchorite_of_Palgrave at 11:46 AM on June 7, 2018 [16 favorites]
The gents doth protest too much. Incels aren't an isolated incident, they are the active and malignent tip of a larger, older iceberg.
posted by Anchorite_of_Palgrave at 11:46 AM on June 7, 2018 [16 favorites]
"As a teenager I had read many fictional accounts of men’s rape fantasies long before I had ever read a literary account from the woman’s perspective of rape, or even of consensual sex."
As a Canadian teenager I read Margaret Atwood's Edible Woman and I don't remember much of it but there was a sex scene where the protagonist's mind wanders off because she is not really into it (in a bathtub maybe? 30+ years later the details are lost) - but the gist that maybe the person you're with isn't into it as much as you are or you think they are and you had probably better check stuck with me.
Just a couple of sentences in a book for English class that I didn't even like and it effected me for life.
posted by srboisvert at 12:48 PM on June 7, 2018 [12 favorites]
As a Canadian teenager I read Margaret Atwood's Edible Woman and I don't remember much of it but there was a sex scene where the protagonist's mind wanders off because she is not really into it (in a bathtub maybe? 30+ years later the details are lost) - but the gist that maybe the person you're with isn't into it as much as you are or you think they are and you had probably better check stuck with me.
Just a couple of sentences in a book for English class that I didn't even like and it effected me for life.
posted by srboisvert at 12:48 PM on June 7, 2018 [12 favorites]
The gents doth protest too much. Incels aren't an isolated incident, they are the active and malignent tip of a larger, older iceberg.
I agree. We talk about "incels" as though they are part of an isolated social phenomenon, when in reality they're at the extreme end of a continuum of behaviors and attitudes.
posted by JamesBay at 1:52 PM on June 7, 2018 [4 favorites]
I agree. We talk about "incels" as though they are part of an isolated social phenomenon, when in reality they're at the extreme end of a continuum of behaviors and attitudes.
posted by JamesBay at 1:52 PM on June 7, 2018 [4 favorites]
If you are writing an article and make an attempt to make a link a mass murderer and DFW, it would behoove you to justify that with more than a link to someone saying they don't like DFW.
The real meat of the article, making a case for making sure we're teaching a wide variety of viewpoints is fantastic and I support that wholeheartedly. The framing of the article with respect to incels is insane and not justified in the slightest beyond "incels = misogynists, canon = has misogyny, qed"
posted by ReadEvalPost at 1:57 PM on June 7, 2018 [1 favorite]
The real meat of the article, making a case for making sure we're teaching a wide variety of viewpoints is fantastic and I support that wholeheartedly. The framing of the article with respect to incels is insane and not justified in the slightest beyond "incels = misogynists, canon = has misogyny, qed"
posted by ReadEvalPost at 1:57 PM on June 7, 2018 [1 favorite]
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Rape+culture
You're welcome.
posted by PMdixon at 2:00 PM on June 7, 2018 [6 favorites]
You're welcome.
posted by PMdixon at 2:00 PM on June 7, 2018 [6 favorites]
"As a Canadian teenager I read Margaret Atwood's Edible Woman and I don't remember much of it but there was a sex scene where the protagonist's mind wanders off because she is not really into it...
...Just a couple of sentences in a book for English class that I didn't even like and it effected me for life."
I can't help but feel that Canadian high school students have been well served by the inclusion of female perspectives on life and sex in the novels of Margaret Atwood and Margaret Lawrence. I often found their books emotionally gruelling, but I recall them being relatively unflinching in their portrayals of sex, abortion, social class prejudice, racism and misogyny.
posted by Secret Sparrow at 2:09 PM on June 7, 2018 [8 favorites]
...Just a couple of sentences in a book for English class that I didn't even like and it effected me for life."
I can't help but feel that Canadian high school students have been well served by the inclusion of female perspectives on life and sex in the novels of Margaret Atwood and Margaret Lawrence. I often found their books emotionally gruelling, but I recall them being relatively unflinching in their portrayals of sex, abortion, social class prejudice, racism and misogyny.
posted by Secret Sparrow at 2:09 PM on June 7, 2018 [8 favorites]
Mod note: Several comments removed. Laotic, you need to find a way to either be satisfied with the MetaFilter you're actually on or find somewhere else to spend your time, because griping about the site and SJWs and etc. is tiresome behavior and I'm tired of cleaning up after it.
posted by cortex (staff) at 2:14 PM on June 7, 2018 [13 favorites]
posted by cortex (staff) at 2:14 PM on June 7, 2018 [13 favorites]
This part struck me as so very & especially sound: "We have always treated the alienation of men as if it deserved thousands of pages of analysis, perhaps because we feared it had the power to endanger us all. [...] Reassessing the canon allows us to see that one of the reasons why "he was a lonely virgin" sounds like reasonable justification to us for a spree killing is that we have long valorized male isolation. Our literary canon treats such desire as if it is a (if not the) central topic in the lives of white men. It treats the frustration of male desire as if it merits exploration time and again."
Helen Oyeyemi's Mr. Fox blew my mind wide open a few years ago with its incisiveness in regard to how we tell stories about violence committted against women. There's a passage where two people (a male writer, and his female character) discuss the justifications/explanations for why violence is committed against women in stories:
It's about incels, but also more than that. It doesn't matter if Elliot Rodger ever read The Things They Carried. It matters that all of us are living in a culture that where what's valorized as our most important renditions/explanations of the human condition is an exploitative version of masculinity. It feeds into books, into television and movies, into newspapers, into all of our conversations. It feeds into the explanations we give ourselves, and into the frustration of a lot of us when it's clear that misogyny and violence against women connects SO MUCH and yet we get so little traction in addressing that.
It matters that "He shot up his school because a girl he liked wouldn't go out with him" can be given as an explanation for why that happened. "Women would not have sex with him" as an explanation for mass murder, as Spampinato aruges, is seeded as "reasonable" because of the stories we tell each other about masculinity and isolation. Even for those of us who find it horrifying, there are grooves in our brains (n.b. not actual neuroscience) created by a deep cultural history of romanticizing thwarted male desire, as it's been a noble topic enshrined in our literary canon rather than something universally recognized as a virus and a prison we all--people of all genders--need to be free from. So instead of a universal commitment to liberation, we have so-called public intellectuals daydreaming about sex distribution in newspaper editorials, because they have no tracks in their brain, no stories in their head, for what gender liberation and equality might look like, except for their own fears.
So, yeah. I really liked this essay and the connections Spampinato made. Thank you for posting it!
posted by mixedmetaphors at 3:18 PM on June 7, 2018 [21 favorites]
Helen Oyeyemi's Mr. Fox blew my mind wide open a few years ago with its incisiveness in regard to how we tell stories about violence committted against women. There's a passage where two people (a male writer, and his female character) discuss the justifications/explanations for why violence is committed against women in stories:
"What you're doing is building a horrible kind of logic. People read what you write and they say, 'Yes, he is talking about things that really happen,' and they keep reading, and it makes sense to them. You're explaining things that can't be defended, and the explanations themselves are mad, just bizarre--but you offer them with such confidence. It was because she kept the chain on the door; it was because he needed to let off steam after a hard day's scraping and bowing at work; it was because she was irritating and stupid; it was because she lied to him, made a fool of him; it was because she had to die, she just had to, it made dramatic sense; it was because 'nothing is more poetic than the death of a beautiful woman'; it was because of this, it was because of that. It's obscene to make such things reasonable."With the books we share and teach, the stories that explain the human condition, there are all these little zippers of "reasonable" justifications/explanations/so-called-logic that seal up the story, that explain what happens to women and why, and that we accept as explanations.
He shrugged. "These are our circumstances. I'm just trying to make sense of them," he said.
Mary was silent.
"Everyone dies." He smiled crookedly. "I doubt it's ever a pleasant experience. So does it really matter how it happens?"
"Yes!" She put a hand on his arm, trying to pass her shock through his skin. "Yes."
It's about incels, but also more than that. It doesn't matter if Elliot Rodger ever read The Things They Carried. It matters that all of us are living in a culture that where what's valorized as our most important renditions/explanations of the human condition is an exploitative version of masculinity. It feeds into books, into television and movies, into newspapers, into all of our conversations. It feeds into the explanations we give ourselves, and into the frustration of a lot of us when it's clear that misogyny and violence against women connects SO MUCH and yet we get so little traction in addressing that.
It matters that "He shot up his school because a girl he liked wouldn't go out with him" can be given as an explanation for why that happened. "Women would not have sex with him" as an explanation for mass murder, as Spampinato aruges, is seeded as "reasonable" because of the stories we tell each other about masculinity and isolation. Even for those of us who find it horrifying, there are grooves in our brains (n.b. not actual neuroscience) created by a deep cultural history of romanticizing thwarted male desire, as it's been a noble topic enshrined in our literary canon rather than something universally recognized as a virus and a prison we all--people of all genders--need to be free from. So instead of a universal commitment to liberation, we have so-called public intellectuals daydreaming about sex distribution in newspaper editorials, because they have no tracks in their brain, no stories in their head, for what gender liberation and equality might look like, except for their own fears.
So, yeah. I really liked this essay and the connections Spampinato made. Thank you for posting it!
posted by mixedmetaphors at 3:18 PM on June 7, 2018 [21 favorites]
I'd just like to float the notion that self-identified incels probably only make up a fraction of a percentage of the number of people who believe in the incel Weltanschauung. These beliefs don't automatically go away just because you found somebody willing to touch your wiener, or never had trouble with that in the first place.
If incels are singled out as the face of misogyny and rape culture, it's probably because they first drew attention to themselves by being risible online, and then because they started murdering people. But there's a guy on your block with a wife and daughters who thinks exactly the same fucking way they do, who doesn't know what the fuck a chan or a subreddit is. He just doesn't have any particular reason to smear his value system all over the internet for the world to see, that's all.
posted by prize bull octorok at 3:54 PM on June 7, 2018 [21 favorites]
If incels are singled out as the face of misogyny and rape culture, it's probably because they first drew attention to themselves by being risible online, and then because they started murdering people. But there's a guy on your block with a wife and daughters who thinks exactly the same fucking way they do, who doesn't know what the fuck a chan or a subreddit is. He just doesn't have any particular reason to smear his value system all over the internet for the world to see, that's all.
posted by prize bull octorok at 3:54 PM on June 7, 2018 [21 favorites]
The incel "community" is inclusive of men who are having sex regularly. Celibacy is optional. What is required is simply a desire to enact an extremely violent vision of absolute male supremacy. And yeah, I agree 100% that it's a continuum, I don't think that's in question. It's just the extreme end. Incel is about male supremacy and female dehumanization. As has been discussed here in this thread though, an awful lot of our culture is about that.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 5:16 PM on June 7, 2018 [10 favorites]
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 5:16 PM on June 7, 2018 [10 favorites]
Misogynist fiction is largely a 20th century phenomenon, and mostly mid-to-late century at that: Updike, Roth, David Foster Wallace. Which is not to say that earlier fiction was always better, but we had a wider range of female characters, and also more women authors as an established part of the canon (Austen, Eliot, the Brontes, to name a few). And even male authors (EM Forster, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Hardy) wrote sympathetic and complex women.
On the other hand, I do remember being assigned Margaret Atwood's "Rape Fantasies" in high school, and it was taught as "look at this foolish woman with her foolish ideas, and it's edgy because rape-that's-not-rape." It wasn't until I re-read it as an adult that I realized that the story is actually the narrator's attempt to convince a man she's just met not to rape her. It's a terrifying story.
posted by basalganglia at 7:14 PM on June 7, 2018 [6 favorites]
On the other hand, I do remember being assigned Margaret Atwood's "Rape Fantasies" in high school, and it was taught as "look at this foolish woman with her foolish ideas, and it's edgy because rape-that's-not-rape." It wasn't until I re-read it as an adult that I realized that the story is actually the narrator's attempt to convince a man she's just met not to rape her. It's a terrifying story.
posted by basalganglia at 7:14 PM on June 7, 2018 [6 favorites]
If you think the incel phenomenon has been present and deeply rooted in our culture since Shakespeare, I think you’re not really getting it. Were sixteenth century men frustrated by their inability to order women around, sell them and use them sexually in whatever way they wanted? Not so much.
If we treat this as just more of the same old male stuff, we blur important distinctions around something new and nasty that I think should be clearly labelled as divergent and unacceptable.
posted by Segundus at 2:36 AM on June 8, 2018 [1 favorite]
If we treat this as just more of the same old male stuff, we blur important distinctions around something new and nasty that I think should be clearly labelled as divergent and unacceptable.
posted by Segundus at 2:36 AM on June 8, 2018 [1 favorite]
Were sixteenth century men frustrated by their inability to order women around, sell them and use them sexually in whatever way they wanted? Not so much.
What makes the incel philosophy different from ancient Greeks, Jews, or Muslims where women were literally to blame for everything and existed only to serve men? ISIS even bureaucratically parceled wives to men in ways incels advocate for. They marketed the practice to recruits. I wouldn't go so far as to say they're exactly the same, but there do seem to be some striking similarities between the worlds incels and fundamentalists dream of.
posted by xammerboy at 3:02 AM on June 8, 2018 [5 favorites]
What makes the incel philosophy different from ancient Greeks, Jews, or Muslims where women were literally to blame for everything and existed only to serve men? ISIS even bureaucratically parceled wives to men in ways incels advocate for. They marketed the practice to recruits. I wouldn't go so far as to say they're exactly the same, but there do seem to be some striking similarities between the worlds incels and fundamentalists dream of.
posted by xammerboy at 3:02 AM on June 8, 2018 [5 favorites]
What makes the incel philosophy different from ancient Greeks, Jews, or Muslims where women were literally to blame for everything and existed only to serve men?
The difference is that they're scared it might have changed irrevocably and they will never get all their privileges back, which is frightening given how much privilege they still have and how much more needs to change.
posted by kewb at 4:22 AM on June 8, 2018
The difference is that they're scared it might have changed irrevocably and they will never get all their privileges back, which is frightening given how much privilege they still have and how much more needs to change.
posted by kewb at 4:22 AM on June 8, 2018
It may.also be worth recalling that a history of domestic violence or violence against women seems to be a factor in most of the mass shootings that aren't directly motivated by Incel or MRA ideology as well. Sady Doyle notes the connections between extreme misogyny and white supremacy; those connections go both directions. But also, people who act violently tend to start by acting violently toward those they can get away with harming (isn't animal abuse and torture also recognized as a common step in an escalation of violent acts for serial killers?), and we still live in a sexist culture where women have less power and there are fewer consequences for violence against women.
I see this as a "both and" situation: we are currently seeing a rise in extreme misogyny (paired with white supremacy and xenophobia) that has specific proximal causes and needs to be addressed specifically and directly, and this has bubbled up from underlying cultural trends (as a backlash to movements for social justice), that also need to continue to be addressed.
posted by eviemath at 4:31 AM on June 8, 2018 [18 favorites]
I see this as a "both and" situation: we are currently seeing a rise in extreme misogyny (paired with white supremacy and xenophobia) that has specific proximal causes and needs to be addressed specifically and directly, and this has bubbled up from underlying cultural trends (as a backlash to movements for social justice), that also need to continue to be addressed.
posted by eviemath at 4:31 AM on June 8, 2018 [18 favorites]
Recommended longer readings:
Backlash, by Susan Faludi - it's from the start of all of this (back when the seeds of this current Incel group were being planted), but is an excellent journalistic exploration into the phenomena of backlashes.
A Brief History of Misogyny, by Jack Holland - draws some interesting threads from the Classical world (ancient Greeks, Christian aescetics, etc.) through modern day. In particular, some version of MGTOW has definitely been a thing in the past.
posted by eviemath at 4:45 AM on June 8, 2018 [4 favorites]
Backlash, by Susan Faludi - it's from the start of all of this (back when the seeds of this current Incel group were being planted), but is an excellent journalistic exploration into the phenomena of backlashes.
A Brief History of Misogyny, by Jack Holland - draws some interesting threads from the Classical world (ancient Greeks, Christian aescetics, etc.) through modern day. In particular, some version of MGTOW has definitely been a thing in the past.
posted by eviemath at 4:45 AM on June 8, 2018 [4 favorites]
Backlash (1991) is on my bookshelf, right next to No More Sex War (1992) - a perfect illustration of Faludi's point, which I keep around and dip into every now and then to remind myself that none of the smarmy patronizing horseshit you find fuckwits like Benjamin and Crowder vomiting up on the middle of YouTube's carpet is in any way new or original.
It's all there in Lyndon - all the whining, all the entitlement, all the fragility, all the cherrypicking and witless humourless wilful point-missing. And as befits a serious work* of cultural criticism, the dustjacket features a disembodied pair of reclining sexylegs caught half way through the unlacing of a pair of fashionable combat boots. It's a treat*!
*descriptions are not valid in your jurisdiction
posted by flabdablet at 5:59 AM on June 8, 2018 [3 favorites]
It's all there in Lyndon - all the whining, all the entitlement, all the fragility, all the cherrypicking and witless humourless wilful point-missing. And as befits a serious work* of cultural criticism, the dustjacket features a disembodied pair of reclining sexylegs caught half way through the unlacing of a pair of fashionable combat boots. It's a treat*!
*descriptions are not valid in your jurisdiction
posted by flabdablet at 5:59 AM on June 8, 2018 [3 favorites]
The depressing thing is that when I was an undergrad in the early 90's, Backlash was very much discussed on campus. And yet here we still are, nearly thirty years later.
posted by JamesBay at 8:33 AM on June 8, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by JamesBay at 8:33 AM on June 8, 2018 [3 favorites]
^ Yeah. I've found myself telling a lot of stories from the '90s to current undergrads this past year.
posted by eviemath at 9:30 AM on June 8, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by eviemath at 9:30 AM on June 8, 2018 [2 favorites]
Were sixteenth century men frustrated by their inability to order women around, sell them and use them sexually in whatever way they wanted?
Well, some 4th century Egyptians certainly were. And there's a very famous play from the late sixteenth century that depicts one man's successful effort to "tame" a woman who is insufficiently obedient to him.
(Even if it's a satire of men's desire for obedient wives, which I think is wishful thinking, it's undoubtedly a reflection of existing attitudes of the time. So I'd take issue with your "not so much.")
You can see reflections of male frustration and disdain towards women throughout history. Men have never had absolute power over women - because even in the most oppressive societies, women still had their own personalities and desires. But anything short of that absolute power wasn't enough for many of them. In fact, I suspect that the entitlement that patriarchy teaches men makes small rebellions even more galling to them. And of course, one mans' desire could be thwarted by another man - her father, her husband,chad...
Incels are both new and not new; it's both the same old male shit and not. Without a cultural context of patriarchy and misogyny, their frustration wouldn't take such patriarchal and misogynist forms. It's pretty condescending to say that we're "not really getting it" when we remark on those connections.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 9:33 AM on June 8, 2018 [11 favorites]
Well, some 4th century Egyptians certainly were. And there's a very famous play from the late sixteenth century that depicts one man's successful effort to "tame" a woman who is insufficiently obedient to him.
(Even if it's a satire of men's desire for obedient wives, which I think is wishful thinking, it's undoubtedly a reflection of existing attitudes of the time. So I'd take issue with your "not so much.")
You can see reflections of male frustration and disdain towards women throughout history. Men have never had absolute power over women - because even in the most oppressive societies, women still had their own personalities and desires. But anything short of that absolute power wasn't enough for many of them. In fact, I suspect that the entitlement that patriarchy teaches men makes small rebellions even more galling to them. And of course, one mans' desire could be thwarted by another man - her father, her husband,
Incels are both new and not new; it's both the same old male shit and not. Without a cultural context of patriarchy and misogyny, their frustration wouldn't take such patriarchal and misogynist forms. It's pretty condescending to say that we're "not really getting it" when we remark on those connections.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 9:33 AM on June 8, 2018 [11 favorites]
Snow Crash, which was recommended to me by a bunch of male friends and acquaintances not a single one of whom mentioned that it includes a scene where a fifteen year old has extremely good and satisfying sex with a guy in his thirties.
Self-identified “nerd”/“geek” men who feel they missed out on banging teenage girls when they were in their teens are a real demographic (case in point: when the techbros took over Seattle, the rate of teenage prostitution was said to have gone up, with the explanation given as techbros “catching up for lost time”). Presumably Stephenson (who is a consummate professional at nerd-culture fan service) was, consciously or subconsciously, pandering to this fantasy.
posted by acb at 9:35 AM on June 8, 2018 [1 favorite]
Self-identified “nerd”/“geek” men who feel they missed out on banging teenage girls when they were in their teens are a real demographic (case in point: when the techbros took over Seattle, the rate of teenage prostitution was said to have gone up, with the explanation given as techbros “catching up for lost time”). Presumably Stephenson (who is a consummate professional at nerd-culture fan service) was, consciously or subconsciously, pandering to this fantasy.
posted by acb at 9:35 AM on June 8, 2018 [1 favorite]
> something new and nasty that I think should be clearly labelled as divergent and unacceptable.
Hatred of women and the desire to dominate us is not new and has always been unacceptable, though generally not to very many men until very recently. I don't know why too many of you keep insisting that this is some weird new thing when so many women keep pointing out that it's not. We see the similarities quite clearly; maybe don't assume that we're the ones with the perception problem.
posted by rtha at 2:22 PM on June 8, 2018 [11 favorites]
Hatred of women and the desire to dominate us is not new and has always been unacceptable, though generally not to very many men until very recently. I don't know why too many of you keep insisting that this is some weird new thing when so many women keep pointing out that it's not. We see the similarities quite clearly; maybe don't assume that we're the ones with the perception problem.
posted by rtha at 2:22 PM on June 8, 2018 [11 favorites]
Were sixteenth century men frustrated by their inability to order women around, sell them and use them sexually in whatever way they wanted? Not so much.
Yeah, because they totally had the ability to do all those things; the patriarchy was much more absolute back then. Hence the backlash now, when women are beginning to finally win some agency in the world after millennia of violent oppression.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 2:41 PM on June 8, 2018 [3 favorites]
Yeah, because they totally had the ability to do all those things; the patriarchy was much more absolute back then. Hence the backlash now, when women are beginning to finally win some agency in the world after millennia of violent oppression.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 2:41 PM on June 8, 2018 [3 favorites]
Were sixteenth century men frustrated by their inability to order women around
I guess, technically speaking, this poem would be an example of "negging":
Gather ye rose-buds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today
Tomorrow will be dying.
posted by JamesBay at 3:20 PM on June 8, 2018 [1 favorite]
I guess, technically speaking, this poem would be an example of "negging":
Gather ye rose-buds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today
Tomorrow will be dying.
posted by JamesBay at 3:20 PM on June 8, 2018 [1 favorite]
Were sixteenth century men frustrated by their inability to order women around
Greensleeves is a case study in nice guy syndrome.
(Now, I cannot answer with certainty about whether this is solely a Western phenomenon. I'm suspecting it's not.)
posted by steady-state strawberry at 8:55 PM on June 8, 2018
Greensleeves is a case study in nice guy syndrome.
(Now, I cannot answer with certainty about whether this is solely a Western phenomenon. I'm suspecting it's not.)
posted by steady-state strawberry at 8:55 PM on June 8, 2018
Snow Crash, which was recommended to me by a bunch of male friends and acquaintances not a single one of whom mentioned that it includes a scene where a fifteen year old has extremely good and satisfying sex with a guy in his thirties.
Wait seriously?
Seriously. I'd like to be able to say that there's more to it than that—I mean I remember being fifteen and I certainly had a sexuality back then, and fifteen-year-olds don't always make good decisions, and the guy who she sleeps with is the main villain, and she pretty much kills him with her vagina—but eh. It's not exactly the kind of book that invites the reader to think deep thoughts about the complicated intersection of youth and sexuality, or about feminine power. It's a book about techbros with katanas fucking shit up in a dystopian future, and that scene is extremely gross.
I found it mildly disturbing at the time but mostly chalked it up to "straight people are so weird, I don't understand."
I didn't take up with romances as a kid, and even now it's hard to find lesbian romances. At nine though I definitely didn't have the vocabulary to say "compulsory heterosexuality is weirding me out, where are the queer feminist books?"
And now as an adult in my 40s, I still have to stop reading so many books or watching so many shows because of the ways they deal with gender and cis male entitlement.
posted by bile and syntax at 7:44 AM on June 9, 2018
Wait seriously?
Seriously. I'd like to be able to say that there's more to it than that—I mean I remember being fifteen and I certainly had a sexuality back then, and fifteen-year-olds don't always make good decisions, and the guy who she sleeps with is the main villain, and she pretty much kills him with her vagina—but eh. It's not exactly the kind of book that invites the reader to think deep thoughts about the complicated intersection of youth and sexuality, or about feminine power. It's a book about techbros with katanas fucking shit up in a dystopian future, and that scene is extremely gross.
I found it mildly disturbing at the time but mostly chalked it up to "straight people are so weird, I don't understand."
I didn't take up with romances as a kid, and even now it's hard to find lesbian romances. At nine though I definitely didn't have the vocabulary to say "compulsory heterosexuality is weirding me out, where are the queer feminist books?"
And now as an adult in my 40s, I still have to stop reading so many books or watching so many shows because of the ways they deal with gender and cis male entitlement.
posted by bile and syntax at 7:44 AM on June 9, 2018
Something about this thread hasn’t been sitting well with me. There’s something very white feminist about it all.
All this talk about misogyny in the American literary canon hardly recognizes that the canon doesn’t just exclude female voices — it excludes almost all identities but white, male (mainly Western European and Jewish) voices.
This piece was cited multiples times, and while it makes some effective points, my attention and enthusiasm waned halfway through because it elides others.
It mentions Eliot Rodger as one of the sources of the incel movement, but hardly acknowledges his sense of sexual frustration was greatly affected by his race. Rodger believed he was more deserving of female attention because he was partially white, and not an 100% Asian male, like the majority of the people he killed.
It mentions how Alek Minassian's attack killed 10 people, 8 of them female -- but fails to mention half of his victims were POCs. Of the eight women, three were women of color. Another three were over age 80. If you want to talk about being voiceless in the canon, these identities are even more marginalized than your average young white woman who gets to hold the microphone.
It goes out of its way to pass on an unsubstantiated allegation about the students of "Asian playboy" pickup artist JT Tran, who is far from the most offensive of these types -- and serves to distract from the racial component of inceldom.
And finally, it serves up Milo Yiannopoulos as inheritor to OG pickup artist Mystery, without mentioning the narrative-disrupting fact that Yiannoupoulos is a gay white supremacist.
Even the OP's link soft-pedals this racial component by saying "Our literary culture has long treated rage and aggression as if they are normal features of (white) male sexuality." Why the parentheses? It is taboo to acknowledge that the canon is as racist as it is sexist?
My point in bringing all this up is to say that the literary classics may support incels and misogyny, but
1) the literary classics don't only exclude women and
2) the incel movement derives greatly from a sense of entitlement, and the literary canon serves to enforce this sense of entitlement mainly for one group of people.
A related tweet to chew on.
This is not to say that there are no POC incels, but those who would concentrate on the role of gender in the canon may be conveniently overlooking the privileges they share with these incels, and are being rather disingenuous or ignorant, and selective in their fight.
posted by Borborygmus at 10:32 AM on June 9, 2018
All this talk about misogyny in the American literary canon hardly recognizes that the canon doesn’t just exclude female voices — it excludes almost all identities but white, male (mainly Western European and Jewish) voices.
This piece was cited multiples times, and while it makes some effective points, my attention and enthusiasm waned halfway through because it elides others.
It mentions Eliot Rodger as one of the sources of the incel movement, but hardly acknowledges his sense of sexual frustration was greatly affected by his race. Rodger believed he was more deserving of female attention because he was partially white, and not an 100% Asian male, like the majority of the people he killed.
It mentions how Alek Minassian's attack killed 10 people, 8 of them female -- but fails to mention half of his victims were POCs. Of the eight women, three were women of color. Another three were over age 80. If you want to talk about being voiceless in the canon, these identities are even more marginalized than your average young white woman who gets to hold the microphone.
It goes out of its way to pass on an unsubstantiated allegation about the students of "Asian playboy" pickup artist JT Tran, who is far from the most offensive of these types -- and serves to distract from the racial component of inceldom.
And finally, it serves up Milo Yiannopoulos as inheritor to OG pickup artist Mystery, without mentioning the narrative-disrupting fact that Yiannoupoulos is a gay white supremacist.
Even the OP's link soft-pedals this racial component by saying "Our literary culture has long treated rage and aggression as if they are normal features of (white) male sexuality." Why the parentheses? It is taboo to acknowledge that the canon is as racist as it is sexist?
My point in bringing all this up is to say that the literary classics may support incels and misogyny, but
1) the literary classics don't only exclude women and
2) the incel movement derives greatly from a sense of entitlement, and the literary canon serves to enforce this sense of entitlement mainly for one group of people.
A related tweet to chew on.
This is not to say that there are no POC incels, but those who would concentrate on the role of gender in the canon may be conveniently overlooking the privileges they share with these incels, and are being rather disingenuous or ignorant, and selective in their fight.
posted by Borborygmus at 10:32 AM on June 9, 2018
My point in bringing all this up is to say that the literary classics may support incels and misogyny, but
1) the literary classics don't only exclude women and
2) the incel movement derives greatly from a sense of entitlement, and the literary canon serves to enforce this sense of entitlement mainly for one group of people.
The focus here was on gender. It is okay to write about the way that gender is addressed in the canon. It is okay to be concerned about it. It is okay to not address all of the world’s problems at once.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 6:37 AM on June 10, 2018 [9 favorites]
Mod note: Couple comments removed. What this thread needs, if it needs anything, is not additional ham-handed analogies.
posted by cortex (staff) at 12:39 PM on June 10, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by cortex (staff) at 12:39 PM on June 10, 2018 [1 favorite]
I honestly don't remember too many of the books I was assigned for English in school. I think there was Blue Fin by Colin Thiele, A Fortunate Life by Albert Facey, and probably some others. But I mainly remember being able to choose our own stuff to read, for doing papers and presentations and so forth, because I distinctly remember acting out bits of Cancer Ward and Pulp Fiction. I'm trying to find a reading list for national/state curricula today but I guess it might be done on a school-by-school basis.
posted by turbid dahlia at 4:00 PM on June 12, 2018
posted by turbid dahlia at 4:00 PM on June 12, 2018
'Not as ironic as I imagined': the incels spokesman on why he is renouncing them
posted by Artw at 1:29 PM on June 19, 2018
posted by Artw at 1:29 PM on June 19, 2018
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posted by tclark at 7:38 PM on June 6, 2018 [59 favorites]