Utilitarian Review 5/24/14

All right, Sixteen Candles isn’t actually about a trans man, unfortunately; representations of trans people in media were even rarer two decades ago than they are now. But rewatching the film, it is surprising how obsessed this girl’s coming-of-age story is with manliness. Partly that has to do with the subplot involving the Geek (Anthony Michael Hall) as he tries to convince protagonist Samantha Baker (Molly Ringwald), or anyone, really, to have sex with him. His nerdishness and awkwardness is related repeatedly to a lack of manliness; Sam calls him a “total fag,” and he taunts his even geekier henchman by telling them “don’t be such faggots.” At one point, he even accidentally takes birth control pills, foisted on him by Caroline Mulford (Haviland Morris). He spits the pills out quickly, though…and soon thereafter, as if getting rid of those contaminating hormones is some sort of rite-of-passage, he finally manages his transition to not-womanly by having an unspecified but mutually satisfying intimate tryst with the seemingly way out of his league Caroline.

Like the Geek, Sam is trying to grow up — a process made no easier when her entire family forgets her birthday. Growing up for her doesn’t mean becoming a man, but getting one: in this case, the Robert-Pattinson-before-there-was-Robert-Pattinson hot, soulful Jake Ryan (Michael Schoeffling). Yet, getting the guy and being the guy are wrapped around each other in complicated ways. Sam (whose name is suggestively androgynous) is a sophomore; Jake’s a senior. Her eagerness to be older, then, is a wish to be like him, as well as a wish to be with him. Her desire isn’t just about romance, but about the desire to be acknowledged rather than erased — to get out of her beautiful sister’s shadow, and out from under the bleak school hierarchy. It’s not an accident that the film’s one glimpse of nudity is a scene in the girl’s bathroom in which Sam and her best friend stare at a topless Caroline in an excess of envy at her body and at her good fortune in dating Jake. The camera focuses first of all on her breasts before it pulls back; it’s an eroticized moment, in which the jealous sophomores’ desire to be Caroline (and so date Jake) is visually blurred with the desire to be with Caroline (and so essentially be Jake.)

Adulthood in Sixteen Candles, then, is in many ways coded as male — a patriarchal economy underlined by the viscious Asian stereotype of the quintessentially nerdy, iconically non-manly Long Duk Dong (Gedde Watanabe.) This link between adulthood and manliness isn’t a surprise; power in the 1980s, and still today, is generally coded as masculine. To grow up, to stop being a “fag” or (as one cruel upperclassman calls Sam) a “void”, is to grab hold of the male thing. Desire is not just about love, but about (male-coded) strength and substance and influence — thus the attraction of Bella to Edward, or of Anastasia to Christian Grey, or, for that matter, of Dorothea to Casaubon. Love isn’t just about wanting a man, but about wanting to be the man. Jake’s attractiveness , too, is not just his pretty face; it’s also his fancy cars and his place at the pinnacle of the school’s pecking order — and also the fact that he’s dating the desirable, visibly adult Caroline.

So romance is all about patriarchy? Well, not exactly. Or at least, the dynamic of wanting to grow up by loving and becoming the loved one isn’t restricted to heterosexual love stories. For example, it’s the basic premise of Nora Olsen’s wonderful lesbian YA novel, Frenemy of the People, out last week. At the start of the book, Lexie is the one out lesbian at the high school: she’s fiercely political, anti-bourgeois, and (in what I take as a deliberate Holden Caulfield wink) hates the smarminess and fakeness of her classmates. Clarissa, on the other hand, is a straight girl from a Conservative Christian family who rides horses and has tons of friends in the popular clique.

But then Clarissa suddenly figures out she’s bi (she has an epiphany where she realizes she likes pictures of Kimye as much for Kim as for Kanye) and she and Lexie begin a wary process of falling in love. That process isn’t just about learning to like one another; it’s also about becoming like one another — growing up both by loving and by turning into the loved one. At the end of the book, it’s the fierce Lexie who says, “It’s like Clarissa cracked me open, and all this tenderness spilled out of me that I didn’t even know I had” — and it’s the political Lexie who admits that “All I do now are bourgeois things, like horseback riding and lying around kissing my girlfriend.” Meanwhile, it’s the popular high school girl Clarissa who says that Lexie has “made me more fierce and brave,” and who gushes about the joys of property destruction. (“I can’t wait to do more things like that.”) The two girls have grown and found themselves — and the selves they’ve found are each other.

You could argue that the absence of patriarchal fantasies, not to mention the absence of stupid gay slurs and emasculated Asian stereotypes, makes Olsen’s coming-of-age story better than Sixteen Candles. And “Frenemy of the People” is in fact much superior to the film. Olsen’s a wittier and smarter writer than John Hughes, with a broader range of interests and sympathies than Hollywood formula can manage (the book tackles everything from the housing crisis to mental disability issues, all with an immaculately light touch.)

Nonetheless, I think reading Sixteen Candles through Frenemy actually makes me appreciate the film more, not less. Yes, the anxieties around masculinity are a bit off-putting. But at the same time, as Olsen shows, it’s natural for Sam to want to be Jake, because people, of whatever gender or orientation, often want to be, as well as to be with, their sweeties. If there’s some suggestion that she likes his status and his maturity — well, what’s wrong with loving someone because they have qualities you admire, and want for yourself? When you’re looking for it, you can even perhaps see Jake doing something similar himself — he gives an impassioned speech about wanting a serious girlfriend; he’s sick of partying. Growing up for him means putting aside the childish things that comprise being on top of that social hierarchy, and getting to be more like Sam, quiet and out of the spotlight. Maybe it’s Jake’s birthday too, there at the end of the film, and the gift he gets is to grow up to be the girl he loves.

Utilitarian Review 5/17/14

Posted on May 17, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Chris Gavaler’s students review Spider-Man 2.

Me on why it’s not morally wrong to send your kid to private school.

Ng Suat Tong on the subversive blandness and bland subversion of Ms. Marvel.

Sean Michael Robinson on Depeche Mode, Doré and the denigration of craft.

Sarah Shoker on the economics of fantasy and why nerds like stuff.

Roy T. Cook asks if Tong of the Fantastic Four is transgendered.

Kailyn Kent on why suggestions of lighting for wine are stupid.

Utilitarians Everywhere

I contributed a piece to the Orange Is the New Black roundtable at Public Books, which really kicks the series satisfyingly. My piece is on the way that the series uses hoary lesbian tropes from the 1950 prison film Caged.

At the Chicago Reader I did a short review of Edie Fake’s wonderful Memory Palaces, which he’ll be reading from at Quimby’s tomorrow.

At the Atlantic I wrote about how Beyoncé critiques bell hooks.

At Salon I wrote about:

— the 12 greatest albumsof the 90s.

—how twitter has enabled sex worker speech.

—Comic Book Resources’ decision to revamp their comments in the light of sexist abuse.

At Splice Today I wrote about

—Liberals for the Republican establishment

— why mainstream sites cover Game of Thrones even though no one watches it.

At the Dissolve I wrote about the mediocre documentary Next Year in Jerusalem, about nursing home patients visiting Israel.

Other Links

Rob Liefeld…what more can you say?

Dani Paradis on a camp for children to express whatever gender they want.

Jonathan Bernstein on why campaign finance reform isn’t worth the candle.

Linda Holmes on romance fiction and women’s health.

Kids Vs. School

Posted on May 11, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

This first ran on Splice Today.
_________

I send my son to a private Waldorf school. This makes me one of the bad parents Allison Benedikt singled out in a controversial post at Slate recently, in which she excoriated (and/or trolled, as Mary McCarthy said) parents of private school kids. According to Benedikt, “[I]f every single parent sent every single child to public school, public schools would improve.” Therefore, folks like me are morally evil for sending our kids to a private school and beggaring our neighbors. Benedikt thinks that my kid would probably get a worse education at a public school. However, she tells me:

You want the best for your child, but your child doesn’t need it. If you can afford private school (even if affording means scrimping and saving, or taking out loans), chances are that your spawn will be perfectly fine at a crappy public school. She will have support at home (that’s you!) and all the advantages that go along with being a person whose family can pay for and cares about superior education—the exact kind of family that can help your crappy public school become less crappy. She may not learn as much or be as challenged, but take a deep breath and live with that.

The worst that will happen to my child, Benedikt insists, is that he won’t know poetry or the dates of the Civil War. He’ll just have fun drinking before football games rather than having fun learning about komodo dragons or drawing.

And maybe all of that’s true. Maybe I’m hurting the public schools by not sending my son there, and maybe it’s all for nothing, since he’d be just as happy filling in test bubbles as he is knitting. But I couldn’t help thinking of Benedikt’s proscriptions when I read Emily Yoffe’s most recent advice column. Yoffe’s interlocutor is a member of a religious minority living in the Deep South. The community, and therefore the public school, is deeply Christian, and the separation of Church and State appears to be honored entirely in the breach. There are school-sponsored Bible studies; the choir concert includes little but Christmas songs. And — the one that really matters — the woman’s middle-school aged daughter is frequently told by peers that she is going to hell.

Yoffe’s response was long on sympathy and short on actual practical advice.

Being in middle school is for many kids a kind of torture at best, and being told you’re going to hell must only add to the fun. But unless your daughter finds her treatment intolerable, you have to help give her some tools to deal with this: “Thanks for thinking about my soul. But my family is happy to be Jewish/Muslim/Hindu.

Which rather begs the question — what if her daughter does in fact find the treatment intolerable? What do you do then?

Benedikt would probably say that the mother should confront the school, and insist that they stop with the Bible studies and that they prevent the harassment. This is, in fact, Benedikt’s central argument; active parents, she feels, need to direct their energy, not towards building up some happy Waldorf community, but rather towards improving their local public schools. They should be, as Kim Brooks wrote at Salon, “super-parents who, through tireless volunteering and organizing and advocacy, turned our neighborhood school around.” By this reasoning, the questioner here needs to march up to the overly evangelical administration and start doing some transforming.

Brooks, who sends her kids to private school, admitted, with much guilt, that super-parenting wasn’t something she could face. For her part, Yost is savvy enough to realize that, for the non-Christian mother, super-parenting could make matters worse, not better. “[B]ringing a complaint,” she acknowledges, “might not do much except make school more unpleasant for your kids.” And, indeed, schools are often quite bad at dealing with bullying, especially when the bullying is directed at folks who are seen as outsiders by the adults as well as the children. Among the kids profiled in the film “Bully,” for example, is one girl named Kelby, who is a lesbian. For a while she stays in school because she wants to try to change people’s attitudes towards gay people. Eventually, though, her parents, who are afraid for her safety and her mental health, pull her out. By Benedikt’s reasoning, that makes them bad people. After all, if your kid isn’t in public school, you’re part of the problem.

I’m sure Benedikt does not intend to morally condemn the parents of bullied queer youth for trying to prevent their children from killing themselves. And, of course, the young girl whose peers keep telling her she’s going to hell may well not be in as dangerous a situation as Kelby. And my son almost certainly wouldn’t be in as bad a situation as either if he went to our local public school here in Chicago.

Still, the point is that if you place your moral duty to society over your moral duty to the person in front of you, you can end up with some fairly monstrous conclusions. Benedikt had an okay time in public school. So did I, despite some unpleasant brushes with bullying. For that matter, I have friends who did better in public school than in private. But still, some kids who go to public school don’t have okay experiences. And if that kid is your kid, are you really supposed to tell them that they need to stay in school for the good of the school system as a whole? Do they just have to take it until it becomes “intolerable” — at which point we can give them no advice and no options?

It’s true, and tragic, that many people don’t have options. But in some cases, at least, the problem is as much a lack of knowledge as a lack of funds. I wish Yoffe had told that family that there are a lot of affordable distance-learning options these days. They might not have wanted to pull their daughter out of school, and she might not have wanted to go. But just knowing that there’s an escape hatch if things do become impossible can sometimes make the day-to-day grind a lot more bearable.

Public schools need more money and more resources. But I don’t see how we get them those resources if we don’t care about kids. If what happens in school doesn’t matter, if learning doesn’t matter, if we’ve convinced ourselves that kids are going to be all right no matter what, then where’s the incentive to improve things? And if we’ve decided that the child must stay in that building for the good of society, then what difference is there, finally, between school and prison?

Schuyler Avenue in Kingston, PA, my public elementary school

Utilitarian Review 5/10/14

Posted on May 10, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

News

Rutgers put up a prepub page for my book! You can see the cover and everything (or just look up above there)!

Check it out!

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Robert Stanley Martin on Brassai’s photography.

I wrote about why I like Piss Christ.

A brief thread on overrated and underratd photography, strongly suggesting that nobody cares about photography much.

Kailyn Kent on wine labels for male insecurity.

Chris Gavaler argues the world is ready for superheroines kicking butt on the big screen.

Me on Ms. Marvel, female superheroes, and aggression (or the lack thereof.)

Adrielle Mitchell on Luke Pearson’s Everything We Miss, time, space, and loss.

Erotic artist Michael Manning on Beardsley and the gay utopia.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic I wrote about why I still like Star Wars. (It’s the dirty robots.)

At Salon:

— you say rockist, I say poptimist, let’s call the whole thing off

— I wrote about The Bechdel Test and shaming women’s genre works.

At Splice Today I wrote about:

— how having the U.S. pay attention to Nigeria isn’t necessarily in the best interest of Nigeria.

— Myra Greene’s book My White Friends and the invisibility of whiteness.

At the Center for Digital Ethics I wrote about the Ethics of Ride Sharing, of all things.

Other Links

Michael Carson on taking the war out of war literature.

Zeynep Tufecki on Nigeria and the politics of attention.

Ta-Nehisi Coates on how racism was deployed against Bill Clinton (and Lincoln, for that matter).

Kathleen Geier on conservative family trees and the cult of victimhood.

Nobody watches Game of Thrones.

Tracy Q. Loxley on underreporting sexual harassment.

If Aggression Is the New Pink, Does That Mean We All Have to Hit Things?

Posted on May 7, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

Yesterday, Chris Gavaler wrote about female superheroes, arguing that they’ve been around for a while, that people of all genders love them, and that it’s about time we got to see a film dedicated to watching female superheroes hit things. Chris cited a study by Kaysee Baker and Arthur Raney that showed that, in superhero cartoons, women and men behaved just about the same — they hit things, they saved people, and so forth. Baker and Raney found this a little disturbing; they were worried that heroes of either gender had to be more masculine and aggressive to be heroic. To which Chris responds, well, who says that aggression has to be masculine? “Because if aggression is now gender-neutral, how can being aggressive also be “more masculine”?”

Chris has a point — and that point is a neat summation of empowerment feminism, which is the feminist perspective which says that women should be able to do everything men do, especially if that “everything men do” includes holding and wielding power. The lean in movement is empowerment feminism, and so (as Chris shows) is the enthusiasm for female superhero movies and the desire to see Hawkgirl bash in some baddie with her mace. America is really into power (we’re a superpower, after all) and so it’s not a surprise that empowerment feminism is generally speaking the most popular manifestation of feminism.

It’s so popular, in fact, that it can be easy to forget that it doesn’t necessarily appeal to everyone all the time. But here, at least, is one dissenting voice.

[Wonder Woman’s] creator had…seen straight into my heart and understood the secret fears of violence hidden there. No longer did I have to pretend to like the “Pow!” and “Crunch!” style of Captain Marvel or the Green Hornet. No longer did I have nightmares after reading ghoulish comics filled with torture and mayhem, comics made all the more horrifying by their real-life setting in World War II…. Here was a heroic person who might conquer with force, but only a force that was tempered by love and justice.

That’s Gloria Steinem, describing her relief at discovering the original Marston/Peter Wonder Woman comics, in which, as she intimates, there weren’t a ton of fisticuffs and violence. Instead, Wonder Woman tied the bad guys up with her rope of love — and was tied up by them. Loving submission and bondage games, yes; bashing people’s heads in with maces, not so much.

Chris rightly points out that there isn’t anything essentially masculine about violence; there are plenty of women throughout history who have enjoyed hurting other folks. And yet, at the same time, you don’t just get out from under millenia of culture by having Scarlet Johansson kick somebody. Violence and aggression and war have traditionally been encoded male. Lots of feminists, from Steinem to Virginia Woolf to William Marston, have pointed out that masculinity is wrapped up in an ethos of force and violence — that being a man means, in many respects, being violent. And while one reaction to that can be, with empowerment feminism, to point out that women can be violent too, another approach is to say that the non-violence which has traditionally been associated with women is not an aberration or a failing, but a resource. Women do not have to be embarrassed or ashamed that they don’t like Captain Marvel hitting people; rather, they can point out that hitting people is possibly not such a great way to solve problems, and that equating goodness manliness and heroism with hitting people is, perhaps, a failure of imagination which can, under the right circumstances, get people needlessly killed.

Along those lines, one of the things that I most enjoy about the new Ms. Marvel series by G. Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona is how uninterested it is in uber-violence. Three issues in, and our teen protagonist, Kamala Khan, has encountered exactly zero supervillains. After she gains her shape-shifting powers, the first thing she does is to turn her hand giant (embiggen!) and fish a damsel in distress out of a lake. The damsell in question fell in the lake after her boyfriend knocked her in — not in the process of a sexual assault, as you’d think if you’d read too many superhero comics, but simply out of stupidity and drunken horsing around. This is a world in which heroes exist and heroism matters, but it’s not a world in which that heroism is necessarily linked to violence.

In issue #3, Kamala does have her first fight. She sees her friend/sweetie-in-waiting Bruno getting held up at the convenience store where she works, and (after trying to call for help and discovering her cell phone is out of batteries) she transforms into Ms. Marvel and starts swinging with her giant embiggened fist.

Sort of. The robber is Bruno’s brother, and he’d already given up on the theft before Kamala barged in. She easily defeats him, crushing him in with that fist (“you’re squeezing really hard!”)…but not before she does far more property damage than he ever could have managed by himself. And then, after she lets him go (he’s promised to apologize and never come back) he accidentally shoots her. The last image of the comic is of Ms. Marvel sitting on the ground, her giant hand extended out in front of her, looking shocked and confused, an iconic hero reduced to a confused adolescent girl, as the guy she was saving freaks out and the “villain” sits off to the side looking at the gun in his hand in horror.

My suspicion is that Ms. Marvel is going to discover that her rubbery hide is effectively bullet proof, and hopefully all will end more or less well. But it’s rather nice to have a superhero story where violence ends up being, not a solution, but a complication.

Ms. Marvel, in other words, critiques super-hero violence — and the reason it’s able to do that is absolutely in part because the series is not just a superhero story, but a girl YA coming of age story. The narrative is interested in Kamala having adventures, definitely, but it’s also interested in her figuring out who she is, which means (among other things) working out her relationship with her (shape shifting, sometimes adult Caucasian va-va-voom superhero, sometimes adolescent Muslim girl) body and discovering that her annoying good geeky friend is in love with her. Lee and Ditko couldn’t figure out how to make Spider-Man a man except through violence and trauma and more violence. G. Willow Wilson, though, is drawing on a narrative tradition quite different from boys’ adventure, which means that for her, growing up doesn’t need to mean watching your dad die and beating up his killer.

Ms. Marvel has been exceedingly popular (it keeps selling out at my local comics store) — but, given the low sales of even really popular comics, it seems unlikely that it will be turned into a superhero movie any time soon. Still,it’s worth noting, perhaps, that other superhero stories about women on the big screen — the Hunger Games, say, or Twilight (where Bella gets to be a superhero by the end) are significantly more ambivalent about violence, its effects, and its efficacy than the standard Marvel/DC superhero/supervillain thump-fests tend to be. Maybe that’s because they’re working to appeal to women (and for that matter men) like Gloria Steinem, for whom narratives of violence are alienating rather than empowering.

Photography, Overrated/Underrated

Posted on May 4, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

We haven’t done one of these in a bit, but I’ve had so many people tell me that they’re wrong and/or evil that I felt we should revive them. So…since Michael A. Johnson posted about war photography this week, I thought we could bounce off of that. What photographers do you think are overrated, or underrated if such a thing is possible?

I guess I’d go for Walker Evans as someone who is understandably but still inexcusably lionized for his poverty porn. Underrated…I don’t know if Andres Serrano quite fits since he’s obviously very successful, but as I said yesterday I feel like he’s broadly loathed by both right-wingers and high-art skeptics (including comics folks) who don’t seem to have actually looked at or thought about his work much.

Bert Stabler’s written about why all art photography is overrated, and Thomas O’Shea responded here with a defense of the genre, if you’re looking for more photography discussion.

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Author Archives: Noah Berlatsky