We’re coming to the end of our multi-week roundtable on Charles Hatfield’s book Alternative Comics. Yesterday, Charles wrote a post defending Gilbert Hernandez from…well, mostly from me and Robert Stanley Martin. In this post I’m going to try to clarify my position somewhat, and also try to tie this discussion into why I thought it was a good idea to do this roundtable in the first place.
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Charles spends much of his post defending Hernandez’s use of fetish and pin-up imagery. He says:
I’m not going to argue that Gilbert’s above or beyond the pinup. Essentially I’m arguing here that Hernandez approaches self-parody, that the aesthetics of that passage, indeed of Poison River as a whole, are baroque, self-reflexive, and frankly decadent (in several senses), and that what he is doing with the Maria-fetish can best be understood in terms of the book’s overall agenda. Arguments like these—that such excessive, disturbing, and arguably self-mocking elements have some value other than masturbatory or shock value—depend on the arguers’ shared knowledge of the larger context of the work, so I don’t know how to explain or defend my argument to one (Noah!) who admits not having read the work in question. We’re at an impasse.
The page that this debate has centered on is here:
So, let’s start by looking at that page for a second. Then, if you would, answer this question. Suppose Gilbert Hernandez put that page up for sale at auction. Do you think the price would be higher or lower if Maria’s breasts were half the size?
I’ll get back to that example in a minute. Before that, though, I’d like to look at some of Charles’ arguments in more detail. In the paragraph I quote above, he says: “I’m not going to argue that Gilbert’s above or beyond the pinup.” Later in the same essay, he says this:
“I probably stirred some feathers by pointing out that, in our usual understanding of porn, it serves as a masturbation aid. Yes? Was this a fair description of Blood of Palomar?”
I’ll skip lightly over the extremely naive view of porn expressed here (read some Linda Williams!) But I do want to emphasize the contradiction. On the one hand, Charles says Hernandez is not “beyond the pinup”. On the other, he says that Hernandez is not a “masturbation aid.”
So, which is is? Is Hernandez’s work titillating? Or not?
This same confusion — or perhaps I should say anxiety? — runs throughout Charles’ essay. On the one hand, he chastises readers who are put off by the pseudo-pornographic effects in Hernandez’s work, suggesting (to my mind anyway) that said readers are puritanical and stuffy. But he also insists that Hernandez’s work is not actually pornographic; that is, that, if you look at it closely, it actually conforms perfectly well to the standards of important literature. There is, in short, a surface of exploitation which is “not beyond pin up”, but if you look at the work closely (as, Charles points out, I did not) you will see that the core, the heart, of the work satisfies exacting literary standards. Maria’s breasts may look to the uninitiated like a fetish, but if you look closer (though, presumably, not too close) you will see not fetish, but parody, critique, and literary value.
There are a number of difficulties here. I would say they mostly center around the creation of naive binaries between, for example, surface/essence, parodied/parody, and art/porn. My example of the auction is a quick thumbnail way to explain why these binaries might not work. After all, if a viewer such as myself bought that page for the breasts, would that be a misunderstanding of Gilbert’s work? Would I really be misconstruing the pleasures offered by that page? Should Hernandez interview folks about how much or what kind of pleasure they get from looking at his books before he accepts their cash?
Part of art is surface. It’s about initial reactions as well as considered ones; about glib appearances as well as thoughtful meanings. In the page above, Hernandez is, very deliberately, referencing fetish pin-up art. That is one of the traditions he’s participating in . You can say, well, that’s the superficial level — but it’s a superficial tradition. More, he’s used his considerable formal and narrative skills to expand on that tradition; fracturing time so that Maria is displayed in outfit after outfit, juggling narrative so that we see her turning down man after man, the better to objectify her and emphasize her desirable unattainability. She is fetishized. Hernandez draws her in a way to make her desirable. Men (and not just men) looking at this page are supposed to get pleasure from looking at her, just as the men in the narrative do. That’s the surface meaning of this page. No amount of context can change that.
So does that mean that context doesn’t matter? Not at all. Charles argues forcefully that the rest of the story puts the fetishization of women in a context of parody and critique. Hernandez is questioning and undermining the view of women as surface and as objects. I have no reason to dispute that. But — parodying or critiquing a tradition does not mean you aren’t in that tradition as well.
Or let me put it this way. It would be possible to parody or critique the tradition of pin up art and fetishization without yourself drawing fetishistic pin up art. This is what Laura Mulvey, for example, argues for in her famous essay about narrative cinema, in which she insists that the way to get around the male gaze is to create non-narrative cinema — not, noticeably, to create narrative cinema which is self-aware. So if Hernandez is parodying pin up art, that’s well and good — but it doesn’t explain the stylistic choices he makes. Why has he chosen a parody or critique which participates in the thing he is parodying or critiquing? Why allow — or indeed, encourage — people to take pleasure in fetishistic images if he is critiquing those images? If the answer is that he’s implicating the viewer…well then, as I said before, we’re back to a situation where you get your cake and the opportunity for patting yourself on the back for knowing you’re not supposed to want the cake too.
My point here is adamently not that pin up art is automatically evil, or that fetish is always wrong. Rather my point is that you can’t deflect a critique of surfaces through an appeal to depths. What’s on the page is on the page, and what’s on this page is a pleasure in fetish art. What I asked Charles, or anyone, to do, was to explain to me what that pleasure is doing there; how, in other words, does Hernandez reconcile his participation in this economy of pleasure with his critique of same? The response has been, basically, that if I read the whole thing I would realize that it does not participate in this economy of pleasure. Thus, Jeet Heer:
…the “fetishized women” in Poison River are part of a much larger narrative tapestry, one that includes a powerful critique of macho culture and a very sympathetic exploration of all sorts of sexual diversity (not just bisexuality and homosexuality but also transgender issues). If you glance at a page of Hernandez’s work and just say “fetishized women” you’re immediately conflating it with all the other images of “fetishized women” in our culture—pin-ups and beer ads and what not. But if you actually sit down and read Hernandez’s stories […] you’ll see that there is much more at work and at play in his stories.
For Jeet, the context actually takes these pin up images and puts quotes around them. The surface meaning of the image (beer ads!) is disappeared. The “much more at work and at play in his stories” is so much more that our basic cultural knowledge — the visual iconography Hernandez is referencing and participating in — is erased. Don’t get me wrong; sympathy for sexual diversity and a critique of macho culture both sound great. But when Hernandez draws a hot babe, it’s still a hot babe, not (or not only) a critique of hot babeness. Those aren’t “fetishized women”, Jeet. Those are fetishized women.
“To point selectively to loaded imagery without respect to context is the strategy of censors, not critics,” Charles says. Perhaps. But neither calling me names nor covering your ears and shouting “context! context!” is going to make those giant secondary sexual characteristics go away either. Figure out a reading of Hernandez in which an insistent appreciation of fetishized female bodies is thematically coherent or else admit that his use of exploitation imagery is gratuitous. But saying that a deeper reading negates the surface pleasures is to bury your head ostrich-like in silty piles of meticulous pedantry.
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Part of the debate here has been methodological —or, to put it more bluntly, Charles and others don’t think I should be commenting on the page without having read the entire book. Charles frames this somewhat puritanically:
when it comes to rendering considered judgments of a work, judgments that may include not only aesthetic but also ideological determinations (as in Noah’s critique), I believe we have to put in the hard work.
Criticism is, then, “hard work” — not presumably for dilettantes and idlers. Reading comics is serious business. This echoes some of Charles’ most important concerns in his monograph.
Comics raise many questions about reading and its effects, yet the persistent claims for the form’s simplicity and transparency make it impossible to address these questions productively. Criticism, whether formalist or sociocultural in emphasis, will remain at an impasse as long as comics are seen this way — that is, as long as they are rhetorically constructed as “easy.”
Part of Charles’ project is to present comics as complex. That complexity is, he feels, essential if comic are to be taken seriously as art and as worthy academic objects of study. Comics and criticism must be “hard work” if they are to be valuable and valued.
I think that this is an excellent strategy for convincing the academy that comics studies can be a rigorous discipline. I think, though, that it may have some downsides as well. Among those downsides are ones that have come out in this discussion — a tendency to privilege context over surface; an insistence that certain kinds of context (the whole work) are more important than others (actually having some vague theoretical basis for your comments about porn, for example.) In short, the effort to shore up the importance and coherence of comics as a discipline has the downside that it shores up the importance and coherence of comics as a discipline, regimenting, to some extent, who can speak, what objects are worthy of study, and how those objects should be approached and discussed. I think that can end up being limiting, and sometimes blinding.
Which is why I’m so pleased that Charles’ talk and his walk don’t really line up. If he had the courage of his convictions, he should not, in some sense, be out here in the great wild blogosphere, exposing himself to the drooling idiocy of every two-bit wacko with a grudge and a keyboard. He certainly shouldn’t be trading barbs with such a resolutely unserious person as myself. And yet, here he is, giving the lie to his claim that he’s a slow writer, pounding away in comments like a demon, writing not one post in response but two (and more to come!) His arguments in his book and here point to turning comics crit into a more sober, careful, and rigorous undertaking, but his actions suggest that he’s also comfortable with comics criticism as a giant, troll-infested, half-assed, gibbering mess.
For which I’m very grateful, Charles. Thank you for doing this.
See my comment on Charles last blog.
I agree with most of what you say here, Noah, but as I’ve written before question the implication that “problematic” elements lead to lesser art. You tend toward ideological readings of the kind where certain triggers, such as fetishization, sexism, racism, or — most notably — white middle-class whining, leads to curt dismissal.
Art would be a boring, uninspiring thing if it were “perfect.”
Not at all! I don’t want it to be perfect! As I sort of hinted at, if I like anything in Hernandez, it’s the fetish art. And some of my favorite art is openly exploitive and not at all perfect.
I just think it’s important to know where you’re coming from. I’m open to the argument that the art is worthwhile even if (or because) it’s not perfect. However, I think there can be a tendency to deny imperfections or problems when one likes a work for other reasons. That’s what both this and my initial post were about.
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Ben; I saw your comment just after I posted. I think the tack you take is essentially the Sir Mixalot argument. Caro and I think EricB also pointed in this direction. That is, the fetishization is part of a subcultural resistance to mainstream body-image norms.
I like Sir Mixalot quite a bit, actually, and know a number of women who do as well. The thing about Sir Mixalot, though, is that there’s little sense that he’s critiquing machismo, or parodying himself (he’s funny, but he’s not self-critical.) The kind of “you too can be objectified, girl!” stance fits poorly, it seems to me, alongside the more thoroughgoing critique of sexism that Charles and Jeet see in the books.
And it’s mitigated against, too, by the coldness that Charles notes, and which I think is very visible on the page above. The fragmenting of Maria across time, the manipulation and staging of her body — it’s formally and coldly sadistic and voyeuristic. Sir Mixalot’s enthusiastic, eclectic lewdness is quite different, I think. So while I agree that there may be elements of parody and critique along with elements of celebrating different body types, I think the those elements, at least as they work out on this page, still don’t really provide a coherent explanation of how Hernandez’s fetishism and his feminism fit together.
I think there could be a really interesting discussion about Hernandez which talks about the pull in his work between feminism and misogyny. I don’t find a tack which denies the ambivalence convincing, though.
Figure out a reading of Hernandez in which an insistent appreciation of fetishized female bodies is thematically coherent or else admit that his use of exploitation imagery is gratuitous.
This is an either/or?
First of all, I have argued for a way in which Hernandez’s use of fetishized female bodies is coherent. But I have not argued that it is trouble-free or automatically immune to criticism.
Secondly, I dislike the word gratuitous becomes it assumes a clear distinction between that which is needful and that which isn’t, as if one reader were capable of making that decision for all.
Regarding pornography studies, I don’t think I need to be schooled there; I’ve read some Linda Williams, though I had not at the time of the incident described in my anecdote. In any case, it’s not as if my view of pornography would automatically and unquestioningly be changed had I read Williams, or that my conversation with my students would have been substantially different had I read Williams at the time of the incident.
Regarding deep versus surface responses to art, I would say that I was, and am, asking for a breadth of response to Hernandez, based not so much on deep or elitist reading strategies as on the simple injunction that one ought to read an entire work before venturing public criticism of that work. And no, I’m not going to surrender that point.
You are right that I resist “surface” and “easy” construals of works of art, comics included, and that I consider criticism “hard work.” I do. I wouldn’t say that reading comics is serious business necessarily, but performing comics criticism is, or should be, as serious as what is available for any other art form.
I’m not at all convinced by the argument, occasionally heard among some cultural studies scholars, that deep readings of texts are available to only a select view and are therefore elitist. This argument serves to browbeat formalist and aesthetic criticism, from a position of ideological surety that I find deeply suspect, as in, How could you possibly talk about art and artistry here while neglecting the social problem of __________?”
An example of this–and I’m not going after you here, Noah, but trying to put my finger on a larger problem–would be Eric Smoodin’s ideologically disapproving review of Witek’s Comics Books as History in American Literary History 4.1 (1992), which, in essence, berates Witek for not being Smoodin and not being Dorfman & Mattelart. In its conclusion, this review essay argues for how critical histories of popular culture ought to be written–“ought” is Smoodin’s word–and what Smoodin specifically warns against, rejects rather, is approaches “that stress individual creators and special achievements” (138), as if it is inherently problematic to talk about such things when talking about the popular arts.
This kind of presumption (the prescription of exclusive oughts) bugs me because it forecloses certain kinds of analysis. It can tend toward what Matthias has called dismissive ideological readings (though I stress here that I am not assuming that Noah and Smoodin have identical perspectives!).
I don’t think it’s “puritanical,” elitist, or needlessly exclusionary to ask critics to exhibit a certain deep engagement with the things they criticize. And I don’t think that formalist or aesthetic considerations foreclose ideological readings, either. The point that I’ve tried to make in my first general response to the roundtable is that comics studies has had a specific developmental trajectory that cannot be explained by reference to literary or film studies or other fields, and that Alternative Comics was meant to be an interception of that trajectory, one that would emphasize, among other things, formalism, complex readings, individual creators, and special achievements. And, yes, as a literature teacher, as an English Studies professor, I expect students and other scholars and critics to engage on the level of form as well as other levels.
Noah, if you think that this expectation tends toward regimenting, to some extent, who can speak, what objects are worthy of study, and how those objects should be approached and discussed, then you are right that my walk and my talk don’t really line up. Because as a scholar I’ve consciously worked to make sure that I acknowledge, include, encourage, and make opportunities for other kinds of critical work besides those that I do. In fact I spent twelve years with the ICAF reviewing conference proposals from a dizzying variety of disciplines, and I never recommended turning down a proposal because it didn’t share my discipline, my methodology, or my perspective. I certainly have criticized proposals, papers, articles, and books on methodological and theoretical grounds, and have certainly found fault with specific studies due to their lack of rigor, but I don’t try to cut everyone to the exact same shape as me. If I may say so, I try to manage the balance between rigor and openness in a responsible and humane way. And Alternative Comics rejects every other kind of dogmatism except that kind that privileges rigor.
In any case, there are serious differences between review criticism, large academic research projects, classroom teaching, and the various other contexts in which I participate.
This blog is one such context, and I thank you for the opportunity!
Matthias–
Art would be a boring, uninspiring thing if it were “perfect.”
On this, I bet most of us agree!
…silty piles of meticulous pedantry.
Ha! I like that phrasing. But watch out, Noah: you’re tacking dangerously close to anti-intellectualism, albeit scaffolded in a very intellectual way, with these various scolds about disciplinarity, academic seriousness, alleged rigidity, and so forth. I feel as if each of us may be modeling the very problems we claim to reject.
Pedantically yours,
CH
Right, Noah, I do recognize that you’re not that dogmatic. Clearly, but those initial one-page readings of Hernandez *were pretty damn dismissive.
Another instance that came to mind was your piece on Crumb for Comicology, I believe it was?
Since it was brought up in the other discussion, I would venture that idealization plays a huge part in Hernandez’ depiction of women. There’s a long tradition for this sort of thing in the visual arts and it’s a rather complex, but vital issue in the interpretation of same. I think Hernandez does really interesting — both self-aware and self-indulgent — things with it.
Oh, and would Sir Mixalot be a better artist if he were overtly self-critical?
I wasn’t calling for Mixalot to be more self-critical! On the contrary, I was saying that what he does do would be made fairly incoherent if he were to be self-critical. (In fact, self-critical hip hop folks who try to celebrate womanhood often end up sounding like idiots for just that reason. Arrested Development, for example, should not have gone there….)
I was dismissive of Crumb. Rightfully so, I think. But folks can decide for themselves.
Charles, a more thoroughgoing engagement with Williams’ work on pornography might have led you to a place where you could acknowledge the ways in which Hernandez is like pornography without seeing that as absolutely damning. In particular, Williams identifies pornography as a genre defined in large part by an obsession with revealing or understanding women, with that understanding linked to bodies. I think there are some obvious ways in which that maps onto what Hernandez is doing.
I would point out that your relation to Williams (read some, not that engaged, don’t think it would affect your view that much) is not that different from my response to Hernandez. You feel it’s important to be engaged with and affected by one and not the other. That’s your choice, of course — but I maintain it’s a disciplinary and strategic one, not an absolute.
Oh sorry, I keep misunderstanding. I agree re: Arrested Development, although some hip hop acts have succeeded better at celebrating womanhood, even if it’s often done from a male perspective which might taint it for someone who sees the male gaze as an absolute negative.
Regarding the Crumb piece, I wrote a response to a similar, if less nuanced critique of Anton Kannemeyer recently. I also briefly referenced your piece.
Noah, there’s one obvious difference between Hatfield’s relation to Williams and yours to Hernandez: viz. Hatfield hasn’t, as far as I know, written two posts (and counting?) criticising Williams. For what that’s worth (about thirty-seven cents, I would say).
I also doubt he thinks “it’s important to be engaged with and affected by one and not the other”, simpliciter. His view seems to be that, if you’re going to do criticism (whatever, exactly, that means) about Hernandez, it’s important to be engaged with him (whatever *that* means); likewise I’d bet he’d say, if you’re going to talk about Williams at depth, it’s important to be engaged with her.
Noah,
So if Hernandez is parodying pin up art, that’s well and good — but it doesn’t explain the stylistic choices he makes. Why has he chosen a parody or critique which participates in the thing he is parodying or critiquing?
Big boobs are for a large contingent of men quite pleasurable to look at, and no amount of ideological critique is going to change that. Why? Because ideology didn’t create the pleasure to begin with. There is, of course, many negative aspects that come from the pleasure of such objectification. So how could Hernandez deal with both its pleasures and problems in a narrative without depicting the objective form? And even if such desiderata were completely constructed by culture or whatnot, I figure a deconstructive type such as yourself should see the problem (or maybe I should say problematic) here and say Hernandez draws big boobs under erasure.
Hey Matthias. Thanks for the link to your critique. I find the argument, “well, he’s just exploring his own personal racism, and that’s aesthetically valid,” fairly unconvincing. If you create a work to be looked at by others, that’s public and political. If what you do in that work is use bone-headed racist stereotypes, I think it’s fair game for people to point out that you’re using bone-headed racist stereotypes.
Specifically, this:
“This is not some kind of vicious propaganda against black Africans produced by a hegemonic entity, it is expression of personal truths by an individual who finds himself living in a society deeply mired in such emotions and attitudes.”
Seems to me to be confused. Hegemonic attitudes are perpetuated by individuals. They exist and are experienced precisely as personal truths. That’s why they’re so effective.
That said, I don’t think that such imagery is always off base, or that it can’t be used under any circumstances. I don’t know enough about Anton Kannemeyer to know what I’d think of his work or his approach to the material. I do know that I can’t see anything subtle or thoughtful or even particularly personal in Crumb’s use of racist iconography on that Cheap Trick album cover.
Jones, re the “and counting” — I think I’m going to write on Human Diastroetc (I hate that title at some point in the near future), but I plan to bow to the hegemonic discourse and read it first.
Noah, your assessment Sir Mixalot seems to be to be accurate based on the one video i am families with…this strikes me as a limited assessment which could prove to be true enough. But with Gilbert we are not limited to a single piece, the page above. In art (comics in this case) the artist should communicate with the purpose of revealing a truth with lies (which both bend to the will of each artist and audience member as they receive the message and interoperate them. Assessing the level of truth and lies with clues left by the artist and individual lenses and lexicons). Gilberto is authentic and within his right to depict from his cultural and personal perspective stories that may present misogyny in himself as long as they also are purposeful in not exploiting this base instinct. He does this by sharing his fetish and on balance working through it with a consciously created story and cast of characters that are diversified in all aspects and utilize the strength of comics to depict each with form that bends to the physics of his world. All accurately reflecting truths in ours with lies that are the tools of his art. These are flawed characters who are not exploited in the broader story. He is not a pornographer. He is an artist with a particular personal perspective built on internal and external reality. He uses his medium to present his flawed perspective and his process to amend for this. He is doing what must be done to change himself and his world. I would suggest his work does more for feminism then it does for misogyny.
Hey Charles R. You can talk about objectification and fetishization without creating work which replicates the effects of objectification and fetishization, I think. People don’t generally try to do that because everyone loves objectification and fetishization so much. But, to pick a favorite of mine, Andrea Dworkin’s *Intercourse* is all about critiquing fetishization and objectification, and it’s pretty much not titillating at all. And yes, it’s also a work of art.
Or…Alison Bechdel might be an example closer to home. The strip about the Bechdel test is essentially about objectification and dehumanization of women. It does not itself objectify or dehumanize women. Any number of Hothead Paisan strips would probably work as well.
Your Derrida is probably better than mine…but looking to handy Wikipedia, I don’t really see how the erasure applies. It’s not like there’s no language or imagery in the world that doesn’t look like pin up art. You don’t need to use fetish imagery under erasure to critique fetish imagery; you could just use different language or imagery. Lots of people do.
Hernandez uses fetish imagery not because (or not solely because) he wants to critique fetish imagery and these are the only tools he has. He uses fetish imagery because he really likes fetish imagery.
Isn’t there something amiss when you offer two lesbian approaches as a way out of Hernandez’s approach to masculine desire for the female form? There’s nothing inherently wrong with the objectification of another if that’s not all there is to one’s treatment of others. People find other people beautiful to look at. So what? As has been repeatedly argued by others, Hernandez doesn’t stop there. Just because he approaches female beauty from a straight male perspective doesn’t invalidate his approach. For a more extreme example, Sam Peckinpah often had insightful and critical things to say about macho ideology while still being a hardcore masculinist.
And though I’m not much for bean-counting, I suspect Hernandez (both of them) repeatedly pass the Bechdel test.
“Isn’t there something amiss when you offer two lesbian approaches as a way out of Hernandez’s approach to masculine desire for the female form?”
Only if you assume that only men can talk about masculine desire. On the contrary, I’d say that probably since Lacan, the most interesting and thoughtful discussions of masculine desire have been made by woman (and yes, often by lesbians. And Dworkin is one too.)
The assumption that the only way men can represent desire is through pinup art and fetishization is not to me very convincing, to put it mildly. The argument that people find other people beautiful, therefore we will naturally resort to a visual vocabulary drawn from soft-core porn also strikes me as ridiculous.
I never said his approach was invalidated. I didn’t say he couldn’t have insightful things to say. I didn’t say he failed the Bechdel test. I said he used fetish imagery, and that that mattered, and that making excuses for it and arguing that he does other things besides use fetish imagery is not an explanation for the fetish imagery. Your response — which basically conflates biology with particular iconographic traditions in the interest of not having to question how women are portrayed — seems to me to nicely encapsulate why raising this question in the first place was a good idea.
I guess what I’m saying is that presenting the pleasure of looking at a certain type of female form is a valid technique from which to do a critical narrative with. Acknowledging that there’s nothing inherently evil in taking pleasure in such a way is something Hernandez can see that a nutjob like Dworkin will not. Yet, he can still be critical of the way such objectification can work in a culture. I don’t have quotes handy, but Charles H. has at times in this discussion come too close to dismissing the fetishistic use of the female form by Hernandez. But, to give him the benefit of the doubt, I think he was probably just overstating his case for Hernandez’s contextualized critique of such use. I didn’t say or imply that such imagery was “the only way men can represent desire.” I just think there’s a lot to be said for a representation that implements the reader (who shares Hernandez’s view of “hot girl”) from the inside and critically examines the way such a desire might have on a social concept like masculinity. Yes, Maria is supposed to be attractive, but how would the story work without that? It would be another story with other points to be made.
I’m no fan of Bechdel’s so I can’t much comment on how she approaches her own desires. But if she only draws women she finds ugly in an attempt to critique desire, then that’s a resoundingly false approach.
“… desire might have effects on …”
Charles: “[Matthias:]Art would be a boring, uninspiring thing if it were “perfect.”
On this, I bet most of us agree!”
Maybe, but that’s not the point. The point is, as Noah put it perfectly: “there can be a tendency to deny imperfections or problems when one likes a work for other reasons.”
Being viciously attacked for more than 7 years in the CJ’s messboard for pointing out “imperfections or problems” in the subculture’s canon I can safely say that the artists who are part of said canon can’t be attacked in any way without an instant defensive position from the fans (the word is short for “fanatic” and we better not forget it!). (Being attacked I was pushed to the uncomfortable position of creating a persona who can’t say how much he likes Kirby or Hergé in spite of considering them little masters, not canon fodder.) I also think that comics scholarship inherited that annoying feature, among other equally annoying things, from the subculture.
Domingos, I have no doubt that what you just said is true, but that’s not really what’s happening here.
I for one would never have posted anything if it was merely a matter of disagreeing over taste, or, especially, issues (like gender studies) that are clearly out of my depth. I read comics, for fuck’s sake—I’m used to people not liking the things I love.
Noah’s idea that he can come to such sweeping generalizations of an artist’s whole body of work by simply close reading a single page out of context and without reading the actual book is what *I* find repellent (he wasn’t keeping these generalizations to the one book, either. He was applying them to Beto’S oeuvre).
Just imagine if I made sweeping racial generalizations because I happened to live beside a penny-pinching jew/crack-smoking afroamerican/alcoholic native. Hey, it’s not superficial—I knew the guy for years! I *must* know about jews/blacks/injuns!
It’s that mindset that disgusts me.
Let Noah read Human Diastrophism and let us know his take on it. *Then* reprimand the fan(-atic-)boys for rushing to Beto’s rescue. But don’t lump us all in with those fanboys.
Andrew:
First of all I don’t want to call “fanboy” to anyone around here. I’m just saying that these discussions can lead to defensiveness on the part of those who like the work (as Noah put it, for other reasons).
Your “penny-pinching jew/crack-smoking afroamerican/alcoholic native” example is perfect to support Eric Smoodin’s point of view: if we can’t decontextualize a page from a whole graphic novel, we can’t decontextualize a graphic novel from its social context.
As for Noah you may be right (if reading the whole story changes the reading of the page) and may not be (if it doesn’t). I can’t decide and I’m not rereading _Human Diastrophism_ in order to find an answer, sorry!…
Thanks Noah — my point wasn’t that Kannemeyer was not part of a hegemony, but that what’s interesting about his work is that he is honest about his position in this hegemony and even goes as far as to implicate the black South African elites in it. What he is doing is not simplistic racist propaganda, but an expression of the racism that’s part of his social and cultural constitution — a racism that is undergoing changes with the social and political landscape in South Africa.
The same goes for Crumb, really; he was honest about his white middle-class racism and expressed it in uncomfortable, but also self-conscious ways, tying it to consumerism and political discourse. He furthermore expressed it in a largely liberal context (the underground press), confronting his readers with their own, often acknowledged, prejudices as well. Plus he made fun of militant black political movements, which I think was also warranted, as much sympathy as I might have for some of them.
This is where I think your ideology hinders your understanding and appreciation of art — I know you’re not saying this directly, but the consequence of your stance would be art that doesn’t express problematic emotion or ideology in any way.
Domingos, I agree with what you’re saying — there *is a defensiveness in the comics culture, surely in part due to the historical marginalization of comics, but that doesn’t mean that one should dismiss a comic, or any work of art, out if hand just because it expresses something problematic. By that logic, most of world art would disqualify, and the stuff we would approve of would in any case not meet the standards of changed ideological discourse in the future.
Domingos, I didn’t say that reading the story would change the reading of the page. I said that I didn’t think Noah could make sweeping generalizations about Gilbert’s work based on the reading of the one page. You seem to have interpreted what I wrote in the reverse.
I don’t think I was suggesting the graphic novel should or shouldn’t be decontextualized from its social context—I’m not sure if you’re accusing me of that, either. I know I’ll get in over my head if I follow up on this one, though. There are smarter and more verbally deft people here who can follow up on that one if they think it merits their time.
It seemed to me that Noah was inventing a context (his imagined Betoverse) from the one page (two now, one from Poison River and one from Human Diastrophism). He wasn’t keeping to the context of the one page with his criticism—he was critiquing all the pages he hadn’t read as well, and not even just limited to the particular graphic novel the page came from.
Andrew:
By mentioning Eric Smoodin I grabbed your metaphor to answer to one of Charles Hatfield’s points, sorry if I muddied the waters with that one.
I agree with you re. Noah’s generalizations, if that’s what he did.
Matthias:
Unless we are prophets we can only meet the standards of our own ideological discourse. We cannot meet standards that we know nothing about.
Maybe most world art expresses something problematic and we must disqualify it… but disqualify it for what? Certainly not historically (we can learn a lot from past prejudices expressed in art about a particular age). Not even from an academic critical point of view. If you mean from evaluative criticism, sure, why not? Great works of art are few and far between, anyway…
Excuse me, but why is the term ‘pin-up’ used by everyone discussing this page?
None of Maria’s poses corresponds to any pin-up pose I’ve ever seen. Nor is her body language sexual in the standard pin-up ways: either aware of the gaze and welcoming it, or falsely “innocent” of the voyeur’s gaze.
Maria is indeed sexual in these images, but in an arrogant, dismissive way. This is congruent with her persona: a user, who treats her sexual attractiveness as an asset.
Hernandez’s imagery seems to me at least to come directly from Dan DeCarlo pin up art, in the proportions, the dress designs, and many of the poses. The second panel in particular could almost be a DeCarlo drawing.
“if she only draws women she finds ugly in an attempt to critique desire, then that’s a resoundingly false approach.”
Charles R, We’re not talking about attractive or unattractive. We’re talking about iconography that’s fetishistic. They’re not the same. The fact that you can’t tell the difference is exactly why using this imagery to critique it is problematic. It naturalizes and excuses it rather than actually critiquing it.
“Acknowledging that there’s nothing inherently evil in taking pleasure in such a way is something Hernandez can see that a nutjob like Dworkin will not.”
Dworkin does tend to get called a nutjob because she opposed the fetishization and exploitation of women, and because she thought sexual desire was implicated in gender discrimination. She wanted that to stop both because she opposed gender discrimination, and because she had a very high regard for sexual desire. In any case, I doubt very much that she’d hate Hernandez’s work, though she’d probably have some criticisms of it.
I would point out that your relation to Williams (read some, not that engaged, don’t think it would affect your view that much) is not that different from my response to Hernandez.
No it isn’t, because I have not offered to criticize Williams. I lack the qualifications.
The starting point of this exchange was a classroom anecdote that in no way obligated me to display or profess knowledge of Williams. The fact that I discussed pornography with students does not oblige me to cite Williams (though I grant that it certainly would if I took that discussion to print in the course of research, because I know that her work is important).
Er, sorry I spotted an annoying error in my last post, that I’ll now disrupt the flow of the discussion to correct, because it’s too frustrating not to.
I wrote:
“He furthermore expressed it in a largely liberal context (the underground press), confronting his readers with their own, often acknowledged, prejudices as well.”
That should be ‘UNacknowledged’, right there.
Sorry.
Charles H; but you then moved the anecdote into a blog post in order to make a point about pornography. It’s the same context (a blog post) in which I discussed Hernandez. I’d say the main difference is that you didn’t highlight your lack of expertise (that is, you just defined porn without noting that there might be contradictory theoretical contexts) while I explicitly noted the limits of my experience with Hernandez.
And I want to make clear, my point is that you *didn’t do anything wrong*. Nobody knows everything; part of the joy of conversation is having people who know more than you about something explain why you’re incorrect. I don’t want conversations about porn to be limited to people who have a theoretical background to talk about porn. I prefer a forum in which people with different perspectives and different levels of expertise are able to have conversations. That’s one of the things I like about blogging.
Noah: you’re being deliberately obtuse, so much so that it borders on being disingenuous.
Your writing on Gilbert Hernandez would parallel Charles Hatfield’s comments on Linda Williams if: 1) CH had written two long blog posts on Williams during which he admitted he had only read one page of her writing and 2) greatly insulted Williams in some way (perhaps by suggesting that she’s only prominent because of affirmative action programs helping female scholars and also that she’s using feminist language to pander to the male power structure).
If Hatfield had done that, sure, he’d be just like Noah Berlatsky. But Hatfield didn’t do that bring out Williams in an egregious display of irrelevant and unearned erudition. You’re the one who brought her up and Hatfield, responding in the comment section to your blog post, just said that he’s looked at her work at the time of the anecdote he’s relating. And it’s fair to surmise that Hatfield doesn’t think Williams is germane to the anecdote he was telling. Both are fair enough responses since, as you rightly say, no one can be expected to read everything.
The difference seems blatantly clear to me: Noah Berlatsky is talking at length about topics he’s very unfamiliar with while Hatfield is trying to avoid talking about topics he’s not familiar with. One person is being intellectually dishonest here, and the other is being intellectually responsible. Can you guess which is which.
I’m willing to allow that there might be much gained by bringing Williams’ type of porn analysis to the work of Gilbert Hernandez (some of which, like Birdland, is literally porn, as well as other works that have a porn-inflicted sensibility). In fact I’d go further than you and say that it would be good to have someone who has read widely in the field of porn studies (of which Williams is just one distinguished name) apply their expertise to Gilbert Hernandez’s work. But that’s only one approach of many to Hernandez, and there’s no reason why it has to be Hatfield’s approach.
Or to put it another way, just because you enjoy throwing around names like Williams or Lacan doesn’t mean that other people can’t have their own intellectual projects that are distinct from yours. Often Hooded Utilitarian posts involve people throwing around names of authors they’ve read, the intellectual equivalent of locker room talk (my Zizek is bigger than your Jameson). It’s not a very fruitful way to have a conversation and Hatfield was right to want to sidestep the issue by saying that Williams wasn’t pertinent to the anecdote he was telling.
Hey Jeet! Speaking of intellectual dishonesty:
“CH had written two long blog posts on Williams during which he admitted he had only read one page of her writing”
I didn’t do that either. I’ve read more than one page of Hernandez, including one of his books.
“Or to put it another way, just because you enjoy throwing around names like Williams or Lacan doesn’t mean that other people can’t have their own intellectual projects that are distinct from yours. ”
Yep, that was exactly my point, Jeet. You just torched the strawman I had already burned down.
“It’s not a very fruitful way to have a conversation and Hatfield was right to want to sidestep the issue by saying that Williams wasn’t pertinent to the anecdote he was telling.”
Charels is certainly within his rights to talk about whatever he wishes. However, what’s pertinent depends on where you’re sitting. That’s one of the central insights of feminism.
You pretty much always feel that what’s pertinent is only what you think is pertinent, Jeet, and you accuse people of intellectual dishonesty if they don’t agree with you. When folks talk about writers and thinkers you don’t care that much about, you don’t say, “huh, somebody with a different perspective”, you say, basically, “shut up! shut up! shut up! nyaah nyaah I can’t hear you!” Which, you know, is its own perspective, and I wouldn’t want to shut you down. But I wouldn’t want it to be the way my blog worked, either.
Sorry, I posted this on the wrong thread. It should go here.
Noah: I’m glad to hear that you’ve read an entire Gilbert Hernandez book. On November 1st you wrote “I believe I read Heartbreak Soup once upon a time.” This was sufficiently vague that I wasn’t sure what you had read or not. First of all “Heartbreak Soup” is both a short story and the title of several different collections with different contents. Also whn you wrote Does “I believe I read Heartbreak Soup once upon a time” it sounded like you weren’t sure that you had read it yourself. Did you mean that you read it or could it mean that you skimmed it? Or could it be that you might have dreamed you read it? I’m glad to have this clarified so we can say that you did in fact read a collection called “Heartbreak Soup.” But until now I was genuinely unsure of this point.
I’m a bit distressed at your willingness to tarnish the good name of feminism by using it as a shield to defend your own intellectual laziness. Did Mary Wollstonecraft and Andrea Dworkin really go through so all their struggles just so Noah can write about comics he’s only vaguely familiar with. I doubt it, but I could be wrong … I’ve been wrong before.
Do you think Dworkin would really be upset to be used to question fetish imagery? I mean, she was fairly touchy, so it’s possible….
It’s funny that you mentioned dreams. I’m just reading the wonderful book on Lacan by Elizabeth Grosz that Caro recommended in an older thread. She points out that one of Freud’s scandalous innovations in dream interpretation was to see each part of the dream as a site for interpretation in itself; to be read for its own meaning rather than in context. She also talks a lot about the way that Freud and Lacan decenter the subject (the unconscious thinks, therefore I am not.) For Lacanian feminists, I think the point is, the Cartesian (male) subject as unity ends up marginalizing (or objectifying) other viewpoints, especially female ones. Reading a work out of its “context”, then, could definitely, I think, be seen as a feminist project, as could connecting the imagery on a page to other cultural imagery, rather than to what happens to be on the preceding or following pages.
In any case, I’ll delete your double post. No worries.
Noah,
We’re not talking about attractive or unattractive. We’re talking about iconography that’s fetishistic. They’re not the same. The fact that you can’t tell the difference is exactly why using this imagery to critique it is problematic. It naturalizes and excuses it rather than actually critiquing it.
I’m not seeing that you’re making much of a distinction in categorizing images of females that are merely attractive from those that are, to use a better term, subjugating. I prefer ‘subjugation’ to ‘fetishizing’, because the latter isn’t inherently bad, as you and Dworkin seem to think. Pointing out that one’s eye is drawn to big breasts isn’t the same as saying one has reduced a woman’s being to those big breasts.
Dworkin does tend to get called a nutjob because she opposed the fetishization and exploitation of women, and because she thought sexual desire was implicated in gender discrimination. </em.
I rather thought it was because she was a censor who wanted to force her own reductionist ideology on the whole of society through the law. I wasn't aware the ACLU opposed her because they were friends to the exploitation of women.
forgot a ‘>’ — that last paragraph is mine.
Hey Charles. I think she really gets called a nutjob for the same reasons Freud did, more or less — she thought people were culpable for their sexuality in ways that makes just about everyone uncomfortable. Obviously, the censorship upset people, but what makes people think she’s actually insane is the other stuff. Lots of folks are into censorship…but people don’t generally think of them as insane. (People just think Wertham’s a jerk and a philistine, right? Not actually nuts.)
“I’m not seeing that you’re making much of a distinction in categorizing images of females that are merely attractive from those that are, to use a better term, subjugating.”
I don’t think fetishization is inherently bad. Marston uses fetish imagery incessantly, and I’m fine with it. I mentioned Sir Mixalot earlier too as an artist I quite enjoy.
Are you claiming that Hernandez’s art does not in fact reference pin-up imagery? Or that Maria on that page is not deliberately objectified? If the first, you need to look at more Dan DeCarlo; if the second, you’re disagreeing not only with me, but with Charles H, who (if I understand him) is saying that Maria here is objectified specifically to critique objectification.
“Pointing out that one’s eye is drawn to big breasts isn’t the same as saying one has reduced a woman’s being to those big breasts.”
This seems fairly bizarre. Hernandez isn’t pointing out that there’s some sort of biological interest by men in big breasts. He’s drawing a woman with well-nigh impossible proportions, and accentuating them further through design elements drawn from pin up iconography. Why doesn’t that qualify as fetishization?
If Dworkin’s the one who said that “all penetration is rape,” then she IS a nutjob. And I ain’t even had to read her BOOK to know that.
Hey Darryl. She never actually said that, and she denied that it was a fair description of her argument. She does come close to saying something like that in “Intercourse”, though, I think — it doesn’t seem like a completely specious paraphrase, anyway.
But yes, as I said, that’s exactly why many people think she’s crazy.
All of Dworkin’s writings are online here.
The “all penetration is rape” paraphrase is a reading of Chapter 7 of Intercourse. Click here to read.
Personally, I side with those who think she was a nutcase.
It’s worth pointing out that she was in a hideously abusive relationship with her husband, and after she left him was forced into prostitution. Did that make her nuts, or did it give her a valuable perspective on gender roles? It doesn’t have to be one or the other obviously, and there have been lots of nutty people who were also smart and had worthwhile things to say.
She’s obviously extreme (like Shulamith Firestone, who was a big influence on her.) But I don’t think that means she’s either crazy or necessarily wrong.
This is maybe the most relevant quote:
“With intercourse, the use is already imbued with the excitement, the derangement, of the abuse […] Intercourse as an act often expresses the power men have over women. Without being what the society recognizes as rape, it is what the society—when pushed to admit it—recognizes as dominance […] There are efforts to reform the circumstances that surround intercourse […] These reforms do not in any way address the question of whether intercourse itself can be an expression of sexual equality.”
Dworkin constantly played the victim card when talking about her own life. It was so grotesquely exhibitionistic that I have to wonder how much of it was tall tales on her part. If her accounts of her life are to be believed, she was one of the most put-upon people who ever lived.
As near as I can tell, her claims of all the horrible experiences she had were completely uncorroborated. The one time a grand jury heard her accusations was when she claimed to have been sexually assaulted with a speculum while being processed after being arrested at a demonstration. The grand jury refused to indict, which says volumes about how weak the case was.
The capper for a lot of people was her claim that hotel staffers gang-raped her in her Paris hotel room in 1999. She did not report the matter to police. She did not have her alleged injuries treated by a doctor. She also would not name the hotel in her account of what happened. Like everything else, one was just expected to take her word for it. Even people close to her thought her claim was bullshit.
My reaction to every account by Dworkin of the various crimes that allegedly have been committed against her is that she’s trying to manipulate me. The language is self-consciously florid. The events described are jaw-droppingly melodramatic. My favorite was her account of how she returned to the U.S. in the early ’70s. (The Bennington girl couldn’t just call mommy and daddy for money?) The fact that virtually none of it is corroborated leads me to think that she was a bullshit artist of the first order. She used people’s pity to control them.
Hmm. I didn’t know about the later claims, whatever they might have been. The account of sexual harassment by her husband doesn’t seem especially sensational as these things go. The question about why she didn’t call her parents seems extremely wrong-headed. People in those relationships often don’t reach out for help for all sorts of reasons. Sneering at them for not acting rationally is sort of the definition of blaming the victim.
For what it’s worth, the Wikipedia article doesn’t have any discussion of doubts about her earlier abuse…though it sounds like the 1999 events were widely questioned at the time.
She doesn’t actually talk about her own abuse in Intercourse at all, as far as I remember…and certainly not in Right Wing Women, which is the other of her books I’ve read. So she wasn’t playing the victim card in those contexts, at least.
This has made me want to read of biography of her…but none seem to exist (except her own autobiographical writings.)
I was referring to her almost-a-drug-courier story.
I wasn’t questioning why she wouldn’t bring up her alleged abuse to her family. I question why she wouldn’t contact them for airfare money home. (That’s assuming she didn’t.) Of course, calling the parents for money isn’t as sexy as claiming she came this close to being a heroin smuggler.
Does anyone know how Dworkin financed her life after returning to the U.S.? I’m curious as to whether she had a trust fund from her family.
“I wasn’t questioning why she wouldn’t bring up her alleged abuse to her family. I question why she wouldn’t contact them for airfare money home.”
I do think when you’re abused as she described being abused your decision making function is often really adversely affected. And sometimes people do end up estranged from their families, for whatever reasons.
I should read her autobio; I have to admit I’ve been a bit nervous about reading her non-theoretical work, because I suspect it might not be very good. But I should at least give it a try….
I do think when you’re abused as she described being abused your decision making function is often really adversely affected. And sometimes people do end up estranged from their families, for whatever reasons.
Yes, and she could be just making shit up.
I do wonder whether she had a trust fund. I look at the biography in that Wikipedia article, and it just screams trustafarian to me. When I read that she took a two-year leave of absence from Bennington in the ’60s to live in Greece and Crete while working on poetry and a novel, I can’t help but think anything else. Activism doesn’t pay the bills, and she doesn’t appear to have ever had a real job.
I know you’ve read her books, Robert. Did you pretty much just hate everything about them?
They’re compelling train wrecks.
That’s interesting. I do find them compelling, but I don’t find them especially messy or incoherent as these things go….
“Messy” and “incoherent” aren’t really the adjectives that come to mind. There’s this escalating “Can she top this?” quality to her horseshit. It’s a bit like listening to Harlan Ellison give an extemporaneous talk.
Ah, well, that’s not my experience of reading her at all.
Right-Wing Women, which is the book I’m most familiar with, is quite unified, very smart, and not very outrageous at all. Basically she argues that there are advantages to women in traditional gender roles and that the hippie sexual revolution is not necessarily especially great for women — it often tends to be a way for men to get access to sex without any of the responsibilities that come with it. She talks about this in the context of abortion politics as well, which is I guess somewhat outrageous — though she’s no pro-life and she ultimately argues that right-wing women get a raw deal too… I don’t know. It’s thoughtful and well argued.
There is one unfortunate moment of self-dramatization where she talks about being confronted by a group of republican women on a balcony…I wish she hadn’t done that, but it didn’t ruin the book for me or anything.
“Intercourse” is a collection of essays, and is less unified…but what holds it together in a lot of ways for me was her very strong belief/insistence that sex should not be trivialized. She almost is coming from a place at times where she’s against the abuse of women because it undermines or defiles sex and love, rather than from the place where she’s against the misuse of sex and love because they demean women. She probably would say the two can’t be separated, though. None of which seems like bullshit to me at all — I mean, it’s utopian and visionary and not “realistic”, but to me it doesn’t seem either self-evidently ridiculous or performative in the way you’re suggesting.
My most recent piece on Dworkin is here in case anyone’s interested.
Dworkin first and foremost to me wasn’t a writer; she was an activist. I can’t help but see the writing except as in service to her political agenda. She was not some benign theorist whose work essentially existed as an intellectual conversation piece. Her goal was always to circumscribe aspects of the public sphere and dictate to people how they should live their lives.
She sought to see laws passed that were stupid and dangerous. They reflected a really asinine bourgeois attitude that somehow there is a right not to be offended. To me it always smacked of a bunch of coddled, overprivileged women wanting the state to be their new daddy and make the icky stuff go away.
If you want to read what I consider an apt analogue to Dworkin’s own attitudes about sex, click here. Reading the opening paragraphs of Intercourse, chapter 7, it’s hard for me not to think that Dworkin was someone who was essentially uptight about sex’s physical nature. Her sexual attitudes seem like an extreme version of those of the stereotypical JAP.
That really doesn’t seem right to me. I agree that many of her legislative goals were wrong. But I don’t think just labeling her as a prude or a Puritan is especially insightful, and I don’t think dismissing her theory as an adjunct to her activism is right either.
She was very interested in sexual ethics. She was “uptight” about sex to the extent that she thought phyiscal acts had meaning, and that in societies where there was gender discrimination (which is basically all of them) that discrimination was mapped onto sex. She wasn’t prudish, and in fact has various lyrical passages about the possibilities of physical sex.
She tends to get caricatured more or less as you’re doing not because lots of bourgeois people thing like she does, but because her positions are ones which freak everybody out, bourgeois and aesthete alike. These days feminists hate her, aesthetes hate her, conservatives hate her, liberals hate her — a lot of people really hate her, not because she was a stereotypical JAP (and I’m not sure what her Jewishness has to do with it, really?) but because she was an extremist.
The fact that Dworkin was Jewish is just an unfortunate coincidence with that JAP reference. I was using it as a shorthand for a particular set of attitudes. I deliberately added the word stereotype to indicate that I know it’s a simplification/caricature. I wasn’t playing on Dworkin’s religious background.
I think Dworkin freaks people out because they recognize the seeds of her attitudes in themselves. That those attitudes are nightmare extremes of notions they already share is what’s upsetting. If the attitudes were completely alien, they’d just treat her with indifference. Most people’s attitudes towards sex mixes revulsion and attraction to greater or lesser degrees. Bourgeois individuals tend to feel more revulsion because their class ideology views all physical appetites with disdain and/or embarrassment. However, they generally reconcile their taste and distaste for sex in a balancing way. Dworkin’s attitudes have a bipolar quality to them that people find disturbing.
If memory serves, Edwin Meese was very complimentary of her testimony before his pronography commission. Bluenose conservatives always saw her as an ally back in the day. Her pornography-causes-rape beliefs are very grounded in the class bigotry that’s endemic to the patriarchical ideology cultural reactionaries seek to reinforce. She was a useful idiot in the pursuit of their goals.
Yeah, she definitely had some congruence of interest with the right — as she discusses in Right Wing Women.
On the other hand, her criticism of the left was often very much on point, I think. She was a fierce critic of Bill Clinton’s nonsense, for example, and in general was just really unimpressed with claims that the sexual revolution automatically helped women out. The hippie argument that more sex is liberating and the problem with women is that they’re repressed isn’t any less bourgeois than the anti-sex attitudes you describe; it’s just less popular on the left.
As I’ve said a time or two, I don’t think her writings suggest a hatred or fear of sex or the body. More like an excessive love of both.
The sexual revolution had its good side and bad. On the one hand, it led to increased licentiousness and women getting used. But it also broke the back of the patriarchical view that women needed to be protected, which required treating them as second-class citizens. Women would never achieve equal status with men without it.
What did she attack Bill Clinton for?
Robert, as far as I can tell her dad was a schoolteacher, and she was born and spent her early life in Camden, New Jersey. That doesn’t suggest that she came from an especially wealthy background. She did spend time abroad…but it doesn’t sound like she lived in luxury, and, in fact, the contrary appears to have been the case. Obviously, she wasn’t dirt poor, and one can have bourgeois attitudes without being bourgois…but I don’t think your effort to make her a trust fund poseur really holds up.
What did she attack Bill Clinton for?
For his history of having sex with subordinates; his history of sexual harassment — that sort of thing.
A family of modest means isn’t likely to scrimp and borrow to send a daughter to Bennington back in 1964. Particularly not when there’s a younger son. Who, according to accounts, went to Columbia and got a doctorate in molecular biology. I find it pretty implausible that this was not an upscale family.
“A family of modest means isn’t likely to scrimp and borrow to send a daughter to Bennington back in 1964. ”
Why not, exactly? College wasn’t nearly as out of reach for families of moderate means in 1964 as it is today. It sounds like they were a first or second generation immigrant family with some money and with (like many Jewish families) a very strong commitment to education and culture. And her dad was a socialist, which suggests he may have been more open to women’s rights and women’s education than many people at the time.
Clinton doesn’t have a history of harrassing subordinates. Apart from Lewinsky, there’s no evidence he was ever involved with one. And Lewinsky has testified, in the face of extraordinary pressure to say the contrary, that there was no element of coercion in the relationship.
Noah, we’re talking 1964. Pre-feminist period. It’s not likely for a family of modest means to send a daughter to an expensive out-of-state (and women-only) school back then. I’d be more willing to accept it, though, if there wasn’t a younger brother. His education would all but certainly take priority. I find it absurd that they would take a chance on derailing his future by spreading themselves even thinner than Dworkin claims they did with her.
Beyond that, Noah, I think she’s full of shit, and you’re not going to convince me otherwise. What’s known about her history strongly suggests an affluent family background. The only thing contradicting it is her own account, and given how ludicrous many of her claims about herself appear, I’m not inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt.
Paula Jones was his subordinate, and there’s certainly evidence he was involved with her. As for harassment, with Jones the evidence seems ambiguous (Clinton settled out of court before the appeals court could make a ruling, it looks like.) I know there wasn’t coercion with Lewinsky — just garden variety having sex with your intern whose young enough to be your daughter. No reason to be troubled by the power disparities there….
We’re probably drifting off topic…I don’t think he should have been impeached, for what that’s worth.
Ah, well, I don’t need to convince you. Mostly just trying to figure out if I agree with you. If her dad was a banker or trader (like Susan Sontag’s) I think you’d have a better case — I sort of expected that when I looked it up, but schoolteachers just don’t make that much money. As it is, the main evidence for an affluent background is that you think her family must have been sexist — and you know, it just seem reasonable to me that Andrea Dworkin’s parents may have been more interested in gender equality than you’re giving them credit for.
Most everybody thinks she’s full of shit. I’ve learned a bunch from her books, though. I wish there was a good biography…but given the general antipathy towards her, it seems unlikely that one will be written anytime in the near future….
Paula Jones wasn’t a direct subordinate, and her case was thrown out of court for lacking merit. He settled with her on the recommendation of advisors who convinced him he needed to make her go away no matter what. As I recall, she picked up the check on the way to her Penthouse photo shoot.
As for Lewinsky, I think she was a lot more afraid of Starr than Clinton when she made her statement. Starr was threatening both her and her mother with prosecution. There was every incentive to tell him what he wanted to hear. She wouldn’t do it.
My schedule’s clear today. Interesting way to spend it.
“Interesting way to spend it.”
I hope that’s not sarcasm!
The evidence is this:
–She and her brother went to high-end and expensive private universities.
–She took two years off from school to live in Europe and write poetry and fiction.
–She was a dedicated political activist from the late 1960s through the 1970s without any visible means of support. The Vietnam protesters were invariably upper-middle-class or affluent. Lower-middle-class people, if nothing else, didn’t have the time, and most are averse to mixing it up with authorities. The other major feminist voices of the time were either academics (most of them), prominent in a professional field (like Steinem), or trust-funders (like Shulamith Firestone). There’s nothing to indicate Dworkin had to earn a living to support herself. That suggests she was a trust-funder or the like.
If it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck, it tends to be a duck.
I hope that’s not sarcasm!
No, if I didn’t enjoy arguing with you, I wouldn’t be here.
I think there’s a lot of evidence that she wasn’t poor. But what we know about her parents seems to indicate there wasn’t a ton of money there either, necessarily. It think she may have had cultural capital too; Wikipedia notes she worked as an assistant to (I think) Muriel Rukeyser, because Rukeyser wanted to support her writing. Her two years off in Europe ended up with her destitute, apparently.
She did fairly well from her books, I think, had no kids, and was in a long term stable relationship. Again, she wasn’t working class, but I don’t see that she had to be necessarily especially well off by the standards of people who usually get to be public intellectuals.
In some ways, the best evidence that she was bourgeois is the stuff you don’t really want to talk about — which is that she was a Bohemian and an aesthete who was very enthusiastic about sexually explicit work by people like Jean Genet (if I remember aright) and James Baldwin.