I had an article on the Atlantic a couple of days ago in which I talked about the Hunger Games and Twilight, comparing Bella and Katniss. I argue that Bella is in many ways stereotypically feminine (passive, focused on romance and motherhood) while Katniss is in many ways stereotypically masculine (competent, deadly, not focused on romance).
People have not been pleased with me. Specifically, Alyssa Rosenberg and Amber Taylor take me to task. Alyssa started out by calling me condescending and went on to say:
First, there’s something really profoundly weird and limited about this definition of femininity — and condescending in the piece’s sense that a totalizing devotion to motherhood, to relationships, to sex, to girliness is the only, or most worthy, definition of femininity. The second-wave feminists who produced Our Bodies, Ourselves may not have done the research into a groundbreaking medical text that changed the relationship between women and the medical establishment while wearing pretty dresses*, but that doesn’t mean that their work wasn’t deeply attuned to the feminine. Creating space for women’s voices in hip-hop, and suggesting that women have something specific to offer the form, may not be explicitly attuned to the state of romantic and sexual relationships, but that doesn’t mean it’s not an exploration and assertion of the feminine. Choosing to have a baby even if it means you have to be on bed rest or endanger your life might mean you’re devoted to motherhood, but it doesn’t actually make you more of a woman than casting off your cloak to duel the holy hell out of Bellatrix Lestrange or climbing into an exo-suit and doing battle for a little girl’s life — and by extension, the continued existence of the human race.
As is usually the case, Caroline Small is more eloquent than I am, so I’ll let her respond. This is a comment she left on the Atlantic site before Alyssa’s post went up, but I think it resonates.
The comments to this article are really pretty interesting. But pretty disheartening, really, too. A lot of popular feminism, which seems to be where some of the commenters are coming from, isn’t very attentive to the history of cultural gendering, where certain traits were indeed gendered “female” and certain “male”, and where the male traits were generally considered better and more worthwhile. Those preferences haven’t really gone away — the sets of traits and behaviors are still valued differently. They’re just more available to individual people of both genders now.
I’ve been seeing these “I’m glad I grew up with Buffy and not Bella” things too, so it’s not just Katniss. I sympathize; Bella doesn’t particularly appeal to me either. But it doesn’t take much insight to recognize that she aligns more closely with “traditional femininity” than Buffy and Katniss do.
Fortunately, there are lots of women today whose self-perception aligns with the masculine values, to the point that those women would never describe those traits as “masculine”. I think these comments reflect that. But being able to see them as non-gendered, or differently gendered, is something we have the luxury of doing because we were fortunate enough to have come up after feminism fought those hard battles, in an era where other people and society overall enforce those gendered norms on our individual bodies much, much less.
A lot of people seem to think that the point of feminism is making “masculine” behavior acceptable for women — or making no behavior unacceptable for women, that is, separating the behavior from the bodies of the people who perform the behavior and not judging women who prefer those historically masculine traits. And I agree that is one goal of feminism.
But feminism used to also be about recognizing the value and beauty of the way women historically did things, of women’s ways of knowing, of women’s unique experiences — of “femininity” as a counterweight to the excesses of “masculine” strength and authority and aggression. It used to be about valuing “femininity” as a place from which we could criticize and challenge the bad things in our world. A lot of the distaste for Bella is genuine distaste for the historically “feminine” categories and behaviors and values and aesthetics, but it’s generally expressed without even the slightest recognition of how problematic and limiting — and historically patriarchal — that attitude is.
So I’m hesitant that it’s a good thing to derogate traditional femininity, either in favor of traditional masculinity or even in favor of an individual woman’s right to behave however she pleases. A feminism that rejects the very notion that culture is gendered (in ways that have nothing to do with biology) is a feminism that’s amputated its best critique of power. It’s essentially co-opted by historically masculine cultural biases and preferences — including the ones for violence and strength. That’s tragic, if that’s where we are.
Part of the appeal of characters like Katniss is that they challenge conventional gender without completely eradicating it. Part of the appeal of characters like Bella is that they subvert conventional gender without really challenging it at all. I don’t much like either of them at a personal “do I want to hang out with these people” level — I’m with the person who prefers Hermione, although HP is almost as badly written as Twilight. But it strikes me that not being able — or willing — to think the difference is a problem.
Girl power is great — except when it moves beyond allowing people with female bodies to behave any way they like and becomes a new set of restrictive, normative, angry, prejudiced norms that bully people with female bodies into behaving a certain way. The widespread and almost-always knee-jerk “feminist” contempt for Bella, both in itself and in comparison with “tough” female characters like Katniss and Buffy, is a tremendous intellectual and social failure in that respect.
So I think it’s worth asking the defenders of Katniss — is there actually a feminist critique of the power structure that gets Katniss into the book’s defining life or death challenge, the kind of systematic feminist critique you get from, say, Joanna Russ or Erica Jong? I can be talked out of this position, but it doesn’t seem to me that there is. The same question could be asked of Buffy, and of any other girl power heroine. Twilight may actually have the edge on that one — there is a definite critique of the Volturi from Bella’s perspective that aligns nicely, yes, with Christian ideals, but also with traditionally feminine ones. (Although Bella is certainly no Alyx.)
Ignoring the seductiveness of those “masculine” characteristics, pretending their relationship to authority and strength and power and violence is transformed just because a woman engages in them — — that’s not feminist at all. And neither is perpetuating biases and prejudices against the historically gendered-feminine traits. A feminism that can’t make room for Bella is a feminism that’s going to have a lot of trouble getting purchase with women who like Bella, and that seems like a tremendous mistake to me.
To me it seems like Caroline has Alyssa pretty much dead to rights. Alyssa is basically insisting that the feminine be defined as, “anything that women do.” And that has been one goal of feminism. But another goal has been to champion those things traditionally associated with women. And you can’t champion those things if you feel it’s condescending to even suggest that they exist.
The difficulty with championing them if you refuse to admit they exist is perhaps best epitomized by another commenter on the Atlantic. This is Genevieve du Lac. Her comment has garnered 16 likes, so I don’t think she’s just speaking for herself here.
I’m really disgusted with these definitions of femininity and feminism. Why can’t a woman be competent and feminine at the same time? Femininity is not weak. And Bella is just retarded. The two neurons she’s got floating around in her cerebellum are drunk off too much estrogen… like most 16 year olds. So she’s got some feminine qualities – like following her feelings, etc. That does not make her the epitome of femininity.
I’d like to think a woman can be feminine and still be competent. I can wear my makeup and heels and take care of my hair just as well as I sky dive, shoot an arrow, shoot a pistol, finish my MBA, and have a career. Sheesh.
Like Alyssa, Genevieve wants the feminine to mean everything women do. But to get there, she has to call Bella “retarded” and sneer at her “estrogen.” Which, to me, seems like a problem.
Alyssa doesn’t lambast Bella in such offensive terms, of course, which I appreciate. But she is coming from at least a vaguely similar line of country.
And while those values are worth examining further, Twilight‘s also eminently critiqueable on narrative grounds, something Noah gives very little credence. Complexity is the stuff of genuinely compelling decision-making, as well as compelling storytelling. What’s troubling about Twilight is less the idea that Bella picks Edward and more the inevitability of their eventual union. Once Edward walks into Bella’s science class, she never really considers anything else, never gets presented with any other truly compelling options, she treats the humans in her life who are graduating and going off to their own adventures with dismissiveness and disinterest. Tough choices are fascinating. Defending the world’s kindest fate is rather dull.
And just as I’m bored by Bella’s certainty and dismissive attitudes towards people who set other priorities and take other paths, I don’t appreciate the idea that I don’t live up to Noah Berlatsky’s very particular standards of femininity, I’m doing it wrong. There may be effective arguments for a Christian focus on love rather than strength. But a strident and myopic lecture to women with a variety of priorities isn’t likely to be one of them.
Alyssa is arguing for narrative complexity — complexity involving action, politics, and suspense. She goes on to argue that the Hunger Games is interesting in part because it’s about how politics destroys families; how the public trumps the private and why that’s evil.
But…that’s not unique to the Hunger Games. It’s just how adventure stories work. You’re fighting for home and family; that’s the motivation, but it’s not the story. That’s why Amber Taylor is misleading when she says that Katniss’ actions are all about her family. Diagetically they are…but that isn’t what the books focus on. We hardly know Katniss’ sister, or her relationship to her; Pru really just exists as a kind of pure idol of goodness and innocence, a reason to keep fighting, like any number of pure-women-left-at-home in any number of adventure books. What Alyssa wants, and what adventure narratives want, isn’t the exploration of love and relationships…so they push those over to the side. And instead, you get violence and things blowing up.
I don’t have any problem with things blowing up in my entertainment. I don’t know that I seek that kind of thing out quite as much as my wife does, but I’m perfectly happy to go along for the ride. Enjoyable as those things-blowing-up are, though, I like other kinds of stories too. Such as, occasionally, romance. Which is what Twilight is.
As in most romances, narrative complexity, in terms of events and suspense, is not the point. You know Bella is going to get her guy, just like you know that Jane Austen’s heroines are going to end up happily married. That’s how romance works. People — often people known as “women” — read those books not because they’re idiots who don’t like complexity, but because they are interested in a different kind of complexity. Specifically, they’re interested in the ins and outs of love; not just whether people love each other, but how they do so; not who will live and who will die, but what will they say and how will they say it and how will their relationship develop?
For instance, there’s that scene in the Twilight series where Edward’s family is voting on whether to turn Bella into a vampire. Edward’s father votes yes, and his reason is that Edward has vowed to kill himself when Bella dies. For Edward’s father, his love for his son therefore means that Bella has to also live forever.
As a father, as a husband, as someone who has been thinking a lot recently about in-laws and what they mean for marriage and for love — I found, and find that scene really moving. And that’s where the suspense and surprise in Twilight comes from; from the explanation and exploration of love and intimacy, not just between Bella and Edward, but between Bella and Jacob, and Jacob and Edward, and Edward’s family — the entire cast of characters, in other words. It’s different than watching the nifty new way Katniss kills somebody, I’ll grant you. But it’s not worse. For me, anyway, I find it more compelling. Or, as Laura Blackwood says in a lovely recent essay, “The Twilight series challenges what I would call the “Buffy Summers Maxim”: that teen heroines be physically empowered, oftentimes at the expense of emotional clarity.”
None of which means that Katniss, or Alyssa, is “doing it wrong.” Even if the Hunger Games is (like Twilight) dreadfully written, I still like Katniss. I like watching her figure out how to kill people; I like her tomboyish competence; I like her butchness, I like her delight in dressing up, even if the series won’t really allow her to own it. I like the way she finds true love and family at the end. She’s not my favorite heroine in the world, and her whining (like Bella’s) gets pretty tedious, but overall, I enjoyed spending time with her. That’s why I went out of my way to say at the end of my essay at the Atlantic that Katniss and Bella aren’t opposed. As another writer notes here, it’s not an either/or choice. Lots of girls admire both characters. I think it’s possible to imagine that Twilight’s heroine and the Hunger Games’ heroine would find something in each other to love and admire as well.
Amber Taylor disagrees with me there, though:
The idea that there would be a fight is absurd, but the reason for peace is not that Bella and Katniss “might understand each other’s desires and each other’s strength” and walk away in mutual respect. Katniss wouldn’t fight Bella because Bella is not an autocratic totalitarian dictator. Bella threatens exactly nothing that Katniss values, and thus Katniss, a user of violence who is not inherently violent, would probably shrug. Katniss’s political consciousness and promotion of self-rule does not threaten Bella’s tiny microverse of loved ones and would likewise be a non-issue to Bella.
For Taylor, Katniss wouldn’t respect Bella. She’d just ignore her, because Bella is no threat. But I have to ask…if Bella “threatens exactly nothing” that Katniss or Taylor or Alyssa values, why then are so many writers so eager to attack her? If she’s not a danger, why call her a “retard” or deride her as dull or passive or sneer at her “tiny microverse of loved ones” — that thing that some of us of insufficient political consciousness refer to as our “family”? What, in other words, is so scary about Bella and the girls who love her? And could it, maybe, have something to do with our culture’s ambivalence about femininity?
I’ll let Sarah Blackwood have the last word.
Bella holds up a cracked mirror and shows us some things we don’t want to see. But she also reminds us that the imagination resists checklists of appropriate behavior. Teen girls resist checklists. The really interesting conversations start to happen when we stop circling the wagons against “bad examples” and “passivity” and start exploring not only what we want our heroines to be like, but why.
‘What, in other words, is so scary about Bella and the girls who love her?’
Because it’s an entire book series aimed at young girls about how if a man physically assaults you, stalks you, neglects you, emotionally abuses you and attempts to control who you can and can’t see to the point where he will physically destroy your property to prevent you doing things he doesn’t want you to do that actually means he truly loves you and is the ideal man and you should forgive him and be with him forever because that’s how relationships work and that’s a woman’s place in them. I find it both disturbing and very telling that you had to carefully omit those parts of the book in your arguments.
Nah, didn’t omit them; just can’t talk about everything all at once, and it’s not been something my interlocutors (Alyssa, Caro, Sarah Blackwood, Amber Taylor) have focused on. But if you want to go there we can. I think people’s take on the stalking issue is fairly confused; after all, it resolves when Bella tells him to cut it the fuck out, and he then sheepishly cuts it the fuck out. Not exactly disempowering. I talk about it at some length here.
Oh…and I don’t mean to say that Twilight’s gender politics are ideal. But the Hunger Games’ really are not either. The Hunger Games is pretty much set up for you to be in the position of the viewer; you’re enjoying the excitement of watching a bunch of kids get tortured. This isn’t ever really complicated as such, and it’s definitely squicky. I don’t know that disavowing violence while surreptitiously glamorizing it is worse than Twilight’s romanticizing stalking before firmly disavowing it, but it’s not clearly better either.
For me it’s not really a question of Twilight in particular — I think there are plenty of bad things to say about Twilight.
What bothers me is the particular flavor that the feminist critique of Twilight is taking — it zeroes in on Bella. Bella isn’t the right sort of girl; she doesn’t make the right sort of choices; she’s bad for girls. Not EDWARD is bad as a romantic lead, but BELLA is bad for girls. Bad for girls period. Bella should be different, or Bella shouldn’t exist.
I’ve got a serious problem with that, because although Bella is certainly flawed, an awful lot of people really see themselves in Bella, so a feminism that says that Bella is bad is a feminism that says that a great many actual women in the world are bad.
Some sympathy for Bella, even if it takes the form of trying to figure out why she makes “bad” decisions, is vital, because feminism’s job isn’t supposed to be telling women they suck. Women who tell other women they suck have been around for a long time, and there’s nothing feminist about it. Feminism is a sisterhood, and Bella, and girls who like her, and girls who ARE like her, get to be part of that sisterhood, damn it.
It bothers me that feminism, in the formulation of so many of these women, has become so much about the value of empowerment that it is losing touch with an awful lot of women. I think that’s a tremendous political error, one that is, at its core, at odds with feminist principles. Women aren’t unproblematically empowered in our society — they still have conflicting priorities and much less social support than they deserve for reconciling those priorities. So reducing feminism until it’s nothing more than the mantra “women should be empowered” is incredibly wrong-headed. Feminism is so much more than that.
I feel like people’s biggest beef with Noah is that they think he’s patronizing them and that he shouldn’t do that because he’s a man. But that’s entirely a red herring — I mean, “someone on the Internet wrote something in a tone that bothers me” is a problem people are going to have SO OFTEN that if you can’t get past it, you maybe shouldn’t be on the Internet at all, because it’s probably making your life a little more stressful than it needs to be.
It’s just remarkable to me how none of these women will even countenance a discussion about the importance of women’s historical experience as a facet of feminist principles. It’s as if that experience was all so thoroughly dreadful and oppressive that there is nothing to learn from it. But that’s ridiculous — there are no utopian societies. The implication of this type of feminism is that the experiences and perspectives of women who are not fully self-actualized do not count.
If feminism had started from that assumption, there would never have been a feminism. It’s an error, it’s not true to feminism and it’s not being good to women, and I couldn’t care less if someone thinks I’m being patronizing when I say so.
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Caro says:
…What bothers me is the particular flavor that the feminist critique of Twilight is taking — it zeroes in on Bella. Bella isn’t the right sort of girl; she doesn’t make the right sort of choices; she’s bad for girls. Not EDWARD is bad as a romantic lead, but BELLA is bad for girls. Bad for girls period. Bella should be different, or Bella shouldn’t exist.
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Certainly feminists could argue against being attracted to certain types of guys; but isn’t concern over Bella as an influence, a retrograde role-model, understandable?
What was the old feminist “consciousness-raising” about, but telling women who’d absorbed the exploitative, dysfunctional societal version of what being a woman was all about, that they “should be different”?
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…a feminism that says that Bella is bad is a feminism that says that a great many actual women in the world are bad.
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Well, Bella is a fictional character; I think criticism of her as a “bad” influence doesn’t necessarily equate to condemnation as evil of women who are like her. Health advocates can rail against junk food without that translating to their casting obese folks into damnation.
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…feminism’s job isn’t supposed to be telling women they suck. Women who tell other women they suck have been around for a long time, and there’s nothing feminist about it.
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Yeah, women attack each other all the time; but there’s a difference between destructive and constructive criticism. Between tearing down someone for not wearing trendy clothes or criticizing “letting a man walk all over you”?
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Feminism is a sisterhood, and Bella, and girls who like her, and girls who ARE like her, get to be part of that sisterhood, damn it.
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Do those who embody many anti-feminist attitudes get to be part of the “feminist sisterhood” too?
In all fairness, though, after writing the above (and Google’ing for any actual quotes of Meyer attacking feminism), ran across this in Stephenie Meyer’s website:
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– Is Bella an anti-feminist heroine?
When I hear or read theories about Bella being an anti-feminist character, those theories are usually predicated on her choices. In the beginning, she chooses romantic love over everything else. Eventually, she chooses to marry at an early age and then chooses to keep an unexpected and dangerous baby. I never meant for her fictional choices to be a model for anyone else’s real life choices. She is a character in a story, nothing more or less. On top of that, this is not even realistic fiction, it’s a fantasy with vampires and werewolves, so no one could ever make her exact choices. Bella chooses things differently than how I would do it if I were in her shoes, because she is a very different type of person than I am. Also, she’s in a situation that none of us has ever been in, because she lives in a fantasy world. But do her choices make her a negative example of empowerment? For myself personally, I don’t think so.
In my own opinion (key word), the foundation of feminism is this: being able to choose. The core of anti-feminism is, conversely, telling a woman she can’t do something solely because she’s a woman—taking any choice away from her specifically because of her gender. “You can’t be an astronaut, because you’re a woman. You can’t be president because you’re a woman. You can’t run a company because you’re a woman.” All of those oppressive “can’t”s.
One of the weird things about modern feminism is that some feminists seem to be putting their own limits on women’s choices. That feels backward to me. It’s as if you can’t choose a family on your own terms and still be considered a strong woman. How is that empowering? Are there rules about if, when, and how we love or marry and if, when, and how we have kids? Are there jobs we can and can’t have in order to be a “real” feminist? To me, those limitations seem anti-feminist in basic principle.
Do I think eighteen is a good age at which to get married? Personally—as in, for the person I was at eighteen—no. However, Bella is constrained by fantastic circumstances that I never had to deal with. The person she loves is physically seventeen, and he’s not going to change. If she and he are going to be on a healthy relationship footing, she can’t age too far beyond him. Also, marriage is really an insignificant commitment compared to giving up your mortality, so it’s funny to me that some people are hung up on one and not the other. Is eighteen too young to give up your mortality? For me, any age is too young for that. For Bella, it was what she really wanted for her life, and it wasn’t a phase she was going to grow out of. So I don’t have issues with her choice. She’s a strong person who goes after what she wants with persistence and determination.
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http://www.stepheniemeyer.com/bd_faq.html
“What was the old feminist “consciousness-raising” about, but telling women who’d absorbed the exploitative, dysfunctional societal version of what being a woman was all about, that they “should be different”?”
I think this is a little confused. The main point of at least a lot of feminism isn’t telling women that they need to change, but rather telling them that they need to change *society*. Feminism is not (or not primarily) a self-help movement; it’s a political program for social change.
Even as far as consciousness raising itself goes…there’s more to it than recognizing that society has put you in a role from which you have to escape to self-actualize. There’s also recognizing that society *devalues* the roles you have, and the you have to work to make society accept them. So, on the one hand, it’s a feminist goal to say, “yes, women should be able to be the providers for their families and work outside the home” (as Betty Friedan argued.) But it’s also a feminist goal to say, caring for children is really valuable, and as a society it’s important for us to make it possible for parents to do that…and part of the reason that’s a feminist goal is and remains the fact that the parents who are responsible for childcare are disproportionately women.
Oh…and thank you for the Meyer quote. I’ve seen parts of it before, I think, but never the whole discussion.
I can’t believe what a fuse you’ve lit with this. The fact that it’s eliciting such a response is very interesting; clearly everyone has different ideas about what feminism is. I’m two minded about this now- because I can see both sides of the argument, but as I said previously, I find Bella’s motives throughout difficult to stomach.
The bone I want to pick is in regards to this comment-
“I don’t know that disavowing violence while surreptitiously glamorizing it is worse than Twilight’s romanticizing stalking before firmly disavowing it, but it’s not clearly better either”
I think here, you’re kind of making assumptions about the purpose of the plot of the Hunger Games itself. I mean, personally, reading about children dying didn’t particularly excite me- it had made me sad and horrified. And judging from Collins’ interviews that seems to be what she was going for- this isn’t a comedy; its a tragedy to some extent. People die in Twilight too but no one would argue that Twilight particularly glamorises violence. It’s just ancillary or necessary to telling the story. Even when Katniss wins the PTSD she goes through and her absolute horror at having to go in again in Catching Fire make it clear that violence is not something she enjoys and as a reader I’d be slightly worried if anyone read these books and thought hell yeah; having some hunger games in real life would be fun…
Finally, just wanted to add that these debates themselves are highly entertaining. Intelligent conversation about books and feminism and relativism to today is hard to come by so thanks for posting.
Thanks Aara! I have to admit I was a little blindsided by how combustible this turned out to be.
For the Hunger Games…obviously Collins is against violence; you’re supposed to be horrified by the games. And yet, so much of the series is set up in terms of the reader being invested in the games, rooting for Katniss to overcome obstacles. That’s where the adventure is…so much so that she’s sent back into the games again in the second book (even though it doesn’t make much sense to do that at all) and in the third book the war is organized in a hunger-games kind of way.
So while the book is obviously opposed to the violence, it’s also very much excited and invested in it. There’s some of that in Twilight too, no doubt about it…but the violence isn’t explicitly organized as spectacle in the same way, and there’s also just less of it. The climactic battle in the final book doesn’t even happen…the tension and excitement there is all around the conflict being resolved peacefully, rather than with violence.
The Hunger Games are just terrifically, shockingly violent…they’re not substantially less violent than Stephen King novels, I don’t think. And I think everyone(?) would agree that part of the point of Stephen King novels *is* the violence, even though the books themselves see violence and those who perpetrate it pretty clearly as bad.
Not that I think violence is in itself bad! It really depends on how it’s handled. I’m just not convinced that Collins is entirely on top of the issues she raises.
Hm I see your point…but don’t you think you’re rooting for Katniss to win so that ultimately the violence can be over? I mean, giving some credit to the intellect of the average (moral) reader and Collins herself-the violence itself is only applauded when there is some noble cause behind it. (Defence of an innocent etc, self-defence against brutality etc). I mean, its more of a social commentary than a Jet-Li movie. (Not that I don’t like Jet Li). To me, the point and focus of the books is overcoming the violence and dictatorship to reach that peace/healing at the end.
Oh and to be contentious- I’d take the above over glamorizing necrophilia any day :P (That was a joke- I get that as a sparkly vampire is slightly different to a corpse- Twilight’s love story is meant to be more romantic than I feel it is). Speaking of- I saw Breaking Dawn today and had to look away from the screen a lot when they showed the blood and gore birth scene. Let’s talk about that..?
(haha)
The Sarah Blackwood article I link to in the piece has some great stuff to say about the body horror/pregnancy. I highly recommend it.
There’s definitely social commentary in the Hunger Games about violence and peace…I just am not entirely sure that it’s all that smart. Part of the problem is that the world-building isn’t very good; the motives of the bad guys don’t make a lot of sense, the society as a whole doesn’t make a slot of sense, so it’s hard to intelligently explore issues of war and peace in that context. And there’s little effort to think about the possibilities of passive resistance, for example — though such things are actually often tactically explored in real resistance movements, even if they’re eventually abandoned.
There’s nothing anywhere near as thoughtful or meaningful as Frodo’s absolute refusal to do any fighting at the end of LOTR, or his insistence on mercy to enemies, and how that affects him and others.
Once the violence is over, so is the book (or the series, etc.)—so, the book can be “about” ending violence, but it can’t actually be about ending violence (once it becomes so, it doesn’t exist)
People make a big deal about the “dangers” of Twilight while male adolescent fantasies can be as moronic and dangerous for an impresionable teenager as they want to be. Young girls are treated as weak minds while young boys can have fun. Young girls are the ones who must be questioned in everything they like, the ones who need “good role models”, the ones who are teached by media that girly = lame and manly = AWESOME. Sometimes parents whine about violence on TV or other stuff but it’s nowhere close to the hate Twilight gets.
In the Internet, Twilight has become into an excuse for misogyny. Fanboys take the “feminism” flag for attacking tween girls that like Twilight, with all kind of chauvinist remarks. Like the average male fantasy power cares about women!
Is Edward a bad love interest? In real life, yes; but this is a FANTASY book. It’d be pretty boring if Edward was a good guy-next-door who goes to church every sunday, nice with every living creature and want to be a doctor. Edward is pretty tame compared to others female-aimed products. Just read Mayu Shinjo’s Haou Airen or Miki Aihara’s Hot Gimmick and maybe you people will start to apreciate Edward.
I kind of like Edward. He’s got a great line at one point where Bella says, “we should do x” and he thinks about it and says, “You know, every decision I’ve made so far has been horrible; you can’t do worse than that. So yes, we should do whatever you want.” And the best part is he’s not incorrect; he does make all these horrible decisions. But at least he eventually figures it out.
But I certainly agree that there are plenty of male fictions that are awful in various ways.
Eric, I agree about the Hunger Games. That’s not the case for LOTR — it goes on (and on! and on!) after the violence stops…I never really thought about why that might be necessary structurally, but I think it is a way for Tolkein to insist that the violence is not the point….
“It bothers me that feminism, in the formulation of so many of these women, has become so much about the value of empowerment”
I pretty much agree with Caro and Noah on much of this, but I thought I’d single out this quote. This is something that’s troubled me since the Buffy phenomenon began. Empowerment, in itself, isn’t bad, but empowerment BY itself (meaning it’s the only virtue that gets valued) degenerates fairly quickly into the thuggery.
And I’ll admit, I’m part of the problem. I like movies where tough women kill people in creative ways.
So Hunger Games is just blander version of Battle Royale?
Haven’t seen Battle Royale…but I wouldn’t bet it’s blander if you’re referring to the violence. HG is really impressively violent.
Haven’t read Hunger Games but the adaptation is apparently aiming at a PG-13 rating. Charles’ tolerance for violence is quite high I’m sure. The violence in Battle Royale is watered down by its humor and irreverence. Nothing compared to your average Korean serial killer movie.
The Hunger Games are just terrifically, shockingly violent
Really? Maybe it says something about my reading habits, but they didn’t strike me as unusually violent at all.
One of my co-workers once described Twilight as “being stuck on a long road trip with a teenager in the back seat who won’t stop talking about her boyfriend.” I only made it halfway through the first book, but that felt pretty accurate to me.
Hey Lynn. As I’ve said, it depresses me that dislike of Twilight seems to inevitably lead to insulting and sneering at teen girls. I know our culture hates our children, but I still find it disheartening.
The Hunger Games is really violent. 12-year olds stabbed through the gut and bleeding to death on the ground; kids torn apart by animals till they pray for death; people having their skin literally dissolve off them; many descriptions of torture (often occurring off-screen — but off-screen in a book isn’t exactly off screen.) There are far more, and far more explicit, acts of violence than in, say, Pulp Fiction or Funny Games. Less than in Friday the 13th, I guess, though having the violence be done exclusively to children by children seems like it gives it an added bite. Less than in LOTR overall, maybe, though that series doesn’t really linger on death and wounds in the same way. I don’t know. What are you reading that Hunger Games doesn’t seem especially violent?
Is disliking teen boys constantly punching each other in the back seat insulting and sneering at them? Disliking aspects of an age group isn’t the same as disliking the age group.
Suat’s right about Battle Royale (and Korean serial killer movies and my tolerance for violence). Hunger Games doesn’t seem to do anything more than BR, it’s aimed at teens in an official, above board, way (unlike Friday the 13th, which is also aimed at teens, but they’re not supposed to be watching it), and focuses on characterization over the social (the latter being the most interesting in this sort of inverted Logan’s Run tale).
Richard: “Empowerment, in itself, isn’t bad, but empowerment BY itself (meaning it’s the only virtue that gets valued) degenerates fairly quickly into the thuggery.”
Yeah, but I’m sympathetic to the implicit message here: women in power are just as big a dicks as men. It runs counter to the utopian view that a gynocentric world would be any less thuggish and brutal than the current one. More thug roles for women is a good thing.
I’m not sneering at teenage girls. No one is fun on a long car ride. That’s the point: reading Twilight is not fun.
I attempted to read Twilight somewhat before it became “the phenomenon.” I didn’t know much about it beyond what it said on the back cover. I didn’t like it pretty much from the start, but I’m a completionist and I’ve slogged through some bad books. Then came the sparkling and I was done. Book went back to the library the next day.
As to the violence in the Hunger Games, I don’t know it just didn’t bother me. Too much Dean Koontz in my high school years, I guess. That, and when I think about violence in books that has stuck with me, it’s always been written from the perspective of the person committing the violence and usually from characters who were pretty sadistic. That’s really not the case in The Hunger Games.
See, but kids are usually fun. Even when they’re irritating and singing you songs about killing barney (like my son was doing just now; ugh) they’re fun and unexpected. Being irritated by your kids is really irritating, but it’s fun too.
I enjoyed reading Twilight. Liked the first movie too, though it’s been downhill since there. I think it has more to do with one’s relationship to the romance genre than with one’s relationship to teen girls (and with one’s tolerance for mediocre prose…though the Hunger Games isn’t significantly better.)
I don’t know why people dislike the sparkling. It’s inventive and weird and funny; turning vampires into fairies. It gets at what I like about the series; it’s really imaginative and filled with all these unexpected bits, which are often clunky and bizarre and unexpected. Like the vampire baseball — where did that come from? The Hunger Games is a lot more rote; the imaginativeness is a lot less whimsical and a lot more just going through the paces once you’ve established your givens.
In terms of the Hunger Games, I didn’t say the violence bothered me. There’s only a handful of things I’ve seen/read/watched where I was actually disturbed by the violence, and that tends to be a selling point, not something which dissuades me. But on any objective criteria (number of violent incidents, inventiveness of the violence, centrality of the violence to the story, gruesomeness, etc.) the Hunger Games is quite, quite violent.
I tried to read Dean Koontz once, but the writing was so bad (John Grisham level bad, as I remember) I couldn’t hack it. Stephen King is miles better (and better than Meyer and Collins too…and Rowling…I’m having trouble thinking of anyone in King’s pop culture phenom weight class who’s as good a writer as he is, actually.)
Hmm, I find kids to be nothing but irritating. Can’t stand the things.
As Chesterton points out, sometimes you need to own one of your own to see the value of the rest. Kids are like that.
Not that everybody should have kids or anything. But my wife really found them completely off-putting till we had ours; it does change your perspective.
Noah- so, saying that you’re rarely disturbed by violence, in so close proximity to your first Takashi Miike movie, compels the following recommendation–go and rent Visitor Q this weekend. Very curious to see what you think. (I first saw Visitor Q because I went into the local video store and asked the very knowledgeable film slinger behind the counter to recommend “the most disturbing thing you’ve seen recently”. I was not disappointed. Visitor Q certainly doesn’t spare the audience either, implicating them in the worst bits in several ways).
I think this is a case where one person’s “whimsical” is another’s “Stupid.”
It’s interesting that you mention romance because I really like the genre and read quite a bit of it. I’m kind of curious as to what other romances you’ve read that makes you think so highly of Twilight, because there are so many better ones out there.
I think whimsical and stupid aren’t unrelated. Whimsical is being silly, which is not far off from dumb. And I said, I like the clumsiness of twilight.
I don’t like it that, that much though. I don’t think super highly of twilight. It’s not very well written; a lot of it doesn’t work. But it really is not worse than most popular fiction that people seem to give much more of a pass to. It’s not worse than Harry Potter, which is really crap. It’s not worse than Hunger Games, which is also badly written. It’s not worse than Dean Koontz, or John Grisham, or Tom Clancy, or Ian Fleming, or the vast majority of superhero comics, or lots of things. Twilight’s crap, but there are lots of things that are crap that don’t send people into paroxysms of loathing. And unlike most of those things, Twilight is pretty weird in the way it uses genre (body horror romance, for instance.)
I’m not a huge reader of romance. I’ve read the classics — Austen and the Brontes and Trollope and so forth. Read a little Georgette Heyer, who’s fine. Read the Janet Evanovich books, which are okay, though I enjoyed them less than Twilight overall, I think. Read Paradise Kiss, which is manga and which is awesome; Nana (by the same author) is really good too. Various other manga romance as well. So this and that. I’d certainly take recommendations.
I’m also curious…what exactly is wrong with sparkly vampires? Is it because this thing that is supposed to be dark and dangerous is turned into something girly and pretty? I kind of like that about it myself. Or is there some other problem I’m missing? Like I said, it seems like an inventive rethinking of the legend…and one I haven’t come across before at all, which seems like it’s worth something considering how many vampire stories there are.
Just in general, Meyer’s vampires seem to make a lot more sense than, say, Buffy’s, which were always caught between the show’s reluctance to abandon some of the relgiious elements of the legend (souls, vulnerable to crosses) and it’s even greater unwillingness to actually deal with religion in any coherent fashion. Meyer seems to have felt a lot freer to just chuck the stuff that didn’t fit and rework the rest.
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Oscar says:
People make a big deal about the “dangers” of Twilight while male adolescent fantasies can be as moronic and dangerous for an impresionable teenager as they want to be. Young girls are treated as weak minds while young boys can have fun.
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Come on; hasn’t there been widely publicized concern over, say, violent video games or those EC horror comics being harmful to young boys?
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Noah Berlatsky says:
I kind of like Edward. He’s got a great line at one point where Bella says, “we should do x” and he thinks about it and says, “You know, every decision I’ve made so far has been horrible; you can’t do worse than that. So yes, we should do whatever you want.” And the best part is he’s not incorrect; he does make all these horrible decisions. But at least he eventually figures it out.
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Which — like when Bella gets on his case about stalking her, and disabling the engine in her car, and he apologizes and stops doing it — tells girls that if you ask a guy you’re involved with to stop creepy/disturbing behavior, he’ll just STOP.
Good luck with that in real life…
It’s the classic “Beauty and the Beast” psychological scenario; “this guy may beat and cheat on me, get drunk and beat me again, but if I love him enough, I can ‘fix’ him…”
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Noah Berlatsky says:
[Mike H. quote] “What was the old feminist “consciousness-raising” about, but telling women who’d absorbed the exploitative, dysfunctional societal version of what being a woman was all about, that they “should be different”?”
I think this is a little confused. The main point of at least a lot of feminism isn’t telling women that they need to change, but rather telling them that they need to change *society*. Feminism is not (or not primarily) a self-help movement; it’s a political program for social change.
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I’m not talking about defining the “main point of at least a lot of feminism,” but about CONSCIOUSNESS RAISING. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_raising )
A real-life scene from a Joe Sacco comic comes to mind: a Muslim woman’s rights advocate and worker in the Middle East told him of advising “traditional” women that they should have rights, greater freedom and control over their lives. The women just were amused about these “absurd” suggestions. Some consciousnesses need raising!
Re this comment of Stephenie Meyer, which a lot of feminists agree with:
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One of the weird things about modern feminism is that some feminists seem to be putting their own limits on women’s choices. That feels backward to me. It’s as if you can’t choose a family on your own terms and still be considered a strong woman. How is that empowering? Are there rules about if, when, and how we love or marry and if, when, and how we have kids? Are there jobs we can and can’t have in order to be a “real” feminist? To me, those limitations seem anti-feminist in basic principle.
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A logical extension of civil-rights activism would be that, if they want to, black folks should have the freedom to choose to be, in effect, slaves: to be treated as property, ordered about, their lives totally controlled, by their white “masters.”
Just as a woman can “choose” to follow cultural teaching, and be subservient in every way to the man who has her in wedlock, cranking out kids which demand massive amounts of care and attention, thus leading to her being extremely economically dependent upon him, no matter how big a creep he turns out to be, having to neglect caring for herself, education, advancement in a career.
How revealing that when Ann Landers asked her thoroughly middle-class readers, many years back, that if they had the choice, would they have kids again, the overwhelming response was NO.
And that was back in the days when a husband with an average job could support a stay-at-home wife and kids. These days…
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… the people who consistently rank in the worst financial trouble are united by one surprising characteristic. They are parents with children at home. Having a child is now the single best predictor that a woman will end up in financial collapse.
…married couples with children are more than twice as likely to file for bankruptcy as their childless counterparts. A divorced woman raising a youngster is nearly three times more likely to file for bankruptcy than her single friend who never had children.
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http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/3079221/ns/today-money/t/why-middle-class-mothers-fathers-are-going-broke/
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Highly skilled women will lose as much as a third of their lifetime earnings by choosing to have a child…
“Wages of women rise sharply and largely in unison in the period prior to their having children, but at almost precisely the moment they bear children, their wage profiles flatten out,” the report says.
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http://www.dailyfinance.com/2011/01/25/highly-educated-women-pay-a-high-price-to-have-children/
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* For high-skilled women, kids spell the end of raises. High-skilled women have steep wage trajectories. Those trajectories flatten out almost precisely at the moment they have children.
* Low-skilled women don’t seem to make their lost wages back. Ten years after having children, low-skilled women have wages that are six percent lower than their counterparts.
* High-skilled women don’t make that money back, either. Ten years after having children, high-skilled women have wages that are 24 percent lower than their counterparts.
* Becoming a parent seems to have no effect on men’s wages.
…Even women who take only the medically-necessary maternity leaves and go back to full-time work at their old jobs suffer a dramatic loss in wages. ..
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http://shine.yahoo.com/financially-fit/the-true-cost-of-motherhood-for-women-2482193.html
More bad news http://www.tnr.com/article/the-read/81257/women-opt-out-economy-divorce .
So, while it may be “feminist” for women to have the freedom to anything they wish, it’s common-sensical to point out that some of those choices may be counterproductive, self-destructive; leave them with a drastically circumscribed, perpetually cash-strapped future.
And yes, it would be nice if cranking out kids, changing diapers and wiping runny noses were to be highly valued as (let’s put it in a way that this Mammon-worshipping culture would respect) an important factor in producing the next crop of consumers, employees, and cannon fodder. But in a society that soundly defeated the ERA — the very idea that women should be equal under the law, entitled to equal pay for equal work, and such — and one where the right grows ever more powerful and the mildly liberal ever more weak and supine…
…good luck with that.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…Not that everybody should have kids or anything. But my wife really found them completely off-putting till we had ours; it does change your perspective.
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See “Mind Control by Parasites”: http://www.livescience.com/7019-mind-control-parasites.html
It’s just not a sign that you’re a deluded fool that you might want to have children. And the fact that society doesn’t support people who have children or respect them is a sign that society needs to change, not that people need to stop having kids. Admittedly, it’s a difficult and in some ways utopian goal…but, you know, it could be better without being perfect. Hoping that we might have a government more like Scandinavia seems a lot more realistic than demanding that women (or men for that matter) stop wanting kids.
“Which — like when Bella gets on his case about stalking her, and disabling the engine in her car, and he apologizes and stops doing it — tells girls that if you ask a guy you’re involved with to stop creepy/disturbing behavior, he’ll just STOP.
Good luck with that in real life…”
It suggests that if your boyfriend is doing creepy crap, you need to tell him that he must stop. And no, it’s not insane to think that communication in a relationship can make things better. Some men never do creepy stalker crap; some are stalkers; some (like the heroes of many a rom com) dabble. I appreciate that (unlike many a rom com) Twilight presents the dabbling as wrong and creepy (rather than as cute and winning) and says it has to stop.
It’s rather telling that the groups that are most ferociously anti-womens’-rights are also against their using birth control, being able to have abortions. They certainly are highly aware of how keeping a woman “barefoot and pregnant” serves mightly to “keep her in her place”; stuck as a caretaker, financially struggling and/or dependent on a man, having to sacrifice self-improvement in order to slave for her kids.
In other words, the total opposite of “liberated.”
And, with what cunning women were told in the Me Decade that “you can have it all” (one ad showed a smiling young woman cross-country skiing with a baby on her back): a thriving career, romantically lively marriage, interesting, intellectually stimulating life, and a passel of kids.
The propaganda-meisters perfectly aware of how the “arrival” of Baby throws such a hefty monkey-wrench into the lives of women not able to afford caretakers; dragging them back down to “their place.”
That earlier-mentioned Ann Landers column at http://www.happilychildfree.com/ann.htm …
Mike, nobody denies that motherhood is devalued. There are various places to go from there. But it doesn’t really help women to insist that their oppression is the result of motherhood, and that they are suffering from false consciousness if they want to be mothers. I suppose you could do what Shulamith Firestone does, and look towards a utopia that involves the scientific elimination of pregnancy. Firestone is great in her way as one version of a feminist radical utopian vision. As a practical program, though, there are some serious problems…not least that, as Caro says, there’s a whole tradition of feminist thought which is about trying to figure out how to revalue and honor women’s experience rather than jettisoning it. Feminism is certainly about easier access to birth control, but it’s also about easier access to day care centers, you know?
One of the reasons I asked about romance is that I’ve found that people I know who read romance are not as fond of Twilight as people who don’t. I think it’s because there’s a lot of tropes, particularly the controlling stalkerish hero and the passive heroine, that are, well, dated and found more in a romance from 1980 then one written in the last decade.
As to authors, try some Jennifer Cruise, I particularly like Bet Me. I’d also suggest Nora Roberts. I’m not a big fan of her single title romances, although one of those violent scenes that linger with me is from her book Blue Smoke, but I eat the J.D. Robb mysteries like M&M’s. (And they are pretty much the literary equivalent of M&M’s.)
On the historical side, I’d recommend Lord of Scoundrels by Loretta Chase. I think that’s especially interesting because it has a pretty overbearing hero but how it handles the relationship and his own emotional issues is very different then Twilight. (Come to think of it, the J.D. Robb books have a bit of this going on as well.)
That said, if you think that Harry Potter and The Hunger Games are worse then Twilight, I’m not sure we’re going to find much literary common ground.
I don’t much agree that easier access to day care is a “women’s issue,” but I know the mother-child dyad is the more ideologically soluble one for a whole slew of reasons, both cultural and biological (none of which is particularly satisfying). “Easier access” sounds like people who rationally chose not to have kids having to help front the bill for those who didn’t make such a rational choice. That doesn’t seem like much of a feminist message to me unless one identifies irrationalism with the feminine (e.g., an inability to resist the the ticking of the biological clock, aka biological reductionism).
Lynn, I definitely like Harry Potter less than Twilight; those books really irritate me. Hunger Games is more a wash…I may like it less at the moment just because I reread it recently. The more you can forget the prose of either of those series, the better I think. But…there are many YA series that are substantially better than any of those, from the How To Train Your Dragon books to Narnia to the Tripod Trilogy to the Earthsea books; just tons of things.
I’ve had Nora Roberts recommended before; just sort of hard to figure out which one to start with…. I may give one a try though.
Charles, the idea that anyone’s decisions about having or not having kids are “rational” is charmingly insane, as is the cute Cartesian notion that we’re all free, autonomous islands, utterly unaffected by the welfare of other people’s children. But that’s America for you.
I’m old fashioned enough to separate ‘is’ from ‘ought’. Seems to me that this country is overwhelmingly concerned with what affects children’s welfare. In fact, it can’t get enough of that topic. A feminist solution is that women shouldn’t be expected or encouraged to breed unless (1) they can afford to support the child and, of course, (2) they want to have one. It’s practical, rational and will benefit children’s welfare. The notion that we’re just slaves to impulses is part of the reason that things just keep going as they’re going. I’ll take Descartes to that any day.
Nope. This country is overwhelmingly concerned with telling itself that it cares about children’s welfare. A subtle distinction, but important.
And for the rest of your comment, what on earth are you talking about? Let’s just pretend men have nothing to do with creating children, for starters, think of women as animals, and then…what? Punitively tax anyone who isn’t rich who dares to have kids? Or should we move right to forced sterilization?
And what is this “slaves to our impulses” crap? Kids are a source of joy for many people…and they are, in fact, kind of necessary if the human race is going to continue. If you don’t want kids, don’t have kids, but a rationality that looks to a utopian future where no one will have children unless a team of economists tells them it’s okay is a rationality that’s indistinguishable from madness.
I’m not understanding what you’re disagreeing with: should people who can’t afford children have them anyway? This clearly happens, but why? I’d suggest it’s because the culture is geared towards encouraging such a thing. The default is to have kids, not to not have them. They might be sources of joy, but so are drugs. The latter is cheaper. You shouldn’t do either unless you can afford it. What’s so crazy about being responsible?
http://www.frugal-cafe.com/public_html/frugal-blog/frugal-cafe-blogzone/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/family-circus-bil-keane-car-ride-feb-11-1968.jpg
Funny how what to parents is heartwarmingly amusing — like the scene above, or some of Bill Cosby’s old comedy routines about parenthood — comes across as maddeningly hellish to those “not in the club”…
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…it doesn’t really help women to insist that their oppression is the result of motherhood…
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Motherhood is (among other things) a tool of oppression; indeed, aside from the heterosexual urge to become involved with some lout who excites, it’s THE most powerful factor keeping women subjugated.
Wouldn’t it help women to point out that they’d surely be far better off if they resisted the various forces urging them to procreate? Yes, there will be some pleasures in having kids; but do they outweigh the downside?
Just because you really want to have children (whether because of biological programming, societal/familial/peer-group pressure, because you think it might be “fun”), it’s worth keeping in mind that some wishes are best not indulged:
– Because the negative consequences (which the procreation-pushing mass media repeatedly masks, with overwhelmingly babies needing no care at all, children overwhelmingly being smart, cute, healthy, reasonably well-behaved) will likely be greater than anticipated
– Because once you have kids, there’s no going back
– Because while society pays lip service to caring about children, you’ll be significantly on your own
– And yes, it would be great if society were more supportive (just like a woman should be able to get passed-out drunk in a biker’s bar without being “taken advantage of”), but that’s unfortunately not the way the world is right now, and so it would be wise to alter your behavior to compensate
– Because 60% of marriages end in divorce, and though you’re SURE yours will be the exception, the odds are they’ll be some passing-the-kid-around in your future, arguments over child-support payments, and such
– Because their sheer “expensiveness” will keep you locked into bad jobs or relationships, because you can’t afford to go elsewhere
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Charles Reece says:
…“Easier access” sounds like people who rationally chose not to have kids having to help front the bill for those who didn’t make such a rational choice.
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Some years back, saw a young black single Mom on TV saying that we’d better pay for her to go to college so she could get a good job and support herself and her kids, or else we’d have to keep paying welfare to support them all, for the rest of their lives. Does it make one a hopeless reactionary to be resentful about getting stuck with the bill for others’ lousy, self-serving “choices”? To be an “enabler” for bad behavior, the innocent children suffering if we don’t subsidize the irresponsible mother?
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That doesn’t seem like much of a feminist message to me unless one identifies irrationalism with the feminine (e.g., an inability to resist the the ticking of the biological clock, aka biological reductionism).
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A certain amount of irrationality is part of both typical feminine and masculine behavior. What’s so rational about an aging man dumping a devoted, loving wife, and setting himself up for messy, expensive divorce proceedings, public humiliation, and court battles over who gets the kids and other property, all for the sake of a here-today-and-gone-tomorrow affair with some hot young bimbo?
The only people for whom having kids would be a rational choice is farmers: you can breed your own laborers, who only have to be given room and board, can be worked as much and arbitrarily as you wish, and whom — short of criminal abuse — you get to “own” and control until they turn 18!
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…the culture is geared towards encouraging such a thing. The default is to have kids, not to not have them.
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A co-worker of my wife said she was “going to have kids and get it over with.” Did it ever occur to this woman that she didn’t have to?
As for the encouraging of procreation, how many Hollywood movies are based on — or have a significant subplot with, as in “Jurassic Park” — the theme of “selfish childless male learns to appreciate the joys of parenthood”?
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They might be sources of joy, but so are drugs. The latter is cheaper. You shouldn’t do either unless you can afford it. What’s so crazy about being responsible?
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No, you shouldn’t let little things like lack of money keep you from having all the kids you feel like; “society needs to change” and totally support you…
“should people who can’t afford children have them anyway? ”
What does this even mean? Kids aren’t drugs or just another consumer expense. It’s more like saying, “Oh, well, you shouldn’t buy food if you can’t afford it.” Children have been central to a large number of people’s idea of what life means in every culture on the planet, just about. Whether you can “afford” them is largely a function of what kind of life you want to live. And who decides what that means? If you can’t send your kid to an expensive college, does that mean you shouldn’t have children? Who makes that decision, then?
What’s crazy about being responsible is that there’s nothing “responsible” about taking a calculator and locking yourself in Cartesian solipsism and then assuming that economics and abstracted veneration of money tells you anything about how anyone should live their lives.
Mike, it seems likely that your coworker was making a joke. Shocking I know.
And there are huge disincentives to having kids in this country, which is why our birth rate is trending lower. Not that that’s a horrible thing in itself or anything, but the idea that some sort of bizarre baby-fetishizing culture where everyone has to have kids is simply a fantasy.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
“should people who can’t afford children have them anyway? ”
What does this even mean? Kids aren’t drugs or just another consumer expense. It’s more like saying, “Oh, well, you shouldn’t buy food if you can’t afford it.”
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Sure; because if you can’t have kids, you die…!
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Children have been central to a large number of people’s idea of what life means in every culture on the planet, just about.
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So is treating women like crap; making them — as Yoko Ono put it — “the nigger of the world.”
Therefore, because something is “central to a large number of people’s idea of what life means,” doesn’t necessarily make it valid.
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What’s crazy about being responsible is that there’s nothing “responsible” about taking a calculator and locking yourself in Cartesian solipsism and then assuming that economics and abstracted veneration of money tells you anything about how anyone should live their lives.
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Yes, being rational, considering the ramifications and expenses involved in what will be the most important, irrevocable decision in most peoples’ lives is “crazy.” And gawd forbid you should expect anyone else to do likewise.
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And there are huge disincentives to having kids in this country, which is why our birth rate is trending lower.
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Sorry; the birth rate is “trending lower” among the very people here and cultures worldwide (Europe, Japan) who are best-educated, most well-off materially; the ones who could most easily afford kids.
It’s the Third World countries, impoverished slum-dwellers — who have the most “huge disincentives,” economically speaking — who are crankin’ out kids like there’s no tomorrow.
So the birth rate doesn’t go down because of “disincentives,” but because of positive factors like greater access to education, birth control, and job opportunities for women.
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It makes sense that education would impede childbearing. In nearly every country, women with more education tend to have fewer children than less-educated mothers. But new research suggests it may actually work the other way around: having more children hamstrings women’s education.
…They found that women who had children early — by their mid-20s — were much less likely to continue their education beyond the required first two years of high school; they were also less likely to achieve a higher degree later in life than women who delayed childbearing until they finished their education.
So is it education that inhibits fertility, or vice versa? “It seems to be fertility that gets in the way of education,” says Cohen. “If the opposite were true, we would not have seen that the women who put off childbearing had so much more education than the women who bore children early.”
…it might behoove governments to let young women know of the potential chilling effect of childbearing. “Young women should be informed of the likely difficulty of pursuing their education if they have children early,” says Cohen.
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Uh, unless you don’t want women to be able to compete with men on an equal basis…
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The study’s findings also underscore the need for affordable child care — and for contraception, considering that half of U.S. pregnancies are unintended. “That represents a huge social cost to the mothers and to society,” says Cohen.
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Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2011/07/05/education-impacts-fertility-or-is-it-the-other-way-around/#ixzz1eLeIXFob
The fact that the people who are best-educated have the fewest kids is a sign that the usual economic rules don’t really work very well when you’re talking about children.
Many people think kids are as important as food. And if no one has kids, the human race stops.
Here’s a thought experiment for you. Not that long ago, there were slaves in this country. People who were enslaved were seriously impoverished, and often lived in horrible conditions. Their kids faced terrible lives, and could even be sold away from their parents. So, according to your logic, the responsible, rational thing for those parents to do was to not have children, right? They were disempowered and poor, so they should have committed demographic self-genocide. The fact that they didn’t shows that they were irrational and irresponsible and were in thrall to an ideology of baby-making.
Does that logic make sense? Is it reasonable to sneer at disempowered people for refusing to rationally embrace their dehumanization? Or, as another possibility, is that logic profoundly fucked up?
The logic of the situation make sense: the white power structure needed bodies, and your biological calculus supplied it. The Catholic church likes to encourage the poor to have an endless supply of babies, too, and, in return, they’re supplied with bodies. Back when more people had to live off the land, families didn’t cherish children as little joys, they needed the future working hands. Of course, the poor have more children. Does it make sense to be living on welfare and have 8 kids in a contemporary American city? If the country is experiencing widespread starvation, does it make sense to have a kid? And, yet, you’re saying I’m a solipsist.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
The fact that the people who are best-educated have the fewest kids is a sign that the usual economic rules don’t really work very well when you’re talking about children.
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The “usual economic rules” are based on the concept that people make economic decisions rationally. Would that it were so!
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Many people think kids are as important as food.
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So that’s a defense of an argument? “Many people think” — if you can call such an emotion-based attitude — such and such, therefore it has validity?
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And if no one has kids, the human race stops.
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Yeah, you made that comment earlier. Like that’s really going to happen; in my lifetime, the Earth has gone from 3 1/2 billion people to a population of 9 billion, with no end in sight…
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Here’s a thought experiment for you. Not that long ago, there were slaves in this country. People who were enslaved were seriously impoverished, and often lived in horrible conditions. Their kids faced terrible lives, and could even be sold away from their parents. So, according to your logic, the responsible, rational thing for those parents to do was to not have children, right? They were disempowered and poor, so they should have committed demographic self-genocide. The fact that they didn’t shows that they were irrational and irresponsible and were in thrall to an ideology of baby-making.
Does that logic make sense? Is it reasonable to sneer at disempowered people for refusing to rationally embrace their dehumanization? Or, as another possibility, is that logic profoundly fucked up?
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So, their greatly adding to the wealth of their slave-owner, supplying him with ever more victims to spend their lives in thrall, was a noble thing, because they were thus keeping the black race from going extinct?
More like the typical, unthinking baby-making that goes on in every slum and refugee camp, no matter how horrendous the conditions.
While I’m not sure what the whole argument on motherhood has to do with anything here, I do have to respond to your last comment. When slavery existed there was no effective birth control and the rape of slaves by their masters was commonplace.
Seriously, it’s hard to argue that slaves had a choice when it comes to having children.
Right; Mike’s now endorsed the notion that slaves who continued to have children were deluded dupes. Charles uses fancier language, but basically is on the same page.
This is why empowerment is not the whole of feminism. If all you have is empowerment, the only thing you have to offer the disempowered is contempt. And, apparently, eugenics. Lovely.
“makes”
I should add that, in a way, it does make economic sense to have more kids on welfare. The benefits are increased. The government is paying to have more poor bodies.
And, of course, when there are fewer preventive measures, babies will increase. Fucking is one of the few pleasures that chattel slaves could enjoy.
Oh, Lynn beat me to it.
Hey Lynn. It seems a bit afield…but motherhood is fairly central to the problems people have with Bella, no?
Slaves did not have effective birth control. However, it’s far from the case that the only children born to slaves were those born as a result of rape. And Charles is up there advocating the repression of urges, yes?
Slaves obviously had very limited choices. That didn’t mean they had no choices. One of the choices they did have, to a limited extent, was having and caring for children. I contend that people who have and care for children, even when they are oppressed, even when they have very limited resources, are not deluded fools.
Has anyone read Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy? It’s got some very interesting thoughts about oppression and child-rearing.
Is Phyllis Schlafly a feminist? She recognizes, encourages and celebrates the traditional feminine roles. Being enthralled with a spawn of hell is probably too much for her, but otherwise, she’d probably like Bella.
Charles, you appear to have missed the 90s. Welfare reform? Pushed through via the joys of racial demagoguery? Via our great liberal president Bill Clinton? It’s been a great success, as you can see by looking at our nation’s galumphing inequality figures.
And I thought you were all for rational control of urges? Perhaps you could provide a chart of urges vs. oppression so we can see at exactly what point it’s acceptable for the disempowered to have sex.
Phyllis Schlafley does not identify as a feminist, is my understanding. However, Stephanie Meyer does, as Mike’s quote from further up makes clear. When you’re at the point where having a baby disqualifies you from being a feminist (which is where you appear to have landed, Charles) I would submit that you need to think seriously about what the hell you’re talking about.
I’ve been meaning to read Butler. Now I will. Thanks.
I think this is the most sensible and convincing way you’ve stated your case, Noah: “One of the choices they [slaves] did have, to a limited extent, was having and caring for children.” In hindsight, given the fact that slaves were freed, we can see that this natural choice for humans worked out in a Darwinian manner. At the time, there was no guarantee that the situation would improve, and simply advocating for biological instincts doesn’t make for a moral or rational choice. Having a child because it makes one feel good isn’t a solid basis on which to base such a decision. The child will be an individual and the parent owes a moral responsibility to that potential being.
The Xenogenesis series is really fantastic. I haven’t liked anything else by her nearly as much, but that one is great.
I would say that having and caring for children, and attempting to keep your family together, was a way of affirming one’s human dignity in the face of terrible conditions. Endemic rape, breaking up of families, and a general assault on family relations and community was one of the major ways in which slavery worked as oppression. Affirmation of family and community was a way that slaves insisted on their humanity. I don’t really think that reducing that to a rational or Darwinian calculus makes any sense at all.
Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll is probably the book to read here.
There’s a long history of people rationally attempting to tie a decrease in population to economic solvency. Thomas Malthus was promoting abstinence based on “less food than people” claims back in the 18th century–and his figures became (against his wishes) central to the birth control movement of the 19th century (esp. in England). The middle-class was also (often) consciously limiting their number of children in the 19th century in the hopes of becoming upper-middle class, well aware of the link between children and economic drain. Yup…kids cost a lot of money—and there has certainly been a concerted effort to bring “reason” to bear to limit their production in order to maintain quality of living. There was a time in India that you could get a free radio in exchange for sterilization, after all. There’s certainly some evidence, in the West, that such rationalizing has slowed down population growth…though worldwide the population continues to increase.
There are, clearly, other factors besides reason (and science…though Malthus’ “science” turned out to be problematic) that determine whether or not people have children…but this is also a factor with some frequency.
While I agree with Noah that sometimes having children can change your view of children, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it on that basis. There’re plenty of people who have children and treat them like dirt…and seem to have no love for or affection for them at all. I don’t think we should necessarily encourage child-dislikers to have kids on the off chance they might change. It’s true, they might…on the other hand, they might not, and we’re doing ok for population at the moment.
On the flip side, I’ve always preferred children to adults…If I’m at a party with both kids and adults present (and once you have kids, that’s most parties), I go straight for the kids. They’re usually doing and saying things that are more interesting and don’t tend to be as taken with small talk.
I’m doubtful that welfare reform is the reason for the current increase in inequality. It was going on before Clinton.
The disempowered should fuck all they want, just do it with protection.
And promoting possibilities for women other than baby production — i.e., not limiting their role to just that — is feminist to me. This requires that one recognizes women as rational beings, who can make choices which aren’t confined to some biological reduction. Similarly, reducing such choices to some finite sense of joy won’t get you very far down that road. Animals have kids, the females tend to take care of them — recognizing that doesn’t make one a feminist.
Promoting options is good. Shutting down options is not so good. And having kids has historically been one of the most important and meaningful options people in a wide range of societies have chosen for themselves. That’s why I said access to birth control *and* access to child care were both feminist issues. Both abortion services *and* maternity leave policies. I didn’t think this was a really controversial position to be taking. But then, I didn’t think it was controversial to suggest that it was possible to like Katniss *and* Bella. Shows what I know.
Just to be clear: what started my side of the argument was that I see child care as being about children, not a feminist issue. Conjoining the care of children with the role of women as the natural default position isn’t feminist. Women, just like men, are capable of making reasonable choices. If either the man or woman involved in the act expect that the state will care for their offspring or that such production will make them (temporarily) happier or their religion encourages it (God will see to the child), he or she shouldn’t be having kids. What to do with children once they’re here, regardless of the reasons behind their arrival, is a separate matter.
Noah,
I think you’re underestimating the way motherhood is pushed on women by the culture today. Positive media portrayals of women who choose not to have children are incredibly thin on the ground. (I never thought I’d say this, but thank you Grey’s Anatomy.) Some of the negative reaction to Bella and motherhood might simply be an “Oh no, not again!” thing.
Usually with vampires you can avoid the babies.
Plus, with the caveat that I haven’t read it, I’m only going on summaries here, isn’t it incredibly dishonest about raising kids? Isn’t the girl born smart and ages really quickly? Bella gets to have a baby and never change a diaper. That’s a pretty sweet deal but it’s not an honest one.
Charles, refusing to acknowledge women’s actual lives in the name of abstract empowerment is really, really problematic, as I’ve said repeatedly. Childbirth and child-rearing are, massively, feminist issues. Even an extremely radical feminist like Shulamith Firestone sees the uncoupling of women and children as a *utopian* goal, not as something that can be brought about by simply declaring it. Women are the ones who get pregnant, women are overwhelmingly the ones most repsonsible for child care. Therefore, children are and remain a feminist issue; pretending otherwise just gets you to a place where you’re screwing over actual women in the name of letting actual men off the hook.
Lynn, motherhood is obviously pushed in the media a lot. However, there are also a lot of strong voices who see motherhood as irrational, irresponsible, and culpably disempowering (the welfare queen meme didn’t come out of nowhere…nor did it disappear.) As Sarah Blackwood says, Bella as a teen mother is disturbing…and as Blackwood says, that’s a reason to deal with it, not reject it.
I would say that Twilight does that thing a lot of sci-fi birth stories do, and, yeah, the kid grows up too fast, which is cliched and stupid. On the other hand, (as Blackwood notes) the vision of pregnancy is horrifying and not necessarily inaccurate. The vision of child-rearing as a task involving not just the mother and father, but an extended family, also seems worthwhile to me. Sooo…I’d say it’s handling is mixed, though definitely not all dishonest or bad.
I can sympathize with both Noah and Charles’ points of view though Noah’s are more surprising in that they are so optimistic. Charles’ pessimism seems well warranted though. There’s probably no shortage of reports like this one (link) from Russia on the falling child population and “orphan factories” which is in line with the topic being discussed here.
I don’t see my view as especially optimistic. I’m not saying that children make people happy or that they’re always well treated. I just think using economic models to regulate whether the poor can or can’t or should or shouldn’t have children is more dystopic than the alternative.
But would you also stop short of specifically targeting family planning education and other related measures at those who can least afford to have multiple children (no coercion involved)? I understand there’s a school of thought which is against this as well (for example in Africa but I presume the arguments there rest on poor implementation).
That seems to be the crux of Charles’ argument: “…that women shouldn’t be expected or encouraged to breed unless (1) they can afford to support the child and, of course, (2) they want to have one. It’s practical, rational and will benefit children’s welfare.” Perhaps Charles was too absolute in his prescription – that the poor shouldn’t be encouraged to have children at all.
Well, like I said, I think access to birth control and family planning knowledge is important…especially in parts of Africa where it’s so closely tied to AIDS prevention. But I’d hope that such programs would also include things like (for example) education about breast feeding and maternity care. In practice, they often do I believe. No reason why they shouldn’t.
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Lynn says:
…When slavery existed there was no effective birth control and the rape of slaves by their masters was commonplace.
Seriously, it’s hard to argue that slaves had a choice when it comes to having children.
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No “effective birth control”? Never mind abstinence, withdrawal, or whatever, what about the many abortifacient plants ( http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_herbs_cause_abortions ) available, which surely some of the older women among the slaves would have known of?
As it turns out, Google’ing for info on those plants, discovered where the “Encyclopedia of Birth Control” informs that far from being so powerless, slaves were actually pretty damn resourceful in avoiding unwanted pregnancies and inducing miscarriages, “particularly among slave women who were more or less forced consorts of their owners.”
Details at http://tinyurl.com/d7x2rc3 ; my apologies for having underestimated their will to resist bringing forth more slaves, stronger in many cases than their wish to avoid committing “demographic self-genocide.”
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…This is why empowerment is not the whole of feminism. If all you have is empowerment, the only thing you have to offer the disempowered is contempt.
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How about offering the disempowered… power? For instance, “You don’t have to keep having baby after baby after baby; never mind what the Church and your husband says, you can do this…”
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Charles Reece says:
I should add that, in a way, it does make economic sense to have more kids on welfare. The benefits are increased. The government is paying to have more poor bodies.
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And with all the outrage over the suggestion that people in lousy conditions shouldn’t have all the kids they feel like (why, we’re pushing EUGENICS!), where is the concern for the children forced to be born into poverty, abuse, neglect? The focus is all on how wonderful, meaningful, fulfilling it will be for the parents.
Once read an account of a crackhead hooker with AIDS whose greatest wish was to have a baby. Where conservatives and liberals would come together is in fervently defending her rights to do so; where they’d diverge is that the conservatives would say, once it’s born (never mind springing for prenatal care), “you’re on your own,” and liberals insist that we MUST pay to care for that messed-up kid for the rest of its life.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…Perhaps you could provide a chart of urges vs. oppression so we can see at exactly what point it’s acceptable for the disempowered to have sex.
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Uh, you know, it is possible to have “nonprocreative” sex…
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eric b says:
There’s a long history of people rationally attempting to tie a decrease in population to economic solvency.
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Indeed, it’s well documented that the drastic drop in population due to the Black Plague resulted in a dramatic improvement in the economic situation of peasants: now more scarce, therefore more valuable:
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…lord and peasant were adjusting to the Black Death’s principal economic consequence: a much smaller agricultural labor pool. Before the plague, rising population had kept wages low and rents and prices high, an economic reality advantageous to the lord in dealing with the peasant and inclining many a peasant to cleave to demeaning yet secure dependent tenure.
As the Black Death swung the balance in the peasant’s favor, the literate elite bemoaned a disintegrating social and economic order. William of Dene, John Langland, John Gower, and others polemically evoked nostalgia for the peasant who knew his place, worked hard, demanded little, and squelched pride while they condemned their present in which land lay unplowed and only an immediate pang of hunger goaded a lazy, disrespectful, grasping peasant to do a moment’s desultory work (Hatcher, 1994).
…the rural worker indeed demanded and received higher payments in cash (nominal wages) in the plague’s aftermath. Wages in England rose from twelve to twenty—eight percent from the 1340s to the 1350s and twenty to forty percent from the 1340s to the 1360s. Immediate hikes were sometimes more drastic…The reaper, moreover, enjoyed more and larger tips in cash and perquisites in kind to supplement the wage…
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http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/Routt.Black.Death
And the horrendous circumstances of the poor in Victorian England? Greatly exacerbated due to a population explosion in that group.
No wonder that the Ruling Class is routinely “pro-Life”; the more bodies competing for jobs, the less they can pay. Moving jobs (and getting tax breaks to encourage it!) to overpopulated countries which, by an amazing coincidence, boast plenty of “cheap labor.”
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Promoting options is good. Shutting down options is not so good.
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What if you’re discouraging lousy, self-destructive options? (“Shutting down” is hardly realistic; despite all the billions spent on the “war on drugs,” inmates in prison can get any drugs they want…) Doesn’t choosing certain options sometimes mean that other options must be dropped, or become far more difficult to follow?
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And having kids has historically been one of the most important and meaningful options people in a wide range of societies have chosen for themselves.
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“Important” in what way, in that it keeps the human race — teetering on the brink of annihilation due to underpopulation, apparently — from becoming extinct?
And maybe “meaningful” in a personally warm n’ fuzzy fashion: I don’t see society giving huge respect or admiration to those who procreate — something which any animal can do — aside from baby showers and the shallow, easy bonhomie of “congratulations!”
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…refusing to acknowledge women’s actual lives in the name of abstract empowerment is really, really problematic, as I’ve said repeatedly.
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Is pointing out that having a baby — massively pushed as a win-win scenario — has dramatic, negative economic, education, lifestyle consequences, and should not be entered into (if at all) without taking that into account, “abstract empowerment” which “refus[es] to acknowledge women’s actual lives”? In which, apparently, logic and rational considerations are some nasty “Darwinian calculus”; with women “taking a calculator and locking [themselves] in Cartesian solipsism and then assuming that economics and abstracted veneration of money tells [them] anything about how [they] should live their lives.”
What a stirring defense of women that is! Is this not the equivalent of saying, “Now, don’t fret your pretty little head about nasty, silly things like money; you jes’ go ahead and do whatever makes you happy”?
For the heart-warming results of a population group where women refuse to coldly take “Darwinian calculus” and “abstracted veneration of money” into account, and just follow their hearts, check out any slum or ghetto…
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Lynn says:
…Isn’t the girl born smart and ages really quickly? Bella gets to have a baby and never change a diaper. That’s a pretty sweet deal but it’s not an honest one.
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How many sitcoms and movies even remotely hint at the onerous, messy, massive labor involved in caring for babies? One of the best educational programs I heard of involved having classes take care of a baby for one day. Afterward, one girl said, “I had no idea it was so much WORK!”
And this was a whole class being the caretaker, not one isolated mother…
Mike, we’ve once again reached the point where I’m not reading all that. But:
“”You don’t have to keep having baby after baby after baby; never mind what the Church and your husband says, you can do this…””
Sometimes women want to have babies themselves. Insisting that the only empowering choice is not to have children is not in fact empowering. It’s just another way to tell people who are disempowered what to do.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…Insisting that the only empowering choice is not to have children is not in fact empowering.
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“Only”; where did I say that? More like (in support of that group of sourpuss feminists who didn’t bow in reverence before the power of the almighty womb, and were attacked for it) “…while it may be ‘feminist’ for women to have the freedom to anything they wish, it’s common-sensical to point out that some of those choices may be counterproductive, self-destructive; leave them with a drastically circumscribed, perpetually cash-strapped future.”
There are women married to rich guys in love with the idea of a big family; who will find making that fantasy a reality by crankin’ out lots of kids very profitably empowering indeed!
In the Third World, producing lots of sons aids significantly to a woman’s power and prestige.
…And history is full of those cunning, manipulative “power behind the throne” mothers who, though they could not rule themselves, controlled their male children, manipulated them into positions of power…
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It’s just another way to tell people who are disempowered what to do.
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Though your heart’s in the right place, isn’t it a bit condescending and paternalistic to keep defining groups thus? One of the bits I ran across researching earlier:
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How Did Slaves Resist Slavery?
…The most common form of resistance available to slaves was what is known as “day-to-day” resistance, or small acts of rebellion. This form of resistance included sabotage, such as breaking tools or setting fire to buildings. Striking out at a slave owner’s property was a way to strike at the man himself, albeit indirectly.
Other methods of day-to-day resistance were feigning illness, playing dumb, or slowing down work. Both men and women faked being ill to gain relief from their harsh working conditions. Women may have been able to feign illness more easily–they were expected to provide their owners with children, and at least some owners would have wanted to protect the childbearing capacity of their female slaves. Slaves could also play on their masters’ and mistresses’ prejudices by seeming to not understand instructions. When possible, slaves could also decrease their pace of work.
Women more often worked in the household and could sometimes use their position to undermine their masters…. women may have resisted against their special burden under slavery—having to provide slaveholders with more slaves by bearing children…many slave owners were convinced that female slaves had ways of preventing pregnancy.
…most slaves resisted the only way they could—through individual actions. But slaves also resisted the system of slavery through the formation of a distinctive culture and through their religious beliefs, which kept hope alive in the face of such severe persecution.
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http://afroamhistory.about.com/od/slavery/a/How-Did-Slaves-Resist-Slavery_2.htm
Some people are disempowered. Pretending that that is not true isn’t especially helpful to anyone.
In fact, no one is fully actualized in their empowerment. I’m certainly not, nor anywhere close.
Day to day resistance by slaves is inspiring, but it doesn’t mean those people weren’t oppressed.
The last episode of Walking Dead covered this topic. Lori, lead character Rick’s wife, is pregnant but wants to abort for the reason that raising a child in a zombie apocalypse is no life at all. Rick says, without much argument for his side, that she shouldn’t think like that. But Noah’s argument could fill in Rick’s thought bubble: to maintain some memory of their previous way of life, so that some semblance of their fading culture should survive, Lori should have the child. I think at this point the question of feminism becomes superficial, because they’re really talking about something a whole lot deeper, the continued existence of the species itself. Culture, community, law, et al. are already dead (you might call them living dead), and really this is about whether pure animal survival is worth the trouble given the memory of how humans had previously transcended base level living. At this point, rationalism becomes superficial, too: the species just keeps on or dies. If you’ve read the comic, the decision to have the child becomes a huge problem, not so much because of the moral questions involved, but because it slows her down. (The show is pretty bad, but I continue to watch the thing, because the comic is entertaining enough.)
It’s the absolutism the term connotes I object to. From dictionary.com:
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dis·em·pow·er
to deprive of influence, importance, etc.: Voters feel they have become disempowered by recent political events.
Matching Quote
“It is easy to see how adolescence becomes so frustrating, and old age so abhorrent, to many people. The life line is disempowered at two major points: at the beginning and at the end. The only acceptable place is in the middle. Power is conferred only on adults. It is denied to youth and seniors.”
-Virginia Satir
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It’s not having power drastically reduced, but for all practical purposes eliminated.
Which therefore leads, if you think of African-Americans as “disempowered,” to assume they are utterly helpless to change their condition; are not to be held accountable for any dysfunctional behavior among them; are totally dependent on the largess of white society to improve their lot…
Kudos for bringing zombies into this, Charles…!
Come to think of it, there’s a cartoon which ties it all together: http://www.slowpokecomics.com/strips/mombies.html
Mike, the term is often used in a less absolute manner. That’s how I’m using it.
Charles, I tried the comic and wasn’t really that taken with it. I do think any discussion of child rearing is about the existence of the species to some degree. And it seems like feminism matters even in the face of the zombie apocalypse; surely if her husband forced her to have the baby (or forced her to have an abortion) that would be wrong.
One of the interesting thing about the Butler series is the way she manages to suggest that even in the face of a fairly thoroughgoing apocalypse, gender and racial animosities and power imbalances are still really important. Romero gets at that in his Dead films as well, I think.
The Hunger Games and Twilight and Harry Potter tend to either just ignore those issues or else deal with them quite stupidly. (One) difference between good pulp art and mediocre pulp art, I guess….
The more I think about it, the more surprised I am that the Xenogenesis books don’t come up in these discussions more often. They really are entirely accessible YA novels, and they are sooooo much better than any of these other series.
The basic idea of the series is that aliens come to earth, conquer everyone, and essentially mate with earthlings through genetic manipulation. So the world is in some sense turned into a peaceful utopia, but on the other hand it’s done through what can be seen as the extermination of the human race. The aliens are portrayed throughout as essentially the good guys, too — though obviously you have a lot of sympathy for the humans as well. It’s brilliant. I really need to read it again.
Ha! I can’t enough of zombies … or vampires.
That description makes me really want to read it, Noah. Sounds great!
“And it seems like feminism matters even in the face of the zombie apocalypse; surely if her husband forced her to have the baby (or forced her to have an abortion) that would be wrong.”
Battlestar Galactica covered this one: down to a population of 60,000 and dwindling (due to the Cylon apocalypse), the feminist president went against her own previous view and outlawed abortion. No more women, no more feminism, you know? (This show went to shit when it turned to God to save them and became something of a racialist parable, but the first 2 seasons are pretty solid.) I’m real interested in how Butler twists all this around.
Kirkman is pretty good at plotting, but not so good with character dynamics. My way of reading the series is to skip a bunch of father-son dialogue and the like. I figured the advantage of the limited time a tv show would have to tell the story is that it would cut out a bunch of the repetitive “I won’t let anything happen to you, son” bullshit, but the producers decided to deemphasize the violence (argh!).
Counting on a tv series to cut out the father/son whining is a serious tactical error.
Yep. Optimism does me no good.
I just ordered Butler’s trilogy for 50 cents from Amazon. Can’t beat that price.
As long as I’m recommending, you should read John Christopher’s Tripod trilogy. It’s kind of a nice compliment; also about aliens taking over, but the aliens are much more clearly the bad guys…and also much more clearly analogous to human imperialists. The second book, The City of Gold and Lead, is a really fantastic take on slavery. The view of the liberal enlightened alien master is particularly, pricelessly vicious.
Christopher and Butler just have an infinitely better grasp on imperialism and resistance than Susan Collins does. The Hunger Games’ political world-building is really wretched.
I’ve just been skimming this — I’m not even sure how to respond to the idea that wanting and having and loving children is anti-feminist. I think I’ll let Gloria Steinem speak for me:
I’m not sure anyone has claimed that having and loving children is anti-feminist. I certainly haven’t. For my part, it’s neither inherently feminist or anti-feminist. Merely recognizing that women can be mothers isn’t a feminist position.
Except Gloria Steinem disagrees with you. And so does just about every other feminist I can think of. Recognizing the biological and social bases by which women are identified as women, for both better and worse — is central to almost any feminist analysis I can think of. Motherhood isn’t the only one of those bases, but it’s a pretty important one.
Is there some feminist author you’re reading in particular who is making this argument that women are best served by denying the importance of particularly female experiences in feminism? Because to me it sounds kind of crazy.
Mike said this “What a stirring defense of women that is! Is this not the equivalent of saying, ‘Now, don’t fret your pretty little head about nasty, silly things like money; you jes’ go ahead and do whatever makes you happy’?” and I think the Revaluing Economics essay Steinem mentions in the quote is a good rebuttal to that.
The problem is with what is valued, and the way it is valued, and the biases against women’s experience in those values themselves. Feminists should not be derogatting motherhood or any other aspect of the constellation of values that come from women’s historical experience, women’s ways of being and knowing in the world.
Feminism is about changing what power means so it is more available to women, not just giving people with vaginas access to the existing same-old-same-old power structures. It’s not about diversity of bodies; it’s about breaking down hierarchies that discriminate against people who do the kinds of work and make the kinds of choices that women disproportionately make. It’s not just about giving women’s access to the men’s world; it’s about changing the men’s world so it does not devalue the kinds of behaviors and values and, most importantly, responsibilities and work that have traditionally been gendered female.
That’s why it’s radical. Or at least, that’s why it was radical, back in the day when people listened to Gloria Steinem. :|
…and now I’ve bought the Butler’s Xenogenesis book too. Maybe we can do a roundtable at some point if other people pick it up….
Caro’s point is why this discussion needs to be more linked to larger issues. We would easily be able to “afford” good daycare and child services, for instance, if we sliced our defense budget in half, but patriarchal societies have long valued (and funded) war and violence (stereotypically “masculine” activities), while devaluing (and not funding) childrearing and childcare (stereotypically feminine). The feminist notion is not just to say “women should be able to fight on the frontlines with men”–but to critique the whole notion that “fighting on the frontlines” is somehow a productive and useful allocation of our resources and values. In this sense…yes, “caring and nurturing and childrearing” are “stereotypical” feminine traits and it is perhaps offensive to stereotype in that fashion…but the feminist argument can also be to attack and devalue a society built on stereotypically masculine values that simply doesn’t work for women (or for anyone, really). It’s not about “participation” in the crappy society that already exists, but about a transformation of that society by ceasing to devalue the (stereotypically) feminine. Saying “just a homemaker” is part of that devaluing–which allows society to basically not pay for work that has to be done (as Friedrich Engels said). So, the notion that kids cost too much money and therefore we should avoid reproducing so much may have some tiny kernel of truth to it…but when you look at where we are spending our resources, it starts to look like a pretty silly argument.
Noah, it’s neither necessary (you can be a feminist and not have children, nor like them, and you can even dismiss motherhood as a meaningful role for women) nor sufficient (Schlafly has kids, is concerned about them, recognizes that motherhood is a crucial role that women play, but isn’t a feminist). I don’t know what more I can say about it. How about: you can be feminist and a stay at home mom, too. Some mothers are feminists, some aren’t. I don’t see how Bella is a feminist depiction, however.
You’re changing the ground. The question isn’t whether all mothers are feminist, or whether all feminists are mothers. The question is whether you can show me an example of an actual feminist theorist who argues that women and motherhood should be conceptually separated as a means of advancing feminism. I can’t think of anyone. The closest I can get is Firestone, who believes as a utopian goal that women and motherhood should be separated, but believes that to get there we need scientific advances that actually make pregnancy irrelevant.
Meyer seems to think that Bella is a feminist depiction, and I’m inclined to agree with her. As some examples: stalking is presented as bad, and not to be tolerated; the choice about whether to have a baby is insistently and definitively placed with the mother; the ideal relationship is presented as being one of absolute and eternal equality. In addition, motherhood is itself presented as something of a superpower, and as an almost transcendent alternative to conflict. All of those are much, much more well-attested as traditional feminist themes than the frankly wacky idea that women will be liberated if we all cover our ears and declare loudly over and over that women and motherhood have nothing to do with each other.
I said nothing about all feminists being mothers, or vice versa (that would be you trying to switch the argument). I just gave you a logical argument why the simple acts of recognizing motherhood as woman’s role, and the need to care for children aren’t inherently feminist positions. I don’t need an appeal to authority — logic takes care of that. Because they’re conceptually separate, being a mother, recognizing motherhood as a woman’s role and/or childcare aren’t going to necessarily advance feminism (history should demonstrate this). Any feminist argument about motherhood I’ve ever encountered, such as the current one regarding Bella, is about the proper feminist take on motherhood, not merely the obvious recognition that motherhood is feminine. As best as I can tell, the feminists objecting to Twilight don’t like what it says about motherhood and this particular woman’s relation to it as a message to the girls who seem to really being taking it to heart. They’re not saying that motherhood itself is inherently anti-feminist, which seems to be your basic summary of their position. And now you’re trying to read my own take as that, too. You’re wrong on both counts.
Eric had such a great way of putting it: “The feminist notion is not just to say “women should be able to fight on the frontlines with men” – but to critique the whole notion that “fighting on the frontlines” is somehow a productive and useful allocation of our resources and values.”
In order for the critique of how we allocate resources and values to be specifically feminist, it has to start from women’s experiences, present and historical, including but not limited to motherhood and childrearing. You can critique the allocation of resources and values from a lot of vantage points, but if you want a feminist critique, you have to start from women’s lives. ALL women’s lives — including the ones who do not necessarily self-identify as feminists.
So I would say, Charles, (to return to the narrower issue) that it is in fact necessary for a feminist to value motherhood to at least some extent, even if not as the right choice for her. It is simply too big a part of the range of women’s lived experience. A feminist who devalues women’s experiences, including motherhood, has a contradiction there, because that’s a feminist devaluing women. Pointing that out is caretaking.
I think it’s important to realize that feminism is a living idea, not something so bound to its historical moment of inception that it can’t evolve in response to changing circumstances, with its eyes always on the goals of making the world better for women. In the ’70s and ’80s especially, feminists did indeed position themselves against “motherhood snobbery”, where women who choose not to have children were looked down on, generally by other women. Feminism spent a lot of type and breath getting tradition-minded women to respect the decisions of women who eschewed those traditions. Feminists rightly championed women’s right not to be mothers, in a society that insisted women had to be. But now there are a lot of “empowered” women who were blessed enough to grow up after the Second Wave fought that battle against motherhood snobbery. And now we have, I guess “Feminist Snobbery” — essentially the same situation in reverse. We need to remind “empowered” women not to look down in turn on women who choose tradition.
That’s not to say that the issue isn’t difficult. The choices we face regarding domesticity and motherhood are deeply loaded, highly emotional and extremely divisive issues for women — and thus they are loaded, emotional and divisive within feminism.
People’s beliefs are very influenced by their own psychological and emotional perspective and their particular intellectual and socio-cultural biases. We often believe contradictory things, or fail to think through the implication of beliefs. So of course individuals can call themselves “feminist” and think pretty much any way they want. There’s no entrance exam, whereby every woman who wants to embrace the label “feminist” has to be 100% feminist, thinking proper feminist thoughts about all possible topics. There really aren’t that many “proper” feminist thoughts — multiplicity and contradiction are “feminine” values. But that means feminism never gets quite as simple or axiomatic as a lot of people would like it to be. It always has to deal with the tensions and contradictions and difficulties of living as a woman.
But recognizing that doesn’t mean it’s wrong to remind feminists to think a little more, especially smart, educated, privileged empowered feminists who have tremendous means at their disposal to reconcile all the contradictions of modern female-ness. It’s not wrong to remind people who care about feminism as a political and social and philosophical movement to be attentive to those larger issues, to the wider range of women’s experiences, present and past, including but not limited to motherhood, and to the political implications of whatever we say and think and do about motherhood.
In other words, women absolutely do not have to choose motherhood. But feminism does absolutely have to be pro-mothers, because those mothers are women too.
Not “Feminist snobbery”. “Empowerment snobbery.” Sort of like Richard said — empowerment is the new inviolable value, but that’s a problem, because feminism was supposed to be about giving women more choice, not making new rules for them.
Here’s another really interesting article on Breaking Dawn that raises a related set of points: http://www.femininethings.org/2011/11/twilight-breaking-dawn-pt-1-and.html
Oh, for fuck’s sake, people.
This conversation had gone all over globe, and I’m sorry I got involved in the slavery diversion, but has completely ignored the deeply screwed up core of these books.
Bella is 18, 18, barely out of high school when she gets married and has a kid. That kills her. Yes, the kid kills her. Everyone seems to be skipping over that fact.
Celebrate motherhood all you want. She’s a teenager. A teenager.
God, the way people twist themselves into pretzels to defend this series is infuriating. And getting lectured by a man that the reason we don’t like Bella is because we somehow hate our own femininity is even more infuriating.
Well, various women have said the same thing as me, more or less. You can read Sarah Blackwood’s article or Caro’s comments if you don’t like mine. Melinda Beasi, who I linked in the original article, says something similar. The article Caro just linked says something similar. Here’s a quote from it.
The writer adds:
Which I think is right…and is similar to what you said before, which I also agreed with. The problem isn’t that Bella’s 18 and decides to have a life-risking pregnancy; the problem is that the choice as presented is too easy.
And Charles, I was suggesting you think about feminist theory because, like Caro says, feminism is a historical phenomena and a tradition. Abstract logic only gets you so far, real life is messy. I’m the last person to tell you you shouldn’t talk about something even if you haven’t really read up on it, but it’s worth thinking about the fact that feminism really is a tradition and a body of thought, and coming at it from the position “it doesn’t really matter what feminists have said, I can recreate the whole thing via logic” might be a somewhat problematic way to approach it. You’re currently at a much more extreme position than anyone I’ve seen comment on Twilight; you’re saying that feminism shouldn’t see childcare or mother’s issues as feminist. Which flies in the face of basically the entire history of feminism. So it seems like you should either find some feminist somewhere who agrees with you, or else take the position that all the feminists in history have been misguided, or else maybe think about whether the position you’re taking actually has anything to do with feminism.
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eric b says:
…the notion that kids cost too much money and therefore we should avoid reproducing so much may have some tiny kernel of truth to it…but when you look at where we are spending our resources, it starts to look like a pretty silly argument.
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“Some tiny kernel of truth to it”? Did you see all the quotes and links I posted about how massively financially damaging to women — who, by an amazing coincidence, end up overwhelmingly getting “the dirty end of the stick” — having children is?
And, good luck with getting society to alter where it spends its resources; a moderate conservative like Obama struggles to get a watered-down, compromised national health insurance passed (is the thing still alive?), and here we’re getting all these pie-in-the-sky idealistic arguments about how society should value the mind-numbing shitwork that is raising kids as much as we do being a pro football or pop entertainment star, or industrialist, and give mothers all these financial perks.
(What makes a significant difference is that any uneducated, unintelligent drudge can do an adequate job of raising kids. Studies with separated-at-birth identical twins raised by very different parents who grew up to be pretty much identical character-wise have depressingly proved that, unless they’re grossly abusive, what parents contribute to their children is hardly uniquely special. However shallow most of what society values is, it requires more than mediocre abilities, something more that what Joe or Jane Average are capable of.)
…and the fact hat even women married to supposedly “enlightened” guys and up doing 70% of the housework and childrearing labor.
Why let unpleasant realities about the grossly flawed world we live in right now and its atrocious injustices get in your way? Go ahead and have those babies; maybe you’ll get a packet of cash and a robot housekeeper sent through a time-travel portal by the woman-valuing civilization of 3012 to help you meet your bills.
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Caro says:
…We need to remind “empowered” women not to look down in turn on women who choose tradition.
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If feminism is about lots of “freedom to choose,” is it a victory for feminism if a woman “chooses” tradition; namely staying at home, utterly dependent on the man ’round whose sun she orbits, keeping house and cranking out kids? (Re the last two, the attempts to glorify them are amusing: “mothers would make great business executives, because raising kids requires multitasking!“)
What if, moreover, the guy is an abusive, drunken cheater? A loafer who can’t hold on to a job and makes her support him? Is it “not feminist” to look down upon that “choice”?
And this “choose” is a highly dubious word; in a country where half of all pregnancies are unplanned, it implies a conscious decision. Never mind how much biological drives, family, cultural, societal, peer-group pressures are involved beneath the surface of consciousness.
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Young Florida woman chooses baby’s life over her own
Miami, Fla., Jun 15, 2010 / 07:17 am (CNA).- The story of Benny Abreu, a young woman from the Dominican Republic, has moved Floridians because of her testimony to motherly love. The Florida woman suffered from serious heart problems and preferred to die rather than abort the baby she was carrying.
Abreu, 25, graduated from Florida Central University at the beginning of May and decided to continue with her pregnancy, knowing that her serious heart condition could lead to complications.
According to Florida’s La Prensa newspaper, she never considered the possibility of abortion and saw her pregnancy as a blessing.
“The doctor told her she had to abort if she wanted to survive, but she told him no, that she could not kill her baby and that she was going to continue with her pregnancy,” said Martha Motley, the baby’s grandmother.
On May 17, Abreu gave birth to her son but her condition worsened. She was transferred to Shands Hospital in Gainesville, which specializes in cardiology, where she died on May 30…
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http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/young-florida-woman-chooses-to-die-rather-than-abort-baby/
What a “testimony to motherly love”! Not to mention, a victory for feminism, because she “chose” to continue with her pregnancy.
(Good thing she had a university education, too; funny how Baby trumps all that book l’arnin’…)
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Tennessee Woman Chooses Child’s Life over Her Own
NASHVILLE, March 2, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) – On Thursday, February 15, at the age of 31, Jennifer Ann Carlisle gave up her life to cancer after refusing an abortion that doctors told her might have extended her life.
Jennifer had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2005. At two months gestation, long before any chance of saving the child’s life outside the womb, Jennifer was told that she would die from the soccer ball-sized tumour if she did not abort the baby.
“Even though the doctors did say it would extend her life to have the abortion, she and her husband made the decision to let God choose,” said Carol Day, Jennifer’s mother.
“They decided God would make that decision, not her,” Jennifer’s aunt, Jackie Murdock, told the Niles Daily Star. “She wouldn’t decide somebody else’s life.”
Murdock recalled her niece saying, “Whether she lives or dies she will not abort her baby.”
Gabriel Carlisle was born in January 2006 and Jennifer underwent aggressive chemotherapy but after a brief summer remission, her condition worsened. She attended church services Sunday February 11, and died the following week.
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http://www.theologyweb.com/campus/showthread.php?93443-Woman-chooses-her-unborn-baby-s-life-over-her-own-liberals-wail-and-gnash-teeth&s=2e5d864d6fc9a6e2b456cb8a690141f7
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…my sister Erica was very clear to me and to everyone else regarding her recent pregnancy: if it came down to Erica or the baby, she would accept no choice that limited the chances of a successful delivery of a healthy child. If that meant she had to die or have seriously compromised health, even if it resulted in permanent disability, she’d do it. Save the baby.
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http://www.femininethings.org/2011/11/twilight-breaking-dawn-pt-1-and.html
Also…my wife’s mom was married when she was 18 and had a child when she was 19. It seems like feminism should have something more to say to her than, “Your life choices are unacceptable.”
“If feminism is about lots of “freedom to choose,” is it a victory for feminism if a woman “chooses” tradition; namely staying at home, utterly dependent on the man ’round whose sun she orbits, keeping house and cranking out kids?”
It’s a victory when all women’s choices are respected. I know a number of women who stay at home raising their children. They aren’t dependent on their husbands; they are working with them. They aren’t cranking out kids; they’re raising a family. And when women choose to die for their children, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re brainwashed fools. Maybe it means they’re human beings who believe that there is something more valuable out there than their own lives. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t put my life on the line for an unborn child, but that doesn’t mean I have to assume that I’m a better person than someone who would.
When you sneer at women’s choices, presenting them as animals or machines rather than as human beings, you’re not using the discourse of feminism. You’re using the discourse of misogyny. Claiming you’re doing so for women’s own good just puts you in the long line of men who have claimed to know better than women what women should do with their own lives.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Charles…You’re currently at a much more extreme position than anyone I’ve seen comment on Twilight; you’re saying that feminism shouldn’t see childcare or mother’s issues as feminist. Which flies in the face of basically the entire history of feminism…
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What he actually said was:
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Charles Reece says:
…I just gave you a logical argument why the simple acts of recognizing motherhood as woman’s role, and the need to care for children aren’t inherently feminist positions.
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(Emphasis added)
From dictionary.com:
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in·her·ent
existing in someone or something as a permanent and inseparable element, quality, or attribute
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…So it seems like you should either find some feminist somewhere who agrees with you, or else take the position that all the feminists in history have been misguided, or else maybe think about whether the position you’re taking actually has anything to do with feminism.
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Here we go:
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French philosopher says feminism under threat from ‘good motherhood’
Ecologists, breastfeeding advocates and behavioural specialists making women ‘slave to their children’, says Elisabeth Badinter
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/feb/12/france-feminism-elisabeth-badinter
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She’s revered as a trail-blazing feminist and author Alice Walker touched the lives of a generation of women. A champion of women’s rights, she has always argued that motherhood is a form of servitude. But one woman didn’t buy in to Alice’s beliefs – her daughter, Rebecca, 38. [She writes:]
The truth is that I very nearly missed out on becoming a mother – thanks to being brought up by a rabid feminist who thought motherhood was about the worst thing that could happen to a woman.
You see, my mum taught me that children enslave women. I grew up believing that children are millstones around your neck, and the idea that motherhood can make you blissfully happy is a complete fairytale.
…My mother’s feminist principles coloured every aspect of my life. As a little girl, I wasn’t even allowed to play with dolls or stuffed toys in case they brought out a maternal instinct. It was drummed into me that being a mother, raising children and running a home were a form of slavery. Having a career, travelling the world and being independent were what really mattered according to her.
…I meet women in their 40s who are devastated because they spent two decades working on a PhD or becoming a partner in a law firm, and they missed out on having a family. Thanks to the feminist movement, they discounted their biological clocks. They’ve missed the opportunity and they’re bereft.
…Feminism has betrayed an entire generation of women into childlessness. It is devastating…
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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1021293/How-mothers-fanatical-feminist-views-tore-apart-daughter-The-Color-Purple-author.html#ixzz1eXIlhI7h
One of the earliest feminist movements focused on other areas than “childcare or mother’s issues”:
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“Suffragette[s]”…wanted to be involved in the running of the country and they wanted to be treated as equals to men.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffragist
Understandable, since societies worldwide have stereotyped women as nothing much more than mothers and carers-for-children; “straitjacketing by definition.”
Here’s an “interesting” development:
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New feminism is a predominantly Catholic philosophy which emphasizes a belief in an integral complementarity of men and women, rather than the superiority of men over women or women over men.
New feminism, as a form of difference feminism, supports the idea that men and women have different strengths, perspectives, and roles, while advocating for the equal worth and dignity of both sexes. Among its basic concepts are that the most important differences are those that are biological rather than cultural. New Feminism holds that women should be valued as child bearers, home makers but also as individuals with equal worth to men.
The term was originally used in Britain in the 1920s to distinguish New feminists from traditional mainstream suffragist feminism. These women, also referred to as welfare feminists, were particularly concerned with motherhood, like their opposite numbers in Germany at the time…New feminists campaigned strongly in favour of such measures as family allowances paid directly to mothers. They were also largely supportive of protective legislation in industry…
New feminists were opposed mainly by young women, especially those in the Six Point Group…who saw this as a retrograde step towards the separate spheres ideology of the 19th century. They were particularly opposed to protective legislation, which they saw as being in practice restrictive legislation, which kept women out of better-paid jobs on the pretext of health and welfare considerations.
…New Feminists believe that whether or not they do it well, women are physically structured to be mothers; to develop life with their wombs. They purport the idea that the physical capacity gives rise to psychological, spiritual and emotional characteristics that women would need to be mothers…Only women are created with a physical empty space inside of themselves that’s designed to receive another. Every time they conceive, they give a gift of self – their own bodies – so that others, their children, can receive the gift of life. “A woman’s entire being is oriented toward receiving and nurturing new life.”…
For New Femininsts, being a man means being a father…
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_feminism
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Noah Berlatsky says:
It’s a victory when all women’s choices are respected…When you sneer at women’s choices, presenting them as animals or machines rather than as human beings, you’re not using the discourse of feminism. You’re using the discourse of misogyny. Claiming you’re doing so for women’s own good just puts you in the long line of men who have claimed to know better than women what women should do with their own lives.
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Just because one can defend the right of someone to have the freedom to make choices, doesn’t mean that those choices are all deserving of equal respect. (“Every choice gets a gold star, including to value the life of a fetus over your own, or be used as a punching bag by your alcoholic boyfriend!”) Countless choices are idiotic and destructive, deserving to be sneered at. That I sneer reflects not misogyny, but hatred of stupidity.
And you’re saying that “women [know better] what women should do with their own lives”? Are you therefore counting the advice of Phyllis Schlaflys and other right-wing women as superior to your own ideas, because anything coming from males — our being such an utterly alien, different species — is therefore suspect?
Is it a victory, then, when all men’s choices are respected? When he dumps his devoted, loving wife for some young silicone-inflated bimbo, or brings STDs from his cheating to the marital bed, or takes his feelings of inadequacy out violently, spends his money on sports cars and gambling rather than child support, are those to be valued, because if we don’t cheer but sneer, we’re “using the discourse of misandry”?
There’s no such thing as misandry. The whole point of feminism is that under patriarchy, people are unequal. Choices that oppress women are not equal to choices by women about their own lives. No one needs to defend men’s choices, because men just get a ton more support for their choices as it is.
And obviously you can dispute various choices that various people make. If, though, you’re insisting that the vast majority of women throughout history and even today are stupid and even repulsive dupes, then, yes, you’re being misogynist.
When you refer to childbearing as “cranking out kids” you’re expressing a disgust with women’s bodies that is definitely misogynist, and which plugs into a long history of denigrating women through denigrating their bodies. It’s really unpleasant, and I’m asking you to cut it out if you want to continue having this conversation.
I keep waiting for either you or Charles to engage in any meaningful way with anything either Caro or Eric has said. It’s a good thing I’m not holding my breath, I guess.
I’d be interested to see something by Alice Walker making this argument rather than an article in a scandal sheet making it for her. People often act in their lives in ways they wouldn’t necessarily back in argument. Still, the article and her daughter do manage to explain fairly clearly why this position might be a problem for feminism.
Walker also isn’t saying that childrearing should not be a feminist issue. She’s saying she doesn’t want her daughter to have children. Those are fairly distinct statements. If you can find someone arguing that advocating for childcare, or attempting to provide services for women who are mothers, is not a feminist issue and actually hurts feminism, I’d be interested to see it.
I think Charles moved his position somewhat from earlier; thanks for pointing that out. Originally I said, providing childcare is a feminist issue. Charles responded by saying:
That’s a much more hardline position than the claim he’s now making, which is that recognizing motherhood as a women’s role isn’t inherently feminist. I never argued that it was. So perhaps he’s come around to my position, and we agree. My position again would be:
—women at the moment are disproportionately involved in childrearing
—women’s experience historically has disproportionately involved them in childrearing
— therefore, it is a feminist position to advocate for children and to advocate for the value of childrearing, with all that implies in terms of resources, because such advocacy has historically been, and remains, a way to help women
— it is also, and not at all a contradictory feminist position, to advocate for women’s right to work and for men’s responsibility to care for children
All of which also links to Caro and Eric’s point that valuing women’s experiences as a springboard for changing the world has long been central to feminism — a point, again, which neither of you seems to be able to even acknowledge, much less respond to.
Anyway, this has been fun, but I’ve got to get ready to head out of town for the holiday. Have a good thanksgiving all. See you Monday! (Unless internet access where I’m going works better than I think it will.)
As a fan of fascist cinema, I really appreciate the way Diana (from Caro’s link) goes to the trouble of separating the imaginary control of variables in a fantasy narrative from the realworld where people will interpret political implications from the fantasy. One where she doesn’t quite draw out this distinction as much as I’d prefer is here:
Everyone knows Meyer is a practicing Mormon, and (what I know from the movies or what friends have told me about the books) there’s nothing in her stories that allegorically contradicts a conservative Mormon worldview (fucking or marrying vampires probably forbidden). I’ve yet to see the new film, but what this badgering to have an abortion can easily play into is the realworld conspiratorial fantasy of conservative Christians where the secular world is badgering them into violating their beliefs, trying to force their women into killing babies (as if they’re a persecuted minority). On the other hand, one of the values (and dangers) of horror fiction is that it can often get you to empathize with an affect that you might not normally have, and from a radically different worldview. It’s possible that Meyer is a feminist within a conservative Mormon situation, but (to relate this to the debate over Noah’s essay) that doesn’t mean other feminists aren’t correct for arguing it isn’t particularly feminist. Nor are they anti-motherhood, or expressing empowerment snobbery, for being opposed to a fantasy that fits pretty neatly into a conservative religious tradition that has hardly been what most feminists would call feminist. Contrary to Diana, Noah seems to need for the story to agree with him ideologically to justify his liking it, so he goes through a lot of backflips and reductions of others’ arguments to get there.
Anyway, I don’t find myself disagreeing with anything Caro wrote, with the possible exception of this:
There are many kinds of mothers, so abstractly being pro-mother would make hash of being able to separate good mothering from bad. I think that this abstraction is what’s leading to the misunderstanding of Noah’s here:
Mike understood me, so I know I’m being completely unclear. No, I can’t think of any feminists who agree with the above, but I don’t need to, because I’m not suggesting any such thing. My appeal to logic wasn’t to dismiss the history of feminism (which, granted, I haven’t read as much as Noah or Caro, but I do read feminist thinkers), but to clearly separate motherhood and childcare from feminist perspectives on motherhood and childcare. Conflating these is what I found problematic in Noah’s reactions to his critics.
All clear? Probably not.
More stuff has been added, which I haven’t read. But have a good holiday.
Noah wants me to respond to Eric. The reason I didn’t was that his post didn’t seem particularly opposed to my own view, or directly related to what I’ve written here. I agree that war and violence are stereotypically masculine and childcare is stereotypically feminine. And, in terms of stereotype, opposing or supporting one or the other can be read as stereotypically masculinist or feminist. But many men believe strongly in the value of raising children and many women are strong supporters of war. Conservative traditional/patriarchal families can be quite large, populated with numerous children. I don’t have a problem with a feminist taking a position on that, or calling her take ‘feminist’. My problem is with taking the stereotype as a default ‘ought’ position, that because a man is for some particular war, he ought to read as inherently masculinist, or because a woman is for having and caring for a child, she ought to read as inherently feminist and that a rejection of either of these positions is, respectively, anti-masculinist or anti-feminist.
It’s unfortunate that you conflate historical feminine goals and attitudes (motherhood, nurturing) with historically misogynist stereotypes of femininity (passivity, incompetence, irrationality). I don’t care much about Twilight one way or another but some of the backlash against your arguments may be attributed to your failure to distinguish between those two sets of beliefs — a novel that glorifies love, responsibility and the hard work of relationship-building is not the same as a novel that glorifies, and presents as normative, obsessiveness, irrationality and apathy towards everything except an idealised love object. Now I don’t know if Twilight can fairly be read to promote those stereotypes or if Bella Swann has those characteristics. The problem is that you seem to be saying that, even if she does, those characteristics are feminine and so to be celebrated. That isn’t feminism. Revaluing the feminine mean reasserting its moral worth. It doesn’t mean presenting an amoral fantasy as good just because it’s a woman’s fantasy.
Charles, have you read Twilight? I’m curious how you can be certain that I’m performing backflips if not?
I’m perfectly willing to admit that there are lots of problematic bits in twilight. I’ve said so repeatedly. Among them, it’s class politics suck; it’s prose is quite bad; it’s vision of child-rearing is too easy by half (among other things, the vampires don’t need sleep, so the sleep-deprivation that is the worst part of having a baby in my book become irrelevant).
I think however, — as Melinda Beasi said, as Caro has said, as Diana has said, as Sarah Blackwood has said — that the very strong dislike of twilight and particularly of Bella seems based in a discomfort with the fact that she is not empowered. And that’s problematic inasmuch as feminism is not just for people who are empowered, and, indeed, in many forms critiques our culture’s ideas of empowerment.
For a conservative Christian like Meyer to explicitly embrace feminism is I think a meaningful act. I think there are many things in the book (including her absolute insistence that the decision to have the child is Bella’s choice, and putting it in those terms rather than in an absolute pro-life context) that suggest she is serious about that feminism. I don’t think the way she handles it is in every way ideal, and that’s certainly worth talking about (as I said, I think Diana does so very well). But to have someone from a community that has been uncomfortable with feminism stand up and embrace it in such a widespread forum — I really think that’s a good thing, not a bad one.
And…not to put to fine a point on it, but the medicalization of childbirth in this country is actually kind of crazy and oppressive; the paranoia about Bella’s not being in control of her own pregnancy may click with Christian conservatives, but just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you. Read up a little on how our culture deals with midwives and Cesareans. It is, not to put too fine a point on it, insane. The way the issue is gendered in Twilight is pretty definitively women (Bella and Rosalie) vs. men (Edward and Jacob.) She seizes control of her own pregnancy through the power of sisterhood. To turn that into something which is antifeminist really seems like it requires some serious backflips (though again, it’s not clear to me that you’ve read the thing, which might explain the confusion.)
Anyway, I’m glad to hear that you’re not saying that childcare and motherhood are not feminist issues. Since I don’t have any problem with acknowledging that there are various ways of elevating motherhood that are not feminist (insisting that women must be mothers, or that they can’t work outside the home are the most obvious), I think we agree!
Gwen, the other side of passivity is selflessness; the other side of irrationality is empathy. And competence is perhaps our current regimes most overbearing dictatorship; the pragmatic technocratic rationale of power. So, yes, I think passivity, irrationality, and incompetence (in the patriarchy’s terms of competence) are all absolutely values that many feminists have embraced.
Revaluing the feminine can mean various things. But among the things it can mean is actually promoting the value of things that the patriarchy despises…like passivity, like irrationality. Rejecting the morality of power (competence, reason, strength) isn’t the same as being amoral. In fact, there are a lot of traditions (Christianity and Buddhism and some feminisms, to name just three) which see competence, reason, and strength as directly opposed to living a moral life. As Caro keeps saying, feminism is about empowerment…but that’s not all it’s about.
I think Twilight’s most feminist stance is in its assertion that Bella — and, by extension, other teen girls who are passive, irrational, incompetent and messed up — is worthy as a hero and as a person. There are just not a ton of media voices in our culture that are willing to say that (there are man that are willing to say that exceptional, competent girls are worthy…but that’s a bit different.) Bella is not fully actualized or heroic — but Twilight refuses to sneer at her, or call her amoral, or shame her, or demand that we pay attention to someone else. In the end, it insists that her passivity, her selflessness, is a greater power than violence.
Hope that makes things somewhat clearer.
Okay, I think I really will lose internet access tomorrow, perhaps to everyone’s relief. I really do appreciate everyone stopping by and taking the time to talk about this stuff at such length and so civilly. Hope if you’re celebrating thanksgiving you have a good holiday. Thanks again!
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Noah Berlatsky says:
There’s no such thing as misandry.
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No, there’s no such thing as any women/feminists expressing hatred and contempt for men as a group. Has never happened. Right.
And I imagine there’s no anti-white racism expressed by any blacks, either.
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When you refer to childbearing as “cranking out kids” you’re expressing a disgust with women’s bodies that is definitely misogynist, and which plugs into a long history of denigrating women through denigrating their bodies.
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Humans are, basically, animals, and much of what they do are crude biological processes: eating, shitting, fucking, breeding. Now, there’s no shortage of fancy ways in which these activities can be glorified, “dressed up” as somehow glorious and noble, the way some poets can wax about the amazing depths and artistry of football.
Yet when it gets down to it, those are all simple animalistic activities, driven by utterly primitive urges. I’m all for biology, love animals (much better than people, overall) and think women’s bodies are wonderful indeed.
But my point with this harsh, blunt language is to counteract all the prettified, pro-procreation propaganda out there.
Consider (as mentioned earlier) the countless prettified versions of caring for Baby and children shown in the media, soft-focus commercials for baby products with music-box “Brahm’s Lullaby” soundtracks; do these even remotely hint at endless midnight feedings, masses of shit-caked diapers, getting peed on by baby boys while trying to change them, a baby that cries and cries (the sound has been found to drive up peoples’ blood pressure) and won’t stop, nipples that are cracked and bleeding, and all the hideous realities that make my terminology seem like the gentlest of euphemisms?
Would teenage girls reject birth control as “unromantic,” be so easy in choosing to “keep their baby,” if they had any idea of the travails that awaited them? Would that teen mom some years back who squished her baby to death in a trash compactor (not to be confused with this more recent story: http://gothamist.com/2011/05/24/trash_chute_baby_could_have_been_th.php ) because she couldn’t get a baby sitter for a dance she wanted to attend, have decided to avoid pregnancy in the first place if so forewarned?
If I didn’t really care about women as a group, I’d not give a damn if they all chose to handicap themselves and their educational, intellectual, career fulfillment by saddling themselves with kids. (I certainly don’t give a damn about Rush Limbaugh being into cigars; puff away! And have a dozen cheeseburgers as a chaser! Then smoke some more!)
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Walker also isn’t saying that childrearing should not be a feminist issue. She’s saying she doesn’t want her daughter to have children.
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But, why is she saying this? In order that her daughter might be free to do “what really mattered according to her…having a career, travelling the world and being independent.” And arguing against the society-propagated view “that motherhood can make you blissfully happy [which she saw as] a complete fairytale.”
Alice Walker told her daughter “that being a mother, raising children and running a home were a form of slavery,” “that children are millstones around your neck.” Isn’t feminism — AKA “Women’s Liberation” — about freeing women from “traditional” women’s roles, being trapped in the house, which children forcefully tend to do?
While her own lot as a mother (thanks to her wealth and success) was a fairly easy one, I’ve no doubt she picked up her view of motherhood from her own mother, who I have the feeling had to struggle to raise a bunch of kids. (My own single mother certainly showed me that children are a curse and a burden.) Looking up info, saw indeed that her mother had eight children (at least she had a husband), and Walker “was born into the poverty of a sharecropper family.” ( http://www.wc.pdx.edu/alicewalker/walker.html )
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My position again would be:
—women at the moment are disproportionately involved in childrearing
—women’s experience historically has disproportionately involved them in childrearing
— therefore, it is a feminist position to advocate for children and to advocate for the value of childrearing, with all that implies in terms of resources, because such advocacy has historically been, and remains, a way to help women
— it is also, and not at all a contradictory feminist position, to advocate for women’s right to work and for men’s responsibility to care for children
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I heartily agree with all that!
My point has been, that because women remain “disproportionately involved in childrearing,” because society is more “into” giving tax breaks to millionaires and subsidizing Big Biz rather than helping mothers and children*, therefore if a woman wants to pursue feminist goals such as financial independence, education, self-fulfillment, a career; then children (even with a committed, supportive spouse to help) will throw a huge roadblock on the way. And having them should not be done lightly, and with full awareness of the negative repercussions, which society masks and prettifies.
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…So, yes, I think passivity, irrationality, and incompetence (in the patriarchy’s terms of competence) are all absolutely values that many feminists have embraced.
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Heavens, an opponent could really take that line and blast you with it!
But actually, those are all (with some added explanation) defensible values:
– “Passivity,” rather than being mere lumpen inertia, is a quality praised in Taoist philosophy and the Tao Te Ching; of a noninterference which rather than forcing desired goals into being, somehow enables them to happen:
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So a wise leader may say:
“I practice inaction, and the people look after themselves.”
But from the Sage it is so hard at any price to get a single word
That when his task is accomplished, his work done,
Throughout the country every one says: “It happened of its own accord”. (chap. 17, tr. Waley)
…the Tao Te Ching advocates “female” (or Yin) values, emphasizing the passive, solid, and quiescent qualities of nature (which is opposed to the active and energetic), and “having without possessing”.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tao_Te_Ching
Is the egg in the womb simply passive, like a dead rock? Or is it receptive, awaiting like a planet whose gravity pulls in that which it needs to be activated? (In the way the gravity of the early, lifeless Earth attracted meteorites and asteroids with the substances needed for life to develop.)
– “Irrationality” need not mean madness, or chaotic gibberish. But a way of perceiving and arriving at solutions which involves other faculties: instinct (what guys might call “gut sense”), incorporating subtle perceptions occurring below the level of consciousness; holistic perspectives that arrive at wisdom from a way that might appear topsy-turvy:
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We put thirty spokes together and call it a wheel;
But it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the wheel depends.
We turn clay to make a vessel;
But it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the vessel depends.
We pierce doors and windows to make a house;
And it is on these spaces where there is nothing that the usefulness of the house depends.
Therefore just as we take advantage of what is, we should recognize the usefulness of what is not. (chap. 11, tr. Waley)
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tao_Te_Ching
“The usefulness of what is not” certainly sounds irrational, and yet…
– “Incompetence (in the patriarchy’s terms of competence)” is the valuing and taking into account of factors other than crude, blunt utilitarianism. Of seeing things and people as having value in other ways than their “usefulness.”
(As a grotesque example of the latter, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers once “fixed” a river by eliminating bends, removing vegetation on the banks that slowed the current. Thus causing massive erosion, other problems downstream. When you reductionistically see a river as an inefficient drainage ditch — just as our society calls the body a “machine,” compares the brain to a computer — this kind of behavior happens.)
To us, it looks inefficient and incompetent to live life at the easier pace of other countries, or take time off for a siesta. Yet these make for a richer, more fulfilling life; and workers do better when taking time off for a nap. The assembly line may be “efficient” in producing a lot of products, yet it cuts down on the skill-level and involvement, fulfillment of the workers; makes them less valuable, easily replaceable.
(And yes, hope everyone “here’s” having a good holiday too…)
* “…Congress recently blocked new USDA rules intended to improve nutrition in school lunches…” More, and Jen Sorensen’s cartoon take on this, in the Nov. 23rd entry at http://www.dailykos.com/blog/Comics .
It’s the following kind of statement that I was reacting to, why I was separating recognition of a woman’s role from a feminist recognition in the first place:
So, there continues to be a difference between my reaction to Twilight and Noah’s. And, no, I’ve only seen the first 3 movies, but a friend of mine has filled me in on the last book.
And, for anyone who doesn’t believe misandry exists, go watch Tyler Perry’s For Colored Girls. Judith Levine has grouped the misandristic stereotypes: infant, betrayer and beast — all of which are clearly present in Perry’s film. One might counter that Perry is a male, but I’d respond that his films aren’t speaking to a predominately male audience (and this film is based on a feminist play). But I’d have no problem granting the obvious stuff about power structures, misogyny being more prevalent, etc.. But, once again, I’ll agree with Mike that just because majority bigotry is more potent, it doesn’t mean that minority bigotry doesn’t exist. That’s the sort of thinking that leads to any critic of Israel being labeled an anti-semite.
Anyway, I had fun discussing this stuff. I’m currently might proud of having successfully made a banana-pumpkin pie for T-day. Happy holiday to one and all.
Hah, my internet works even at the in-laws! Where nothing much is happening (child self-actualizing by gorging himself on food and Sponge-bob videos while the doting grandmother looks on) so what the hey….
I should have figured you’d seen the movies, Charles. I’d say that they’re overall significantly worse than the books (the first maybe being an exception; it’s different than the book, but has a sense of humor that they lack, which I think it probably for the best.)
Saying misandry didn’t exist was an exaggeration. It isn’t a historical, effective ideology with vast instituional and cultural support, and so comparing it to misogyny as if both are equal is not very useful. How’s that?
And yes, I didn’t think we’d agreed on everything. I continue to believe (with Caro and Sarah Blackwood and various other folks) that feminism is about valuing women, not just valuing empowered women. Indeed, I think that the empowerment in many cases has to follow the valuing, rather than the other way around. If we wait to value women until they are all fully empowered, we are going to spend a long, long time sneering at the vast majority of women on earth. (And, indeed, at the vast majority of men.) Mike’s actually comfortable with that, I think. Me not so much.
Just reading Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas, where she quotes Wilfrid Owen:
And what the hey, here’s a review of the last film that I think is mostly on target (at least in term of the book; haven’t seen the movie yet.)
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…Saying misandry didn’t exist was an exaggeration. It isn’t a historical, effective ideology with vast institutional and cultural support, and so comparing it to misogyny as if both are equal is not very useful. How’s that?
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I’ll agree with all that; indeed, misogyny is by far the most powerful and prevalent evil. But, who here “compar[ed misandry] to misogyny as if both are equal”?
Re that Tyler Perry film of “For Colored Girls,” I had heard that black women could be pretty damn venomous about black males, when away from the “white gaze”…
A little sampler of man-hating quotes: http://www.fatherhoodcoalition.org/cpf/newreadings/2001/feminist_hate_speech.htm . Yeowtch!
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If we wait to value women until they are all fully empowered, we are going to spend a long, long time sneering at the vast majority of women on earth. (And, indeed, at the vast majority of men.) Mike’s actually comfortable with that, I think.
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I’m definitely more than comfortable with sneering at the vast majority of the human race. Men as a group getting it far worse than women.
And I’d prefer it that people get enlightened first, empowered later…
To circle back to an earlier comment:
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When you refer to childbearing as “cranking out kids” you’re expressing a disgust with women’s bodies that is definitely misogynist, and which plugs into a long history of denigrating women through denigrating their bodies.
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Um, how does being dismissive of childbearing express “a disgust with women’s bodies”? There is more to women’s bodies than their reproductive organs, isn’t there?
About 20-30 years ago (how the time flies! It could even be longer) ran across an article titled “Woman Doctor.” Reading on and discovering it told the experiences of a male gynecologist, was furious at how the title made the totality of women seem defined by their “baby-making parts”…
Getting off topic here, the latest (Dec. 2) “Entertainment Weekly” described, “The new Twilight movie [as] the most effective form of birth control ever,” and featured the hilarious “Is That Birth Scene Nuts, or What? A Doctor Weighs In”…
Hi Noah,
I wasn’t meaning to come back to this discussion, partly because I thought your last comment was intended to draw a polite line under it and I didn’t want to push and partly because I don’t know the Twilight books well and I’m not really bothered by the question of their proper interpretation. But as a feminist and a Christian, your comments about apparent vices being the flipside of virtues got to me. Is passivity the other side of selflessness, which is another name for what I call love, charity and agape? Is irrationality empathy in disguise?
I thought a lot about that, in the context the Fool for Christ idea and Martha versus Mary and the sermon on the mount. Then I read this set of conversations on Feministe – http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2011/11/21/one-abuse-script-with-many-faces/#comments – and I had to come back and tell you that my answer to that is no, has to be no if any of the work of distinguishing abuse from love makes sense at all. These women are rejecting the lie that love means the absence of reason, the absence of objective reality, the absence of accountability. And when St Paul in Corinthians defines love, he doesn’t do so in terms either of an insane abnegation of self or an insane elevation of physical passion: he does it in terms of plain ordinary difficult standards of being kind, humble, hopeful, and tough. Buddhism, equally, praises mindfulness over unthinking desire and unrestrained passion.
Now I think you may have misinterpreted what I meant when I said rationality and competence: perhaps it sounded like I was praising some Enlightenment model of rational self-interest which, as a Christian, I of course reject. I didn’t mean that, I meant rationality and competence in the sense of virtue in the oldfashioned sense, being a coherent human being (making the facts of one’s being cohere with the values that underpin it). And I suppose that idea of coherence explains why I reacted so poorly to your post, despite my lack of interest in either Twilight or the other set of books which I haven’t read any of. You seem to set up this Romantic binary between Reason and Passion, as the Victorians called it, or Masculinity and Feminity or the Public and the Private. And my objection isn’t to the valuing of one dimension of that, it’s to the dichotomy itself. The idea of the opposition between these categories is not only false but terribly damaging, because it tells women that the historically feminine goals and pursuits – love, marriage, child-rearing – are instrinsically dark and mysterious realms where the ordinary reasonable standards of ethics and mutual respect fear to tread. That is the very idea that abuse survivors are breaking down for themselves – they’re looking at the so-called mystery realm, where one is called to selflessness and irrationality and weakness, and confronting it with the actual standards of decent ethical behaviour. It’s that which enables them to call abusive behaviour “abuse” instead of “love” and “standing by my man”. The standards which are being applied, and which are doing this lifesaving work, are rational standards, as I use that term – they don’t depend on special, ineffable, inexplicable features of the unique relationship with the partner, they rely on general, specific, nameable claims about what right conduct is or isn’t. You can get those standards from Buddhism or from Christianity; on these points, there’s a fair area of overlap. But the point about them is that this bringing of reason to the passions is important to feminism as well as to the sermon on the mount and Christ’s words to Mary and Martha.
I’m sorry to have gone on at such length and somewhat off-topic. As I said, your comments troubled me very deeply and it was only when I read the testimony of those survivors that I understood what the implication was that had worried me so much. I should also say that I realise my arguments are somewhat tangential to yours; but it seems to me that some elements of what you say imply a clear demarcation between the categories of what is reasonable and what is feminine and I really think that is a dangerous thought as well as a mistaken one, fools for Christ and Buddhist mystics notwithstanding.
Hey Gwen. No need to apologize! Your points are very worthwhile and interesting.
I have trouble seeing anything all that reasonable in the Sermon on the Mount. Much of it seems to fly in the face of reason, really. Zen too, seems very much anti-rational. And people like Luce Irigary go to some effort to question rationality, and to think about the way that masculinity and rationality are intertwined, and oppressive.
I think maybe the stumbling block is that I’m really not trying to set up an absolute masculine/reason/action is bad, feminine/irrationality/passivity is good. If I were doing that, the original post would have been about how Bella is great and Katniss is evil — which isn’t at all what I said. Rather, my point is that rejecting values which have traditionally been seen as linked to femininity in all cases can be problematic, and rejects some (not all, but some) of the historical resources of feminism.
In terms of abuse…absolutely the ideology of love and romance can lead to women being abused, and one of the things feminism has tried to do is to provide other narratives for women which allow them and empower them to escape those situations. But it’s worth thinking too about the ways in which discourses of reason can be and have been oppressive. For instance, in many Victorian novels, women struggle against the idea that they should marry for money (that is, for rational reasons) rather than for love.
American feminism is often pretty chary about creating any binaries around male/female on basically the grounds you’re saying, I think — that is, that any split will be used to denigrate women. But at the same time there are many feminists (like Virginia Woolf who I mentioned above) who see women’s particular experience as an invaluable resource — as a way to work, for example, for peace, and to actually change society rather than simply integrate women into it.
My point really is not that Virginia Woolf is right and you’re wrong. It’s that both traditions are valuable. I don’t think you need to reject Bella’s orientation towards love and family in order to make possible Katniss’ orientation towards action and violence. Especially since the two strands aren’t separated like that for either of the two protagonists.
I think what this boils down to is that you and I are using “reason” differently. You seem to be using it to mean “self-interest”; I’m using it to mean “ethics”. So, to me, the suggestion that it’s rational to marry for money rather than love is, to me, a peculiar reading of that trope in women’s fiction. Austen, for example, goes to some effort to show that marriage for money is irrational because it leads to desperate unhappiness (Caroline Lucas in Pride and Prejudice, Maria Rushworth in Mansfield Park) and because it is a failure to value what is genuinely valuable in the other and therefore makes one shallow and insincere (Mr Elton in Emma, Mrs Norris in Mansfield Park – both are marriers for money and Austen holds them and their marriages up to scorn for it in both books). But there is also a persistent theme in the same novels by the same set of women concerning the danger of unthinking marriage choices, driven by pure irrational desire – Anne Bronte’s Tenant of Wildfell Hall is the most pointed example of this but you can find the same fear in Middlemarch and in Jane Eyre. Jane Eyre is really the central example because of the 3 marriage choices she makes – she rejects a man she loves, she rejects a man she doesn’t love, and then she returns to the man she loves and essentially proposes to him; the novel presents all three choices as right. Her first rejection of Mr Rochester is because what he’s asking of her conflicts with her very identity and her sense of personal integrity, despite her instincts in his favour. Her rejection of St John is because she trusts her instincts over his reason and finds their conclusions true in the light of her own reason. And of course when she goes back to Rochester, she goes on different terms – that triumphal “reader, I married him” is so resonant because it isn’t “reader, he married me”. My point is that there is never a moment where Jane turns from her reason and her “masculine” worries about money and freedom and sexual ethics and instead throws herself into being governed by her desires. But nor is there a moment where she admits an alien standard of reason – St John’s – and subordinates her own desires and her understanding of who and what she is to that standard. That seems to me to be the exemplar of the integration between mind and body, intellect and emotion, that I was talking about in my last comment.
Turning to difference feminists, well, I haven’t read Irigary but Woolf is an old friend and I don’t understand her to be saying what you’re saying, either in 3 Guineas or in a A Room. The metaphor of the spot at the back of one’s own head that one can never see, in A Room, is about women bringing their own distinctive critical standards to bear on the lives of men. When she says in 3 Guineas that women should resist the absurd pageantry of masculine uniforms and rituals and warfare, it isn’t because she’s saying the morality of the Angel in the House is “just as good” – she rejects both moralities as false. She advises women to take a poker and kill off the Angel in the House and to maintain a skeptical eye towards forms of reasoning that are hollow and foolish and aggressive. Nothing in Woolf can be construed to be a song in praise or defence of the ideology of unreasonable, sacrificial romantic love: in that context she becomes mocking and sharp, pointing out how her aunt’s money has freed her from “the large and imposing view of a gentleman, which Milton recommended for [her] perpetual adoration” and left her instead with a view of the open sky.
Now I haven’t read Twilight recently enough to know Bella’s view on the open sky or whether Edward is to be treated, like Mr Rochester, as another moral agent as well as the love of her life. But if she can’t see anything except him and can’t subject him to any standards of criticism and can’t actually do anything except adore him – that’s not what Woolf meant by feminine modes of perception and reasoning. That ideal of femininity is found overwhelmingly in our books, but those tend to be books written by men: Griselda is like that, and Amelia Sedley in Vanity Fair, and there are tragic echoes of the “I would rather die than be without you” sentiment in Desdemonda. As I said, that’s a belief that kills. No romantic relationship can or should be a morality-free zone – the distinction between love and abuse can’t even be drawn without the aid of moral tools and so your claim that love can become abuse and women need tools to see when that is is an acknowledgment that yes, they shouldn’t be irrational even in the most feminine of roles. And the Old Testament praise of femininity praises competence, not passion (Proverbs 31).
This is already too long so I won’t go into details on what I think of the Sermon on the Mount or Zen – put briefly, I don’t believe paradox is the opposite of rationality and in any case the moral categories of Buddhism and of Christianity aren’t jettisoned even by their most mystical and apparently paradoxical practices and sayings (although the role of violence in Zen practice is obviously a controversial topic within Buddhism). So I don’t think that proves the case – no tradition I know of has recommended to men that their reason is simply worthless in bringing them to God/nirvana/moksha and they should simply abandon it. Devotional and bhakti traditions demand more by way of emotion but they don’t demand less by way of reason in exchange. There are traditions which have told women that their reason is worthless and they should concentrate on worship of the husband-who-is-the-likeness-of-God (Griselda, some strands of Hinduism). That isn’t a feminist tradition, it’s simply a misogynist one.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…American feminism is often pretty chary about creating any binaries around male/female on basically the grounds you’re saying, I think — that is, that any split will be used to denigrate women.
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Even praising women as having access to different kinds of wisdom/understanding than the supposedly linear/logical/utilitarian thinking that our society values (actually utterly irrational and insane*) would mean people would then think, “Well, then, that means women shouldn’t be scientists, teachers, mathematicians…”
(Really appreciate your perspectives and comments, Gwen!)
*”Let’s go ahead and poison the entire ecosystem that all life on Earth depends on, because it will provide jobs and make a very few people very rich,” for instance.
Gwen said:
I don’t see how either is right. “Reason” has historically been opposed to “emotion.” That shows up in feminist literary criticism that analyzes the ways female archetypes like the hysteric and the sorceress were opposed to “rational” male actors in order to demonize women as outsiders and others, crazy and wicked, and to subordinate them to patriarchal domination.
“Irrationality” then is rule by emotion. Rationality is rule by logic or empirical observation. I think either could be self-interested, and it’s certainly the case that especially for contemporary poststructuralists (like Irigaray, or Zizek) irrational acts — like letting yourself be crucified on a cross — tend to be vastly more ethical than rational ones.
I also think there are problems with saying that “the ideology of love and romance can lead to women being abused”, because it’s not a belief in love and romance that causes the abuse described in those stories — or in any others. It’s the men’s beliefs — the abuser’s beliefs, regardless of gender — that cause the abuse, that are the problems. Those examples talk about men’s desire for control, either of the women themselves or of their assets. Examples about physical abuse talk about men’s poor anger management and aggression issues, as well as control. Abuse is caused by issues with control and aggression and anger management and a whole host of other problems — all of which are problems with the abuser.
The women’s belief in love and romance is only one thing that abusive men manipulate — the women’s beliefs are not the problem. That’s like saying the fact that glass can break is the source of home robbery — it’s a property people with bad intent can exploit. It’s not intrinsically bad itself.
But there are no particular benefits to glass being breakable, so you can say it’s a “weakness” and jettison it without any consequences. The problem with the feminist trope that “empowering” women to reject those traditional notions of love and romance will prevent abuse is that it throws out the notion of all-consuming, irrational, selfless love altogether, and puts the blame on women’s beliefs, rather than on men’s behaviors.
Even if feminists managed to create a situation where all the women were enlightened and empowered enough to resist the damaging psychological effects of abuse and to recognize and walk away from abusive relationships, those men would still be abusive. They would not miraculously change their psychological stripes because women were no longer available to them. They would lash out at puppies, or children, or property, or coworkers, because the problem is not with the abused women, it’s with the abusive men.
The problem isn’t with the existence of the romantic hero — it’s with the types of heroes we romanticize. People who try to control people and who can’t manage their aggression should be so vilified and demonized in our society that no woman could ever mistake one of them for a romantic hero. But that doesn’t mean there can’t be romantic heroes — romantic heroes who love as consumingly and selflessly as romantic heroines would probably not be a problem.
Conversely, focusing on “empowerment” as some kind of miracle antidote to emotional abuse teaches women that empowerment is more important than love. Which, if you’re NOT in an abusive relationship, isn’t necessarily always the right way to look at it. They’re not mutually exclusive — people can experience and enjoy overwhelming desire and selfless love without ending up disempowered and abused. The case of abuse shouldn’t be the baseline we build our philosophy on — the case of abuse should be recognized as the pathology that it is.
Gwen, I don’t understand this next quote; can you clarify, please?
What I’m not clear on is how the distinction between reason and passion itself makes child-rearing and marriage “dark and mysterious,” or how it makes love “dark.” (I can follow how it makes passionate love mysterious…)
You go on, though, to say that people “shouldn’t be irrational even in the most feminine of roles.”
So I think you’re really trying to get rid of not the binary between passion and reason but the analogy between Feminine:Passion/Masculine:Reason. Your point, though, still seems to be that passion can never be reasonable, which maintains the binary between passion and reason itself. Getting rid of the binary between reason and passion means recognizing the ways passion (or emotion) can be reasonable, can be a critique of the downsides of reason.
Woolf’s pacifism — in 3 Guineas and in general — gives a good illustration: She said in a 1916 letter to feminist Margaret Lewellen Davies “I become steadily more feminist, owing to the Times, which I read at breakfast and wonder how this proposterous masculine fiction [the war] keeps going a day longer without some vigorous young woman pulling us all together and marching through it.”
The opposition there is the traditional one of indulgently aggressive men with passionately pacifist women — but the pacifism, so often derogated as irrational, is presented in Woolf as the Obviously Right Thing, as more rational than what the men are doing. She takes a specific aspect of the binary masculine:war/feminine:peace and inverts the valuing, making the feminine value of peace more worthwhile and reasonable than the masculine value of war, allowing “femininity” to function as a counterweight to “masculine” things that are bad for the society.
Feminist scholars generally class Woolf as a “social feminist” rather than a “liberal” or “equity” feminist. I think that’s a valid distinction, and I definitely come down on the side of social feminism there. (There are some good definitions here: http://www.istheory.yorku.ca/Feminism.htm)
Not to disparage equity feminism, but continuing to value the rational pole without allowing a challenge to it from “irrationality” doesn’t seem to address the underlying problem of a society that still ultimately values some really insidious and historically “masculine” things…
Caro,
I don’t think we disagree, although we may be talking at cross-purposes. What I don’t understand is why a challenge to dominant social values should be considered “irrational” – surely the work of making those challenges is work that relies both on moral intuition and logical reasoning?
My point is that we can’t live in a world split in two halves, one where (for example) utilitarianism is a great guide to life and another where the principle of total subordination to the interests of another is the clearer guide. When I say our moral world must be coherent, I’m saying what – I think – Woolf is saying when she says the apparently domestic virtues of peacekeeping and humility are public as well as private virtues. There’s no sane way to say that murder is fine on the Eastern Front but very bad in the kitchen. My concern here is with the reverse argument that competence and self-protection may be all very well in the boardroom but are out of place in the home. That can’t be right – either there should be more passionate self-sacrifice in the boardroom or more self-protection at home (I happen to think our culture has the balance wrong on both). Similarly, no Christian could say that the crucifixion is irrational in the sense that it’s an act that has no explicable meaning. The meaning of the crucifixtion radiates through the whole structure of Christian thought on every point: it’s treated by most writers I’ve read as a key to understanding everything else, not as an admirable but baffling act beyond our structures of understanding altogether.
I suppose what I object to is this idea of counterweights that are separate from each other, rather than principles that interlink. If war is bad for society, the masculine or power-driven ideology which supports war is not a “counterweight” to pacifism, it’s an error. If the crucifixtion means loving self-sacrifice is good – which I accept, though I think we have to be careful about what sacrifice means and how it links to mindful and adult love – then preferring oneself to others is a mistake anywhere and in any context. I think from what you say about Woolf inverting the moral order, we actually agree on this – it may be my use of “rationality” as the important word which is misleading.
Similarly, when I said that women must be rational in every context, I meant that there is a risk of being misled into the belief that there are some contexts where the values we have chosen to give our lives meaning – whatever those values are – are irrelevant. I don’t mean we are to blame for our own abuse, of course. But if we really accept the view that “the relationship between us is different, none of the ordinary rules I believe in apply, I should prefer him to anyone and everyone and certainly to my own mental and physical health”, we have bought into the abuser’s ideology and we need to rescue ourselves from that before anything else can be done.
Here’s another good link to an essay about social feminism, that has an interesting and I think compelling argument against Judith Butler: http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/eps/PES-Yearbook/94_docs/BENHABIB.HTM
It’s a subtle distinction that probably nobody but Noah is interested in, but I’d say while Butler falls into the postmodernist camp, the French feminists are definitely socialist – closer to Zizek than Lyotard. The article I think does a good job of teasing out social feminism from both postmodernist feminism and equity (which she calls standpoint) feminism.
And a friend sent me this interesting article about Twilight and the politics of “Breaking Dawn”: http://www.femininethings.org/2011/11/twilight-breaking-dawn-pt-1-and.html
I don’t think it’s come up here yet but apologies if it’s a repeat.
Oh, I meant to clarify my “dark and mysterious” comment. It follows from the idea of separate spheres – if public life is the province of reason, and family is the province of passion, the implication is that what is true or good in public life is irrelevant in private life. And vice versa. That’s the dichotomy I’m criticising. Your treatment of your employees and your treatment of your children differs in terms of factual context but not in terms of the ethical standards applicable – it’s very sensible to treat them differently because of factual differences (your children’s dependence on you, your love for them etc) but not because there’s a different morality in play which means your children deserve to be seen as ends in themselves but your employees don’t or that your employees deserve the autonomy to make choices for themselves but your children don’t. I hope that’s clearer.
Gwen, I think you’re right that we’re agreeing and just struggling with the parameters and implications of “reason.” I don’t think it’s that “the challenge to dominant social values should be considered ‘irrational'” so much as it is the recognition that “reason” itself is a dominant social value, so it’s one of the things that will be challenged. Not all challenges to dominant social values will involve the challenge to reason, but challenging our notions of what reason is and whether reason is always the best guide for us is part of it.
But that said, to me reason just does not have the ethical component you see it in – it just has to do with intellect versus emotions, although “versus” is too strong. My way of talking about “principles that interlink” — and Noah has probably heard this until it makes him cringe — is that they are “distinct but not discrete.”
When I think about reason as a value, I am thinking about people who believe emotions should always be under intellectual control, who dismiss strong emotions as crazy, and who devalue emotional information as confusion. I’m thinking about atheist arguments against Christianity, about men mocking women for caring about the emotional consequences of decisions and sometimes prioritizing them over other, more practical, consequences, I’m thinking about economic arguments that treat all social intervention as “bleeding heart liberalism” and exclude any collective societal action that does not directly “grow the economy” or serve national defense, even if it benefit large numbers of people. Those are the things I hear in our society being defended as grounded in “reason” — Reason magazine; reason versus faith, reason versus feeling. That’s the terrain where I think a little valuation of irrationality is really worthwhile…
However, I do tend to be quite poststructuralist and I’m guessing that’s also where the source of confusion comes from. I think American feminism has made a mistake in grabbing so tightly onto Judith Butler’s early work in Gender Trouble (this is discussed in the Benhabib essay I just linked to). Butler herself has a wide theoretical range and I think it’s wrong to reduce her personally to this argument, but especially in her early work there is this sense that “men and women are no different; they do not really exist.” What she meant, opening up lesbian feminism to postmodernism, is that it’s social construction and performance all the way down. What the effect was, though, was a loss of self-criticality about the ways in which society is gendered and how women’s historically devalued experience challenges that societal gendering. Instead, many postmodern feminists just embraced the notion that “woman” as a category is useless, and even actively bad.
I had personal experience of this recently trying to put together an event that celebrated female cartoonists — pretty much every female cartoonist under 30 balked at the idea of even being identified as female at all. That made my heart hurt. How it it progress to make women afraid or embarrassed or even aggressively philosophically opposed to being called women? I talked with some of them directly and it seemed like they’d never thought about the possibility that their identity and experiences as women might be sources of positive inspiration, something to celebrate and explore, something that builds solidarity and sisterhood rather than something which automatically marginalized them from anything and everything that mattered. The idea of being not just an empowered female but empowered about being female was completely foreign to them. They were empowered to do whatever they wanted, except embrace their own gender. That seemed like a tremendous failure of feminism to me – as Benhabib puts it, “In the transition from standpoint feminism to poststructuralist feminisms, we have lost the female subject.”
I don’t think what I’m saying is inconsistent with what you’re saying though…it’s a question of emphasis and the particular framing of the feminist political project.
Gwen, I think the problem is that I really don’t see reason as “any ideology that makes sense.” Reason is a historical ideology like any other, not a transcendent description of form without reference to content. Christ’s sacrifice is not reasonable; it’s excessive and paradoxical and, yes, mysterious if anything is. Similarly, Kierkegaard is at some pains to contrast Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac with any reasonable ideology; it is an act of faith which is a challenge not just to conventional morality, but to any morality. I think making Abraham or Jesus “reasonable actors” undercuts the profound challenge they make to everyday ways of living and thinking. It isn’t just that Christ is a better pragmatist than Obama.
Incidentally, Charlotte Lucas isn’t unhappy in P & P; on the contrary, she’s shown as being quite content with her choice and her life. And yes, her choice is still seen by Elizabeth (and I believe by Austen) as wrong. The idea that happiness is the measure of morality is utilitarian; it’s rational. Austen’s morality has utilitarian aspects, but really is not entirely utilitarian; there are things for her that are more important than rational happiness.
In terms of Bella; Bella is certainly committed to love in an excessive, irrational way, to the point of being willing to risk her own life for her child, and willing to give up her own morality to be with her love. I would say that this does *not* mean that she allows or encourages Edward to treat her anyway he wishes. On the contrary, she repeatedly rejects (through avoidance and eventually through direct confrontation) Edward’s efforts to control her. He tries to get her to stop seeing Jacob; she makes him stop. He tries to get her to have an abortion; she makes him stop.
It’s not clear that any of this is exactly rational — Jacob really is dangerous; it would be more reasonable to abort a pregnancy that is so likely to kill her. In fact, throughout, Edward is *more* rational — his arguments make more sense. But Bella’s arguments (based on love of her friend and her child) are the ones that win.
I really appreciate Caro’s point that it is the abuser who needs to be censured, not the person abused. It does seem to be the case that a lot of the animosity towards twilight is directed towards Bella rather than towards Edward.
Gwen, thanks. That does clarify and it makes perfect sense.
When you say though “if public life is the province of reason, and family is the province of passion,” I think the problem is with the idea that the best corrective to this is to see both public and private life as “reasonable.” I think both public and private life are embued with both reason and passion, and both reason and passion are good and necessary elements of both — as well as bad and destructive elements of both. There are upsides to both and downsides to both; it’s not that reason is good and passion is bad. I think this is acknowledged in what you’re saying, though; it’s again, just emphasis.
I do think we tend to assume that emotional behavior always has bad outcomes and empirical behavior always has good outcomes, which is just too simplistic. The value of talking about irrationality is that it’s just as important to recognize the ways in which passion and emotional and irrationality inform our public life, for better and worse, as it is to recognize the ways in which reason and logic and rationality play into private life — for better and worse. That’s why I think it’s important to value and talk about and take irrationality — emotional commitments and beliefs — seriously, not only as part of interpersonal interactions but also as an important and positive and meaningful element of public discourse.
…and as usual Caro says everything better than I can.
I’d incidentally say that I think blaming Judith Butler is probably a little unfair. More like she was also plugging into a construction of feminism that’s very appealing in the U.S. democratic/capitalist context. Betty Friedan is probably more influential, and was coming from a similar place, I think (that is, the problem for women is that they are not doing the same sort of work as men, rather than that women’s work needs to be valued more.)
I haven’t read Butler, embarrassingly, but really like Friedan. She’s really smart and the Feminine Mystique is great. It’s just coming from where it’s coming from.
I like your emphasis on excess, Noah, which I left out.
I don’t mean to blame Butler. I think she says a lot of smart things. I think pomo feminism is limiting in some destructive ways, but Butler’s really smart and nuanced and she’s hardly the only postmodern feminist. I just think a lot of people read a chapter of Gender Trouble and got a lot of weird ideas from it, when you get down to everyday practice. Butler’s a real theorist, and she gets dumbed down in a really problematic way. But it’s the dumbing down that’s the problem, not Butler per se.
It probably comes as no surprise, though, that I like de Beauvoir more than I like Friedan. But I don’t really see any reason why we can’t love both!
That Benhabib essay is great. I’d totally forgotten about Carol Gilligan! It’s been 20 years since I read that book; I have no idea what I’d think of it now.
I’m confused as to why at the end Benhabib refers to MacKinnon’s view of identity/difference politics as essentialist…. I guess it’s in the sense that for MacKinnon male/female is a more stable binary, right? Though MacKinnon wants that essential difference to disappear; she feels it’s actually constructed by power relations as well. It seems like Butler’s theory is an extension of MacKinnon’s rather than really opposed to it? In the footnote Benhabib really seems to feel that isn’t the case though…so either I disagree with her or I don’t understand what she’s saying.
I haven’t read MacKinnon, so maybe that’s the problem…
“I don’t think it’s come up here yet but apologies if it’s a repeat.”
The effects of Thanksgiving! You were the one who previously linked to it, and we discussed it.
ROTFL. I ate the turkey; the turkey ate my brain.
Noah, I don’t know what she means there either. In the exchange at the beginning, it’s McKinnon who is accusing Gilligan of being essentialist, at least in the sense that “essentialism” is usually used as a perjorative by Anglo-American feminists (although I agree with Gilligan that she, and Irigaray and all the others that get accused of it, are not essentialist).
Benhabib says this in the footnote to that sentence; apparently someone asked her to clarify:
That really doesn’t help much, though.
“That’s why I think it’s important to value and talk about and take irrationality — emotional commitments and beliefs — seriously, not only as part of interpersonal interactions but also as an important and positive and meaningful element of public discourse.”
Nixon called this the Silent Majority.
Anyway, I saw Breaking Dawn 1 last night. I wouldn’t call it a pro-lifer film, but it’s pretty clearly anti-abortion. I find that aspect refreshing given the standard ideology of Hollywood films (I like Mel Gibson films for a similar reason). On whether it’s feminist or not, I’d wait for another story from Meyer with a counter-narrative where the heroine is pregnant with a magical chosen child (maybe it’s even a virgin pregnancy), the prophets with a good track record tell her it’s the chosen one, her loved ones want her to have it, she’s sure that only good things come from caring for it, but against all rationality, she’s resolute in wanting to abort it.
I also saw A Dangerous Method. Y’all might find that relevant here, as well: my father beats me … and I liked it.
Just read Howard’s End, which stages the rationality vs. emotion debate quite well (and in a feminist context). Plus, it’s a great book….hard to believe it took me so long to get around to reading it. (though, it’s a little unfair to the working classes)
Charles, I don’t remember there being prophesies in the book, actually…it sounds like they stacked the deck more in the film maybe. I also really don’t remember the book taking a strong pro-life stance…Edward’s desire to abort the baby isn’t ever seen as wrong-in-itself as I remember…it’s his desire to do so despite her wishes that i a problem. Now I’m curious to see the film to see if I think it’s significantly different (though that desire is balanced by my strong suspicion that it’ll be horrible — the last one was utter crap.)
In any case, it is possible to be feminist and pro-life. It’s a conflicted and difficult position, definitely, but I don’t think it’s right to say that someone has to create a pro-choice narrative in order to be a feminist.
Caro, that’s comforting. I thought I was missing something obvious.
Thinking about Gilligan and that article, it’s interesting maybe to bring up George Eliot’s comment about slavery; she said on several occasions that slavery morally damaged the slaves…and that if it didn’t, you would have to assume that slavery was not evil. MacKinnon’s argument sort of echoes that; she argues that women have been so oppressed that they basically have no ability to articulate true insights.
I think it gets at a common problem in theorizing oppression. On the one hand, there’s an impulse to emphasize the overwhelming nature of the oppression, which ends up creating a situation where the victims are nothing but victims, entirely defined by their victimization — which makes them seem less than human. On the other hand, there’s an impulse to emphasize the strengths or insights of the oppressed — which tends to make it seem like the oppression isn’t so bad, or doesn’t need to be rectified.
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Caro says:
… it’s certainly the case that especially for contemporary poststructuralists…irrational acts — like letting yourself be crucified on a cross — tend to be vastly more ethical than rational ones.
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But, if you want to blazingly embody nonviolence and pacifism, what could be a more effective, utterly rational approach than letting yourself be crucified?
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I also think there are problems with saying that “the ideology of love and romance can lead to women being abused”, because it’s not a belief in love and romance that causes the abuse described in those stories — or in any others. It’s the men’s beliefs — the abuser’s beliefs, regardless of gender — that cause the abuse, that are the problems.
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Not that spousal abusers aren’t scum who deserve to be pummeled to a bloody jelly, but it routinely “takes two to tango.” There are plenty of women who scornfully reject truly nice, loving guys, and just “happen” to get in one relationship with an abusive creep after another. (In some horrible cases, supplying child abusers with victims.) Because the sick example of their parents’ messed-up relationship taught them, “this is what love is like,” and/or that they are bad, and deserve this rotten treatment. (And a guy who is good to them is seen as a fool who can’t tell what she’s really like.)
And no, I’m not equally blaming the “abusee.” But let’s not pretend that all these battered spouses are inert, will-less lumps who mysteriously always end up, through no fault or actions of their own, in these horrible relationships.
That there are plenty of love songs making the argument, as one put it, “Your love is bad for me, that’s why it’s so good” shows how prevalent at least milder forms of these attitudes are.
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Conversely, focusing on “empowerment” as some kind of miracle antidote to emotional abuse teaches women that empowerment is more important than love.
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But, what is the particular definition involved here? There are unfortunately many people for whom “love” involves getting trampled physically or emotionally; considerable emotional pain; seeking, but never having…
Wouldn’t being “empowered,” with a healthy self-esteem and confidence, therefore naturally lead to healthy, balanced and mutually supportive love relationships? Therefore encourage life-affirming love, instead of toxic love? (It sure worked for me…)
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Gwen says:
…There’s no sane way to say that murder is fine on the Eastern Front but very bad in the kitchen.
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If you’re fighting a deadly aggressor, is killing them — whether on the Eastern Front or the kitchen — murder? Both the law and plenty of philosophers say it’s a perfectly defensible action.
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…if public life is the province of reason, and family is the province of passion, the implication is that what is true or good in public life is irrelevant in private life.
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Getting beyond modern-day Western culture, there is plenty of precedent for a family as a social/economic entity rather than a realm of emotion: arranged benefits, for financial/political benefits. Marriage seen as more of a business transaction, with possible love as a far-from-necessary fringe benefit…
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I had personal experience of this recently trying to put together an event that celebrated female cartoonists — pretty much every female cartoonist under 30 balked at the idea of even being identified as female at all. That made my heart hurt. How it it progress to make women afraid or embarrassed or even aggressively philosophically opposed to being called women?
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Ouch. And, it’s supposed to be progress when female thespians are referred to as “actors”; which just happens to make maleness the “default setting” of the acting profession…
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…Reason is a historical ideology like any other…
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But at least far more defensible than, say, Nazism, right?
Unless you read Nazism as the apex of instrumental reason…which some theorists do.
One of those theorists being a Nazi himself – Badumpbump!
scratch that joke — misread you, eric, so it makes no sense.
Noah, I didn’t mean to suggest there were actual prophesies in the story (film or book version). Edward gets mental messages from the fetus that make him see it as a good, loving creature. This is reconfirmed when Jacob imprints on the baby and sees flashes of what she’ll be. And, Edward wanting to abort is seen as a caring gesture in the film based on the quite reasonable expectation that Bella will die if she has it. That’s really the basis for the whole vamp family advising her to get rid of the thing. I didn’t think there was much hectoring going on, except from Jacob, but he came around, too. The film paints a favorable portrait of a teenager who against all reason is going to have her baby because she feels that’s the right thing to do. And, of course, it turns out to be the right thing to do. I fully agree that a feminist can be anti-abortion. What I don’t agree with is that this film is feminist for merely asking its audience to care about Bella. I wager we’ll never see Meyer writing an equally sympathetic portrait of a girl who against all reason wants to abort a fetus.
Edward does hear the fetus in the womb…it takes a while in the book though, so there’s a lot of him strongly wanting to kill it. The pro-life connotations of hearing the fetus thinking are somewhat modified by the fact that it’s a special fetus (i.e., it’s developing superfast.) And I don’t think Jacob gets flashes of what she’ll be in the book; that sounds like they’re trying to fill in narrative detail quickly.
I’d hardly say that Stephanie Meyer’s range is especially wide; I doubt that she could necessarily create a positive portrait of someone who she really strongly disagreed with. But…I still think respecting the intelligence, the choices, and the humanity of a not-fully-empowered tween girl is (depressingly, but stil) rare enough that it does actually qualify as a feminist stance. And presenting a girl’s pregnancy as her decision, and as ultimately controllable in the face of male resistance through sisterhood, seems also feminist. Though I’ll agree Meyer cheats on a lot of the nuances in a way that is certainly worth criticizing from a feminist perspective as well.
That sounds like a good stopping point for me, since it’s fairly agreeable even if I could nitpick it to death.
“That’s why I think it’s important to value and talk about and take irrationality — emotional commitments and beliefs — seriously, not only as part of interpersonal interactions but also as an important and positive and meaningful element of public discourse.”
When I first read this I was very tempted to call a Godwin, but felt embarrassed by the base impulse; still, they certainly embraced both rationality and irrationality in an uneasy mix. Which leads me to a point: accepting gendering of “rationality”/”irrationality” as anything as other than semantic memes created for ideological reasons seems wrong. Stating that if the patriarchy is founded on oppressive “rationalism” then feminism must embrace “irrationalism” as an unavoidable component of female experience seems bluntly contrarian.
I should clarify that to me, rationalism (without the quotes) above all means the ability to work towards a desired goal in an effective/efficient manner; it is a technique, or competence (substitute capacity if competence sounds too gendered), rather than a goal in and of itself. It is with this in mind that I write:
If women do place a higher value on emotional bonds, experiences and relationships than men there is nothing whatsoever irrational (again without the quotes) in disregarding other factors, such as financial status, in the pursuit of these goals; likewise there is nothing irrational in a man disregarding emotional factors if he values other goals higher. They are just different pleasure economies with somewhat different rules, but in either the actors can work rationally to fulfil their desired goals and neither has lesser or greater access to rationality. However, if rationality is seen as a form of competence or capacity, not everyone will always be equally well endowed merely by the nature of their gender: just as men can fail catastrophically in business or war (two spheres often coded male) women can enter emotionally unfulfilling or even abusive relationships, or vice versa, obviously.
Which is all a long-winded way of saying that women and men are cultured to adopt different pleasure economies, but are equally rational in pursuing their goals as defined by these economies. To make a far greater leap I would posit that the goals themselves must always be subjectively founded, or a rational answer to a subjective idea of how society should be structured etcetera, always reaching the subjective at the end. With subjective I mean a judgement of what is considered good, as in that all meaning must be subjective; while rationality is objective, reflecting the laws of nature of cause and effect, but absent of meaning. Meaning, in other words, cannot be rational. (Citations? Humbug.)
I am not well versed in current philosophical discourses on metaphysics (although it seems very focused on liguistic technicalities?) but until scientists discover the Meaning of Life under a rock somewhere it seems to me that there can be no such thing as an objective raison d’être.
I am sure more erudite writers will take me to task for this naïveté, but if there actually is such a thing as a rational road to the Meaning of Life I’d be happy to hear about it!
Climbing ever higher on this tower of shaky (for their absence?) foundations; if all pleasure is subjective, and thus not as much irrational as disconnected from rationality even if it can be rationally pursued, the differences between male and female economies of pleasure is no longer a difference in fundamental ontology (of choosing the “rational” or the “irrational” life), but rather gendering and valuing of different hierarchies of pleasure economies. Any reaction to the (by these premises false) dichotomy between “irrational” women and “rational” men beyond outright dismissal (or at least a critical deconstruction of how male economies of pleasure, often tied to the public spaces wherein they were dominant, are designated as “rational” and the word charged with a nearly theological positive valence) would then be problematic as it engages an ideological fable as if it had any claim to the truth.
Treating the experiences of women, although certainly different from men and indeed perfectly valid in their own right, as dependant on essentialist “irrationality” in opposition to “rational” male experience seems less productive to the feminist cause of validating female experience than pointing out that all human behaviour rest upon a (however distant) foundation of subjective, emotional, irrational motives; that men more often than not refuse to accept these motives by rationalisation and ideological safety nets; and that finding happiness through relationships and emotional connections is no less valid and indeed no less functional an approach than working through patriarchal sublimation systems…
Am I sounding too utilitarian? Or relativistic? On re-reading the conclusion sounds a bit banal, so sorry for making you read all that…
Hey KT. See, my big problem is here:
“They are just different pleasure economies with somewhat different rules, but in either the actors can work rationally to fulfil their desired goals and neither has lesser or greater access to rationality. ”
That’s just an extremely rational, techno-pragmatist way to see the world. Starting from a place where we’re all pleasure robots working from different input cards is to start already from an enlightenment/utilitarian place. You haven’t adopted a universal stance or deconstructed a binary; you’ve just insisted your preferred viewpoint is the only (totalizing) one.
Rationality isn’t an absolute value system; it’s bound by history and culture just like everything else. Coding anything “good” as rational doesn’t make rationality universal; it just makes it impossible to critique it.
The point of thinking about women and irrationality is to talk about the ways in which patriarchy and reason are linked, and about how that has privileged (traditionally) male ways of seeing and thinking, and (traditional) hierarchies. One obvious way: rational economics is valued over irrational love and family ties. Turning love into a “pleasure economy” doesn’t change that dynamic; on the contrary, it suggests even more strongly that all human experience is best understood via the experience of the market. Many feminists have suggested (rightly, in my view) that such a worldview is (a) one that contributes to the subjugation of women, and (b) one which creates a world which is a crappy place in which to live.
Greetings from the Girls on Film writer. (BTW: Hala just copies the content every week. It’s home is movies.com, previously Cinematical – http://www.movies.com/movie-news/girls-on-film-archive)
I was quite surprised to see the responses to your piece. They seemed to decide that you have some sort of antiquated view of men and women, rather than note that the piece is speaking in stereotypical generalities. I thought you brought up an interesting and important alternative to consider.
I’m sick of the arguments against Bella because I’ve yet to see one that doesn’t try to morph the facts to fit the argument. Any agency or personality that Bella has is removed before arguments fly against her. Likewise, any blemishes sported by characters like Katniss or Buffy are dulled. The tough girls are coded in perfect terms, and Bella is made into the perfect loser. Essentially, they’re perfect because all faults can be forgiven by the overall package. People hate the romance and Meyer’s writing, so she doesn’t receive the same privilege.
Even in Amber’s piece, the similarities between K and Bella are obvious. If we boil all of this YA entertainment into checklist points, the girls are not all that different. No amount of bad writing, Mormon values, or indignation changes that.
What I thought was fascinating about Bella was that as much as the book journey was about Edward, it ultimately became about her. I completely disagree with: “Contra Berlatsky, it is laughable to read Bella’s desire for Edward as secondary to her desire to be a vampire—if Edward died, would Bella want to become undead? I think not.” She most definitely would. In fact, some might argue that Edward’s appeal is infinitely enhanced by how much his world helps Bella find her identity. The confused human klutz becomes the calm, impressively controlled vampire. Humanity was a banana peel that always kept her off-kilter.
I think there is a certain.. allergy to femininity because of its implications. Classic definitions of femininity certainly have their place, but I think many of us see that as problematic because of how those notions are fostered by the suffocating media presence around us. It is hard, if not impossible, to signify “natural” moments of femininity because of how much shlock girls get taught from an early age. I often see women act in ways that clash with their own personal ideologies, but are right in-line with the plentiful stereotypical characterizations we’re fed.
So perhaps it’s not so much a matter of hating the feminine, but mistrusting it, and finding it problematic in today’s social environment. But it’s still something we need to consider.
Also: It’d be interesting to talk about how strength fires up forgiveness. The stronger a heroine is, no matter how well or poorly she’s written, the more likely we are to forgive problematic aspects that surround her. Most Buffy fans seem to all-out deny the darker side of Buffy’s world (stalker boyfriends, forgiveness of killers, etc). With Katniss, we get a strong heroine who is literally kept out of a hearing about her life while literally watching her skin melt off, who has no choice about where and how to live, is pressured into having children she doesn’t feel comfortable having, is in a romance that still doesn’t inspire her to say “love”.. She seems to never in control of herself. If no one watched/read either Buffy or Hunger Games, it’d be easy to turn off the populace by the same methods used to turn Bella into a complete fool.
btw: I’ve got to thank you for that 2009 piece, which I hadn’t seen before. I had completely forgotten about the hideous storyline that condemned Buffy’s strength and made Riley morally superior with his blood-prostitute ways. (Much like the other Xander gem when killing a frat-massacring Anya would make Buffy cruel, but trying to help Angel made her foolish and selfish.) I imagine that I find it easy to see Buffy’s weaknesses and Bella’s strengths for this very reason.
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K T says:
…I should clarify that to me, rationalism (without the quotes) above all means the ability to work towards a desired goal in an effective/efficient manner; it is a technique, or competence (substitute capacity if competence sounds too gendered), rather than a goal in and of itself. It is with this in mind that I write:
If women do place a higher value on emotional bonds, experiences and relationships than men there is nothing whatsoever irrational (again without the quotes) in disregarding other factors, such as financial status, in the pursuit of these goals; likewise there is nothing irrational in a man disregarding emotional factors if he values other goals higher…
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Is utterly disregarding either emotional or material factors of significant importance “rational” (in the old sense of the word)? I think not…
Humans being what they are and reality what it is, it’s self-destructive to think that one can either totally be led around by emotional urges or materialistic considerations, and not suffer for neglecting the other “side.”
A man who solely marries for money, no matter how highly he values wealth, will end up feeling emotionally empty, that something is missing from his life. Then — as neglected emotional needs assert themselves — make a fool of himself over a buxom young secretary, lose most of his wealth in a messy divorce.
A woman who values hearts-and-flowers “love” and disregards that the chap has never held more than a menial job for more than a week, will end up with the crude reality of having to pay bills smacking her between the eyes with a two-by-four. What’s the single biggest thing couples argue about? Money! Unromantic, but there it is.
(Which leads back to my argument that, if a woman really really REALLY wants to have a baby, she should — the horror! — take into consideration material factors such as what her financial/career situation is, how committed is her relationship; because those will be negatively impacted. And arguing that “society should change, and value and give lots more support to motherhood” is very well-meaning, but won’t pay the bills in this current reality.)
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Monika says:
I think there is a certain.. allergy to femininity because of its implications. Classic definitions of femininity certainly have their place, but I think many of us see that as problematic because of how those notions are fostered by the suffocating media presence around us. It is hard, if not impossible, to signify “natural” moments of femininity because of how much shlock girls get taught from an early age. I often see women act in ways that clash with their own personal ideologies, but are right in-line with the plentiful stereotypical characterizations we’re fed.
So perhaps it’s not so much a matter of hating the feminine, but mistrusting it, and finding it problematic in today’s social environment. But it’s still something we need to consider.
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It’s certainly pretty damn difficult to separate what types of behaviors/values are biologically inherent in a gender as a group, and which ones are “taught” by observing others, social interaction, cultural programming.
One extensive study of young girls found they were actually more “tomboyish,” less stereotypically feminine, that how they were supposed to be. (Not that they were full-blown tomboys; but, rather, not limited to behaving in a narrowly proscribed “sugar and spice and everything nice” fashion.)
Not to mention that inherent qualities are deliberately warped and distorted: for instance, male sensitivity quashed and punished, that they may make better soldiers; female independence equally discouraged, that they will make better “house-slaves”…
Hey Monika. Thanks so much for your comment; I really appreciate it.
I thought Buffy overall was a really problematic character. That Angel storyline really kind of crystallized things…but she was always being made to feel guilty for her strength and desires. The whole idea that “S/M relationship is eeeeevvvviiiilllll” also. Like Katniss, there was a sense with Buffy that admitting to her own desires, or enjoying being powerful, was somehow wrong or problematic. There’s just not a moment that I remember in hunger games or buffy where the characters are just really, really psyched and joyous about their physical prowess, the way Bella is in Breaking Dawn.
And thanks for confirming my sense of Bella’s desires being at least as much about being a vampire as about loving Edward. I think it’s about his family too, actually — it’s the whole weird Mormon package of close family and eternal life and monogamous union that’s appealing. I don’t even know that that’s *better*, exactly — you could argue for and against I suppose. But it isn’t *just* about doing everything for Edward, or sacrificing everything for him.
And I agree about femininity — both in terms of being something to think about and in terms of the wariness of it being understandable and even necessary. But I think there’s just a real problem when that wariness is translated into an attack on people who, like Bella, are *too* feminine in one way or another.
Mike Hunter-
I wouldn’t even say biologically to a gender, but what’s natural to a specific person. Unless a person of a specific gender really goes against cultural expectations, there is no distinct line between what naturally appeals to them, what they’re taught, what they fear to expose.
(Though males certainly have much less cultural expectations to fight against and a broader range of socially acceptable behaviours and personas these days .)
Noah, thank you for yours!
I agree about Buffy. Perhaps for a little while in the beginning she was allowed to revel in her strength, but there was so much condemnation in that show. Since Xander most often lobbed the bullshit condemnation, I just funneled my hatred into him rather than the show. He seemed to act like some sort of condescending moral compass that always emotionally beat her down with flawed, self-serving opinions. There IS one moment where Buffy really flourished in her strength though – Prophecy Girl when she killed the Master. After she was resuscitated, she seemed downright gleeful about her role as a slayer. Unfortunately, the beginning of Season 2 took that all away and re-coded her as being severely emotionally damaged by the whole thing.
Funny, I was just going to type about Katniss’ failure to feel much of anything except loyalty/protectiveness and aggravation/anger … but that once again makes her more like Bella. She just gets “better” reasons to feel it, whereas Bella’s are much more realistic to people today.
I think it’s said in the book, but it’s definitely in the movie that Bella tells Edward she wants to marry him because of how she finally feels like herself. “This wasn’t a choice between you and Jacob. It was between who I should be and who I am. I’ve always felt out of step. Like literally stumbling through my life. I’ve never felt normal, because I’m not normal, and I don’t wanna be. I’ve had to face death and loss and pain in your world, but I’ve also never felt stronger, like more real, more myself, because it’s my world too. It’s where I belong.” And then she specifically says it’s not just about him. It’s just that these points get muddled in the Edward lust.
Yes, I think Bella is attracted to that familial life, but I think that the audience is even more. Twilight might be ridiculous and in some ways problematic, but it fills holes. If your familial life is traumatic or nonexistant, you can go into the books feel the warmth of the family. If you have relationship problems, you can get swept up in the love. More than anything, the Saga speaks to the dissatisfaction and emptiness in life, or most distinctly, offers a really defined sense of reliability. The Cullens are honest and reliable without condemnations about how people live their lives; they love their family no matter what crazy choices they (Edward, Alice, etc) might make. I think that probably appeals to the readership just as much as the romance. (I know that to be true for some friends of mine who like the series.) Of course, it also means exacerbating expectations of love to inhuman forms.
And yes, there is a real problem with how loathed Bella is. If she was just immediately dismissed as problematic with a list of reasons and that was the end of the story, fine. She is far from an ideal heroine. However, the vehemence against her is strange, and not at all in line with how she’s presented in either the books or the films. I think that’s partly due to people taking up the argument from other’s opinions and not reading for themselves, and maybe some of it is the anger towards Meyer’s style making any positive point irrelevant? I don’t know..
I think it’s the book’s popularity which creates a lot of the vehemence. They feel like a real threat, I think, because they have such a huge cultural footprint. People really want to distance themselves from it and say, “no, this isn’t what women are like and this isn’t what feminism is, or should be about.”
I think the style is kind of a red herring. The books are crap, but lots of things are crap. The Hunger Games and Harry Potter are quite badly written too. And Buffy was often an incoherent mess, god knows. If the issue were actual literary quality, everybody would be reading “How To Train Your Dragon” or C.S. Lewis or Lloyd Alexander or the Tripod Trilogy or Octavia Butler or, I don’t know, lots of other things.
Oh and good recall on that Bella speech. I didn’t remember that, though it fits with my sense of the character. And she’s clearly always already meant to be a vampire…which I think fits into the sense I talk about in that Dworkin essay that this world isn’t made for women, and that there needs to be a utopian transformation for equality to be real.
Wait, first you’re complaining about Katniss using violence and now you’re complaining that Buffy doesn’t get to revel in her strength and enjoy her role as Slayer.
Which is it people?
Lynn,
I never complained about Katniss’ violence. Though I think it’s problematic to compare Buffy killing demons (although even that gets muddled when she realizes some demons are good) with Katniss killing fellow kids. They’re two exceptionally different types of violence and contexts.
But yes, I agree with Noah that Buffy doesn’t get to enjoy her strength and almost always gets condemned for it, her position, or her choices. Many episodes deal with Buffy’s friends chastising her choices and actions, whether they’ve done similar or worse themselves, whether they’re actually logical or illogical. She’s a strong character whose strength is continually the source of her undoing or a point of contention with the people she cares about.
Hey Lynn. I think this is a basic misunderstanding. I wasn’t complaining about Katniss’ violence, or about her masculinity. As I keep saying, I like Katniss fine. I was thinking about why she’s more popular than Bella, and trying to suggest that both had valuable things to offer as role models for teen girls (or middle-aged men, in my case.)
I think the power and the refusal to embrace that power go together though, as Laura Miller sort of argues. You can be strong or you can be in touch with your desires, but both isn’t allowed. (Though Bella does manage both at the end of Breaking Dawn…)
More thoughts when I have more time, but I at the point where Katniss actually kills people I don’t think she’s in that different a position then Buffy was. After all, except for Coin at the end, the people she kills were at that moment trying to kill her. She was acting in defense of herself and others.
Killing kids does add an extra punch though, doesn’t it? I think the Hunger Games is more concerned about the moral implications of its violence than Buffy generally is — which is to the Hunger Games’ credit.
It actually came to me that my problem (and I suspect several people’s) with Twilight isn’t so much Bella, but something fundamentally off about the world and the characters.
So I read half the first book, got frustrated and gave up. I did watch the movies and the scene from the movies that most stuck with me was at the end of the second. When they’re escaping the Volturi at the end there’s a group of tourists being led the other way. And they’re eaten while our heroes do nothing.
I could go with this. They’re not in a position to fight them. It’s like the end of The Empire Strikes Back and they’re hauling an injured Luke away from Cloud City.
Then in the next film they turn around and take out the Volturi. Oh wait, no, there’s that weird redheaded chick and lots of CGI wolves.
But surely in the fourth book, they take out the Volturi. Well, they confront them and Bella talks them into leaving her family alone.
They can go on devastating the Volturra tourist trade.
What Taylor said about Bella protecting her “tiny microverse of loved ones” is very true. Does she spare a second thought for those poor people who wanted to see some pretty architecture? Or the people Victoria killed to create her army?
Anyway, I’m sure you going to say “femininity” and “family”, and talk about the “exploration of love and relationships” again. There are very good books about those things. Bet Me, the book I recommended earlier is very much about those things and I love it. But when you introduce certain elements, and I think vampires alone might be enough, but add werewolves and armies and secret societies and you’re going to have to deal with questions of good vs. evil and how these characters actions effect the whole world.
Which gets me to the Cullen clan. Sure they don’t eat humans, they eat predatory animals and thus screw up the ecosystem. (Maybe they should chow down on deer. That at least might reduce the car accident rate around Forks.) They have strength, wealth and an infinite amount of time and they spend it in high school? (Even Duncan MacLeod managed to get down to the soup kitchen once in a while.) I could accept that taking on the Volturri is impossible but what else are they doing with their time?
Carlisle’s a doctor, sure, but is he running a free clinic? No, he’s working at a hospital. It’d be fine for most people, but I expect more from repentant vampire….And I definitely wouldn’t expect someone who seems to hate being a vampire to make new ones because he’s lonely. That seems incredibly selfish.
And then there’s Jasper attacking Bella due to a paper cut. Who they send to high school where he’s surrounded by teenagers and paper. What are they thinking?
There’s something morally wrong about the Twilight universe. I suspect a lot of people pick up on this, even if they can’t articulate it, and it ends up coming out as hatred for Bella because she’s telling the story.
Also? Explosions and love and relationships are not mutually exclusive categories. In one of Nora Roberts recent books, the lead characters were smoke jumpers. They could talk about their relationships and dodge fireballs at the same time.
Explosions and love and relationships can go together, sure. Balancing them can be a little tricky, though, and the audiences are not always the same.
Anyway — I think those criticisms are all more on point than the complaints about stalking and so forth. Twilight’s world-building is pretty weak and nonsensical in a lot of ways. Harry Potter and Buffy actually have a lot of the same problems and for similar reasons, I think. The idea of a secret world with powerful beings living in the interstices just doesn’t make much sense, and is going to create lots of problems. For example, in Harry Potter, the constant mind-wiping of muggles — that’s really not morally acceptable, I don’t think. And if you’ve got dragons and various magical creatures around, not to mention dangerous evil wizards, what moral calculus is it exactly that allows you to keep such dangers to yourself and never tell the muggle world? Shouldn’t the normal folk have a chance to prepare to defend themselves if Voldemart happens to win?
To your Twilight criticisms in particular — I would say that it’s hard for me to take those kind of moral questions that seriously because…I mean, the whole idea that you could hide that many vampires and that number of murders for any length of time just seems so ridiculous. It’s not that the morality of the world is off; it’s that the whole damn world is off. Taking the moral problem seriously would require me to take the structure of the world seriously, and I can’t do that. The whole thing is just dumb.
I actually appreciate that Twilight *does not* really care if I believe in the world building in order to enjoy the story the way, say, Harry Potter does. Harry Potter is really about the geopolitics; the fact that the geopolitics make no sense is therefore a real bar to me not just finding the whole series too ridiculous to bother with. For Twilight, the geopolitics is really there only as window dressing. It’s not what the story’s about. If you want actual world-political insight, this is not what you should be reading (I would humbly suggest you shouldn’t be reading Harry Potter or Hunger Games either…but we’ll move on.)
Anyway, I kind of like the fact that there are things Bella really can’t control or stop. She can protect her family, but she doesn’t have the wherewithal to root out all the evil in the world. That seems realistic to me, even if the details are obviously all ridiculous. Carlisle and his coven seem to be making converts in terms of the whole not-killing-people thing…that’s changing the world too, slowly, perhaps, but would an all-out vampire war be better?
Oh, and with Carlisle making vampires…my understanding is he tends to do it to save people’s lives. I can’t remember Edward’s origin story, but Carlisle definitely only changed Rosalie when he found her at death’s door.
With Bella, I think it was more than a paper cut in the book? There was some pretty serious bleeding…. Your point still stands though. Having a hair-trigger vampire around civilians is clearly completely irresponsible. Maybe they could give him a muzzle?
Lynn-
“the people she kills were at that moment trying to kill her”
Actually, Katniss makes at least one other kill, when she kills the gluttonous woman about to call for help. Granted, “help” would be a danger to Katniss, but the woman herself wasn’t doing anything to her.
As for Twilight-
I don’t blame you for not getting through the books, but they do fill in blanks the movies leave alone, and fix at least some of the issues.
Bella does seem flippant in the movies about the Volturi massacre. In the book, however, she was immediately sickened and crying, and then basically has a panic attack about all the people dying, and then anger toward the human Volturi secretary that willingly wants to be there, and then confusion because she’s partly stressed and partly happy. She continues to have nightmares about them through the books. Unfortunately, Meyer set it up so that they couldn’t have a realistic fight without wiping out half of the good guys, which she didn’t want to do.
And yes, it’s silly that they’re in high school. I guess Meyer would argue that since they never sleep, they get to spend most of their days doing whatever they want to do. What do they do? Considering Breaking Dawn, I think Meyer would say that they’re usually having sex or working on their projects. She does say that Edward is so smart and good at everything because he has had no romantic distractions and a lot of time on his hands. It would, I agree, be nice to see them be proactive.
As for Carlisle, I agree idealistically, but it doesn’t make sense thematically. His vamp powers make him a great doctor, and a free clinic doesn’t allow him to save people during surgery, etc. And if he funded it himself, that’d certainly draw attention to him. Still, something more should’ve been done. ..and there’s also the fact that he cherishes human life, but also can be friends with human-killing vampires. It does raise a lot of questions. As for turning, he seems to think that vamping people who are about to die is better than death.
The paper cut: It is THE most ridiculous and lazy piece of the books, by far. Or maybe he has a secondary “gift” that influences the environment to not get paper cuts, menstrual blood, nosebleeds, etc, while he is around, except for Bella, who can block it. :)
But I don’t see the universe being inherently morally wrong, or rather, no more morally wrong than real life.
Noah –
Yes – always death’s door. Edward was about to die from some illness, and was changed because his mom begged Carlisle to keep him safe before her death. Esme tried to commit suicide after her children were killed or something. And Emmett got half-eaten by a bear or something, and Rosalie carried him to Carlisle for vamping.
Nope, Jasper attacks from a single drop of blood that turns into more when Edward flings her out of Jasper’s way. It’d stupid.
I do, however, disagree with this: “If you want actual world-political insight, this is not what you should be reading (I would humbly suggest you shouldn’t be reading Harry Potter or Hunger Games either…but we’ll move on.)”
I found HG to be a great commentary on life, and a challenge to our obsession with happy endings. The Games reflected reality TV, the obsession with the Peeta romance reflected gossip culture, and then the politics instantly showed that every government is as strong as its members whims and weaknesses. Katniss doesn’t get her happy ending really, and I’m surprised that people say she does. There is this suffocating feeling that it isn’t over and that Katniss isn’t being paranoid. Coin was no better than Coriolanus. She still doesn’t have rights. Plutarch says the peace could be short-lived. Unfortunately, that bravery in the ending is completely spoiled by how they treat Katniss … which I think is proof that Collins cared more about the commentary on government than her heroine and the love triangle.
There is no shortage of romance novels out there that combine relationships with not just explosions, but murder mysteries, Navy SEALS, zombies and even alien invasions. You really need to do some more reading before you comment on the genre.
I’m going to bed, but I’m just going to add this: My complaint is not about geopolitics or the logistics of hiding a secret world.
It’s about basic morality. The protagonists of Harry Potter, Buffy and The Hunger Games all have there flaws but I think they act to protect the less powerful more often then they don’t.
The Cullens don’t seem to give a damn.
Put it this way, if you’re under attack by a vicious vampire who do you want coming your way: Bella or Buffy?
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Monika says:
I wouldn’t even say biologically to a gender, but what’s natural to a specific person.
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Certainly there’s plenty of variance among individuals, but for understanding “the big picture,” studying how, overall, most members of a group tend to behave/react is most useful.
After all, a specific person may be genetically less prone to developing cancer, and able to chain-smoke their whole life with few ill effects; some can easily kick the habit. Are we to have, say, Health Department policies/attitudes towards smoking dictated by those rare individuals, or by how the vast majority of people are harmed by tobacco and find it a painful struggle to quit?
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…(Though males certainly have much less cultural expectations to fight against and a broader range of socially acceptable behaviours and personas these days .)
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Broader…
(I remember the days when huge masses of society were frothing at the mouth over the horror of men growing their hair long — “How will you be able to tell men apart from women?” — with one preacher even arguing that Jesus had short hair)
…yet still narrower in overall society than that accepted for women. With all the stereotypically masculine-behavior ass-kicking heroines out there, where are the matching amount of heroes showing stereotypically feminine behavior, being nurturing, caretaking, selfless, and weepy?
Instead, what we see are macho men, fratboys and manboys; the idea that traditional “manliness”is an endangered species that needs to be protected and resurge…
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…There IS one moment where Buffy really flourished in her strength though…After she was resuscitated, she seemed downright gleeful about her role as a slayer. Unfortunately, the beginning of Season 2 took that all away and re-coded her as being severely emotionally damaged by the whole thing…
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We never could get into “Buffy,” but there’s no shortage of mass-media examples of strong women being punished for it. Or, annoyingly, having stuff tossed in like the irritating series of scenes in “Fringe” where Olivia is made to act all motherly and cutesy-talking with her sister’s typically-adorable TV moppet. Clearly to show the audience, “Look, she’s a strong and courageous FBI agent, but she can be mushy and nurturing too, and wants to be a mother!”
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…For example, in Harry Potter, the constant mind-wiping of muggles — that’s really not morally acceptable, I don’t think.
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Totally morally defensible. The “non-magical world” would be mostly into fearing/hating these powerful “not like us” people (so easy to imagine a “Protocol of the Elders of Magic”-type hoax becoming popular), and wanting them to be either exterminated or enslaved: “weaponized” and made to work for the government.
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And if you’ve got dragons and various magical creatures around, not to mention dangerous evil wizards, what moral calculus is it exactly that allows you to keep such dangers to yourself and never tell the muggle world?
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Superman was powerless against magic; wouldn’t the “normal folk” be likewise?
And look at how all Muslims are feared and hated by many because of the actions of a tiny amount of extremists and terrorists. Wouldn’t all magical people be likewise feared and hated, with Fox “News” and Rush Limbaugh spreading lies about their Secret Plan To Rule Us All?
Certainly you also need to take into account writerly considerations: that if this magic world was exposed to public view, it would alter its pocket-universe charm; the appeal of fantasizing about being part of a secret subculture, in the know about things that the “mundanes” know nothing of. And younger readers can enjoy thinking that maybe there are magicians out there, only being secretive about it.
For another writer’s approach, “The Bartimaeus Trilogy” shows…
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…The magicians are the governing class and hold all important posts in the government, from a Prime Minister down through assorted other ministers. They perform their magic indirectly by summoning, binding, and controlling various types of spirits, and by creating magical artifacts to do the same. The magicians are normal humans, who know how to summon demons and bend them to their will.
The commoners are those who are ignorant of magic and who make up the rest of society. They are kept in line by the governing class through fear and ignorance…Unlike the Muggles of the Harry Potter universe, who do not believe in magic, the commoners are fully aware of the magical world and know of the magicians’ dominance…
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartimaeus_%28book_series%29
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Harry Potter is really about the geopolitics; the fact that the geopolitics make no sense is therefore a real bar to me not just finding the whole series too ridiculous to bother with.
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Harry (which is why the lighter, brighter approach of Chris Columbus fit so well for the earlier movies) starts out as charmed — no pun intended — and delighted by the magical world, then gradually discovers all manner of nasty secrets and unpleasant sides to it. Like the enslavement of house elves, with in the books it being revealed that Hogwarts has its own huge group, kept out of sight. Hermione, bless her heart, trying to get them “liberated.”
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When asked about the politics and message in Harry Potter, Rowling explained, “I wanted Harry to leave our world and find exactly the same problems in the wizarding world. So you have the intent to impose a hierarchy, you have bigotry, and this notion of purity, which is this great fallacy, but it crops up all over the world. People like to think themselves superior and that if they can pride themselves in nothing else they can pride themselves on perceived purity. So yeah that follows a parallel [to Nazism]. It wasn’t really exclusively that. I think you can see in the Ministry even before it’s taken over, there are parallels to regimes we all know and love.” She also said, “You should question authority and you should not assume that the establishment or the press tells you all of the truth.”
The Wall Street Journal compared Neville Chamberlain to Rowling’s Cornelius Fudge, saying both were eager to help their constituents look the other way to avoid war. “Throughout the ’30s, Chamberlain, fearing that Churchill was out for his job, conducted a campaign against his fellow Tory. Chamberlain denied the existence of the German menace and ridiculed Churchill as a “warmonger.” He used The Times—the government’s house organ—to attack Churchill and suppress dispatches from abroad about the Nazis that would have vindicated him.” Rowling confirmed Chamberlain was her inspiration in the Spanish newspaper magazine XLSemanal…
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Much more, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Harry_Potter
…and I wish I could find an online version of the article I’d once read about the huge amount of gay symbolism in the HP books, starting out with Harry having to live in a closet…
(By the way, Rowlings’ writing greatly improved as the books went along…)
“Put it this way, if you’re under attack by a vicious vampire who do you want coming your way: Bella or Buffy?”
Um…I really never plan to be under attack by a vicious vampire? Because they don’t exist?
The idea that morality is primarily about physically protecting the less powerful makes sense if you live in a superhero fantasy. It has only a tangential relation to the actual world, in which hitting bad guys is likely to do as much harm as good. (See, 2003 invasion of Iraq) This is what I”m saying about Buffy, et al. not being especially thoughtful or coherent. Hitting bad guys as the apotheosis of morality is a pretty limited perspective.
Mike, I don’t agree that Rowling’s writing improved; I thought the first book was by far the best. It was much more in a Roald Dahl whimsical vein, and so the logical inconsistencies didn’t really matter. By four everything was supposed to be more coherent, and I couldn’t read the things any more.
Monika, that’s an interesting defense of HG. I guess I’d agree that it’s more thoughtful on political issues than Harry Potter. Part of the problem is that I think the sneering at reality TV and gossip culture is pretty glib, and doesn’t fit very well with the totalitarian critique. Reality TV and gossip culture are capitalist sins; they’re really about and enmeshed in consumer culture. Making them about a totalitarian system seems like evading the issue — you’re not figuring out what’s wrong with our culture really, you’re just saying “authoritarianism is bad,” which I think we maybe all knew. By the same token, the way the authoritarianism works doesn’t really make any sense — you never really understand the ideology of President Snow, for example — the humiliation of the districts just seems gratuitous, and more likely to provoke a revolt than squelch one (as indeed happens.) In something like the Tripods Trilogy, John Christopher actually creates an imperialist power that is believable; there’s a mix of racism and self-delusion and a technology of control that makes sense, and so comments thoughtfully on how those things work in the real world. I don’t get any of that from the Hunger Games.
I do like that the rebel leader is not a saint (which is a problem in the Tripod books)…but again, there’s not a sense of what she wants other than that she’s just evil. This is maybe because Katniss doesn’t really know or care I suppose…but that ties into maybe the biggest problem with the series, which is the need to have the political savior be completely disinterested in politics. That’s the case in HP, too, and I think seriously problematizes Lynn’s argument that Twilight is particularly uninterested in politics. It’s true that Bella isn’t especially concerned about saving the world…but Buffy, Harry, and Katniss aren’t interested in saving the world either. All of those characters have essentially a special dispensation from God to be political saviors. The sense that political actors really need to do a lot of groundwork before they end up at the center of the universe is just resolutely ignored; as a result the political message ends up being incoherent in a lot of ways.
An interesting counter-example is the Earthsea trilogy, where Ged only saves the world once, at the end of his career, when he has become the Archmage. Another is maybe the Narnia books, where the saviors not just figuratively, but literally have a special dispensation from God — which doesn’t make it any more insightful politically, but having the cards on the table at least allows the exercise to make sense. LOTR is somewhat clever about this too; the Baggins’ aren’t savvy political actors, but Gandalf is, and he chooses them precisely for their unobtrusiveness…
…And also that Hobbits — being “salt of the earth” types, pleased with simpler joys than power-seeking — were less liable to be seduced by the power of the Ring!
(Even elf-queen Galadriel would’ve gone mad, and bad, with that Ring, as she realized.)
Yes; hobbits are only addicted to tobacco, not rings, bless em.
Noah, we’re not talking about the real world here. We’re talking about Bella’s world. Or Buffy’s. Where monsters are real and physically protecting the less powerful, while not the “apotheosis of morality”, is pretty damn important.
So, can I dislike Bella because I find her amoral and selfish? Because I found her attitude towards her classmates obnoxious? Her martyr complex annoying? Is that me sneering at femininity?
Yes, her passivity and fixation on Edward raised my feminist hackles, but those are far from the only reasons I dislike her.
We’re not talking about the real world…but it’s useful to keep tabs on how the worlds differ, and what those changes say about how the morality works. A moral world in which the best thing you can do is hit a vampire in the face is maybe not the best analogy for the world we live in in every way, you know?
Similarly, you can dislike Bella for whatever reason you like…but I will also feel free to point out that such dislike has ideological content. Insisting that Bella is amoral essentially because she’s not a superhero like Buffy or Katniss makes superheroes the standard of morality — which, yes, I have a lot of problems with.
The martyr complex, i.e. self-sacrifice — that’s definitely coded feminine, and it’s explicitly linked to femininity in Twilight, since Bella keeps wanting to sacrifice herself for either her boyfriend(s) or her family or her child.
So, yeah…you’re not really getting out of the paradigm I discuss in my article. You’re mad that Bella isn’t more heroic in a traditionally masculine vein and upset that she’s self-sacrificing in a traditionally feminine vein. As I said in the piece, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting heroines who are superheroic. But I do think it’s worth questioning why so many commenters, of both genders, seem so put off by a hero who doesn’t fit that mold, and thinking about whether punching-vampires-in-the-face-for-glory is really in all situations a superior morality to sacrificing-my-life-for-those-I-love.
I’m interested in what you disliked about Bella’s attitude towards her classmates. That seemed fairly spot on for a lot of kids in school who don’t quite fit in, for whatever reason. Obviously it would be nice if she were more generous — but a big part of Bella’s appeal is, again, that she’s really not a paragon. She’s kind of dumb and kind of clumsy, she doesn’t do the right thing a lot of the time.
Why is Bella’s attitude towards her classmates obnoxious? I’ve seen that comment a lot, but it doesn’t make sense.
The boy “friends” she has all want to date her and only befriend her to try and get the opportunity for more. They (esp. Mike) also set up an us v. her dichotomy between the girls and Bella.
The girls are wary of Bella’s popularity, and very rarely act with any real warmth toward the girl, outside of Angela. Lauren is outright hostile, and Jessica teeters back and forth.
Bella, in turn, is nice, but she’s not particularly close to them because she doesn’t trust them, and can read the ulterior motives in their interactions.
If you want to take the argument that this is Bella’s POV and their actions are questionably filtered through her, Meyer had been writing a book from Edward’s mind-reading POV of the same events in Twilight and Jessica had a pretty catty, jerky inner monologue in it.
Ultimately, Bella’s wary and doesn’t think much of half of them, but always remains nice and simply keeps her distance. That said, I think Meyer should have, at the very least, let Bella explore her friendship with Angela more than she did.
In the films, because of how awesome Anna Kendrick is, Jessica’s jerky side is subdued, so maybe that has something to do with the contempt.
I think there is something to the idea that not Bella, but Meyer is not really fair to the other high school students. They’re kind of just there to be mundane, pretty much. They *are* so mundane that it’s easy to see why Bella’s not interested…but it would definitely be a better series if Meyer had been able to create secondary characters who weren’t just placeholders, I think. If there were other kids who were interesting/had a real connection with Bella, for example, her decision to forsake the human world would have cost more.
Umm,a martyr complex and self-sacrifice are not the same thing.
That said, your comment did get me wondering why Bella is regarded as self-sacrificing. Is it because she goes to save her mother at the end of Twilight? I guess, but it’s not really what I think of when I think of a self-sacrificing heroine. That would be heroic if the way she went about it wasn’t kind of stupid. Maybe it’s because she doesn’t actually seem to sacrifice anything she really cares about. Yes, the pregnancy and childbirth were pretty harrowing but at the end she got exactly what she wanted.
A self-sacrificing heroine is one who continually puts the needs and desires of her loved ones ahead of her own. It’s the woman who gives up her job to go home and run the family farm, etc. Other then possibly moving to Forks in the first place, when does Bella do that?
And in a romance with a self-sacrificing heroine, or hero for that matter, 90% of the time a big part of the story will be about them learning to be less self-sacrificing and take care of themselves.
One problem with this is that Bella would have to have some actual desires to sacrifice and I can’t figure out that she has any outside of Edward.
BTW, I’m not saying that the only way to be a hero is through physical violence. If Meyer hadn’t shown the Volturi massacring people, the ending would have been fine. But once she made them a threat to innocent people, something had to be done about them.
And, hey, that something did not have to involve violence. There are certainly other ways I could imagine that don’t involve violence.
As to Bella’s classmates, I don’t know, there was something in the way she talks about them that struck me as snotty. Like “how dare these lesser creatures talk to me!” I guess I just didn’t see them as as predatory as Monika did.
Bella isn’t proactive, her friendships outside of Jacob are weak, and she seems too consumed with Edward and the Cullens, but the one thing she isn’t lacking is self-sacrifice.
She’s always putting other people before herself. She moves to a town she hates because her mother is unhappy. She gives herself over to a vampire to try and save mom (kind of an inverse to The Lost Boys). She puts herself and the Cullens in danger to save dad during that whole mess. She offers her life to spare Edward’s with the Volturi. She tries to convince the others to let her lead the newborns to the big fight. She lures Victoria with her own blood. She chooses to potentially sacrifice Edward, what she fought for through over-long novels, as well as herself, to have a child. She dies before she gets saved. She makes plans for how she can save her daughter if she and Edward die. etc
Why is a sacrifice void if it turns out happily? Katniss sacrifices for Peeta, and he lives, so does that weaken the sacrifice?
That said, she definitely could’ve used more of the romance trend you mention — learning to take care of herself. She gets that a bit in the end, and actually gets to make a number of decisions without Edward, but it’s kind of late.
As for the friends.. Perhaps it all seems more clear in retrospect because I happened to read that unpublished half-novel where Edward was reading everyone’s minds. Meyer seems to really hate those kids. I think I remember that Edward started to get protective reading their minds because they were thinking things that made Bella’s thoughts seem sugary sweet.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…you can dislike Bella for whatever reason you like…but I will also feel free to point out that such dislike has ideological content. Insisting that Bella is amoral essentially because she’s not a superhero like Buffy or Katniss makes superheroes the standard of morality — which, yes, I have a lot of problems with.
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Are people saying she’s “amoral” because she’s not out there staking vamps and shooting werewolves, or because she accepts those hapless tourists being drained?
There is moral behavior and action can be taken outside of superhero-style bravado; I don’t think Bella is criticized so much for not being a Slayer, but for going so far in the opposite direction.
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The martyr complex, i.e. self-sacrifice — that’s definitely coded feminine, and it’s explicitly linked to femininity in Twilight, since Bella keeps wanting to sacrifice herself for either her boyfriend(s) or her family or her child.
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Ah, if it were only “coded feminine”; take a look at the massive amount of self-sacrifice involved in raising kids…
I just don’t know what Bella is supposed to do about the Volturi. Fighting them won’t work. Alerting the authorities would probably just kill more people. Yelling and screaming at Carlisle et al. seems like it wouldn’t really do much good…and again, pitched batlle between Carlisle et al. and the Volturi seems likely to cause more death. Trying to warn potential victims…again, very unlikely to be effective, and difficult to see how you would go about it in any case. I just don’t really see what she can do, precisely.
This is what I”m saying about superhero morality. Sometimes there really are evil things that you can’t personally solve. Again, our invasion of Iraq is a good case in point of how deciding to right the world’s wrongs regardless of consequences can make things a whole lot worse rather than better.
Things perhaps change a bit at the end, where Bella’s new power neutralizes the absolute superiority of the Volturi. Still, a war would involve a lot of people dying…I guess it would have been nice to see them strugging with the issue, but it seems like it’s more an issue of Meyer’s crappy world building than that the characters are somehow moral monsters.
I do strongly believe, in any case, that non-intervention and non-violence (which is basically where Carlisle is coming from) are reasonable moral positions even when confronted with evil. Otherwise your embracing neo-con foreign policy, which I’m against.
Oh, and Monika, that about Edward reading their minds and finding out how horrible they are…that sounds repulsive. Sounds like it was for the best that she never finished that….
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…I do strongly believe, in any case, that non-intervention and non-violence (which is basically where Carlisle is coming from) are reasonable moral positions even when confronted with evil. Otherwise your embracing neo-con foreign policy, which I’m against.
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So the only choice is between letting evil do whatever it feels like (even non-violent actions against dictatorships like trade sanctions usually end up only hurting the little people, boosting the popularity of the regime), or the arrogant, utterly hypocritical (because plenty of vicious tyrants, including Saddam Hussein in his day, received U.S. government backing), intelligence-manipulating policy of the NeoCons?
No wonder the majority of the American people are loath to cheer for either side, if the choice is between wimps and assholes.
As for dealing with the Volturi, a series of pseudonymous articles in the less-respectable publications (“Weekly World News,” where are you now that we need you?*) would at least create wariness via an “urban legend” approach; encourage an at least partial curtailing of their “feeding”…
* Ah, it’s at http://weeklyworldnews.com/ : “KIM KARDASHIAN’S BUTT EXPLODES”
I don’t think recognizing that there are some evils you can’t change makes you a wimp. Sometimes there aren’t any good choices.
The weekly world news route is funny, but seems like it would be ineffectual. You’d piss off the volturi but wouldn’t actually alert anybody. Seems like just doing something for the sake of doing something.
Maybe just to reiterate…the whole moral dilemma is kind of ridiculous in the first place, because it’s predicated on the idea that nobody would know about the Volturi in the first place. But you can’t regularly slaughter entire tourist groups without lots of people knowing. The whole scenario is just Meyer being dumb; it’s a moral dilemma in a plot hole.
I don’t even know that it’s morality (which is questionable anyway when we’re talking about vampires who already fight their blood urges every day), but the lack of a death wish. Genocide, wars, etc – we might want them to stop and maybe even know who is responsible, but we don’t have the power to do anything. Most people in the world don’t even so much as donate money, but they care that people are dying, so is their morality questionable?
The Cullens might have superpowers compared to the humans, but not compared to the much-older Volturi with their army of talents.
(I also think an interesting book lies in there somewhere — delving into the morality/expectations/urges of a good vampire. How do they deal not only with their urges, but also vampires who don’t suppress them? I imagine some sense of superiority must come into play. They have, after all, evolved beyond human restraints.)
Anyway.. Found the Edward mind-reading thing. Here are a few gems. From a literary standpoint, not so great; these people are horrifically self-involved. At the same time, I stand by the fact that there’s a certain value in seeing more realistic and unidealized super-human kids. I might not have read minds, but I remember chatter and notes like this in high school.
“Fat lot of good it will do her, Jessica went on. She’s really not even pretty. I don’t know why Eric is staring so much…or Mike.” …. “This put a mean edge to Jessica’s thoughts, though she was outwardly cordial to the newcomer..”
“Everyone’s looking at me today, too, Jessica thought smugly in an aside.”
“Look at him staring at her. Isn’t it enough that he has half the girls in school waiting for him to… Eric Yorkie..”
“…so disgusting. You’d think she was famous or something … Even Edward Cullen, staring … Lauren Mallory was so jealous that her face, by all rights, should be dark jade in color.”
“Oh, good luck, idiot!”
“Would she have asked Mike to the dance if I hadn’t said anything? Does he think she’s prettier than me? Does she think she’s prettier than me?”
“Does she really think that? Or does she want me to look like a cow on Saturday?”
“Jessica Stanley – it had been a while since she’d bothered me with her internal chatter. What a relief it had been when she’d gotten over her misplaced infatuation.”
“Fat lot of good it will do her, Jessica went on. She’s really not even pretty. I don’t know why Eric is staring so much…or Mike.” …. “This put a mean edge to Jessica’s thoughts, though she was outwardly cordial to the newcomer..”
“Everyone’s looking at me today, too, Jessica thought smugly in an aside.”
“Look at him staring at her. Isn’t it enough that he has half the girls in school waiting for him to… Eric Yorkie..”
“…so disgusting. You’d think she was famous or something … Even Edward Cullen, staring … Lauren Mallory was so jealous that her face, by all rights, should be dark jade in color.”
“Oh, good luck, idiot!”
“Would she have asked Mike to the dance if I hadn’t said anything? Does he think she’s prettier than me? Does she think she’s prettier than me?”
“Does she really think that? Or does she want me to look like a cow on Saturday?”
oops.. sorry for the double-paste
Huh…not quite as bad as I’d imagined…. You sort of see a little of the (extremely watered down, but still) social-satire Jane Austen influence that is referenced but not really picked up on in Twilight, maybe. (Though Meyer isn’t at all witty, alas…. “her face should be dark jade in color” — that’s the best put down you can manage, Edward? Yeesh.)
I have to say, if you were an ageless telepath, you’d think you’d stay as far away from high schools as possible. Being inside one person’s head when you’re that age is bad enough; why on earth would you subject yourself to an entire schoolful? Maybe he’s expiating his sins or something, I dunno….
I’ve highlighted some of the comments from here by Monika in a new post.
I haven’t read all the comments yet, (will do so now) but just in case this hasn’t been mentioned: Katniss’ sister is called Prim (Primrose). Not Pru. Please either do your research or proofread.
It’s a blog; no proofreaders, research is haphazard. Welcome to the Internet!