Grid girls and poems (part 2)
"Tell the truth - or at least don't lie," enjoins J Peterson, in his latest poetry collection 12 Elegies for the Mass Funeral of the Bleedin Obvious. I agree. Readers of this blog (that still-empty set) will have noticed I take this commandment rather seriously. I don't know what he finds to say as a gloss to his version of the age-old injunction (haven't bought the book, nor plan to) but if it was me, I'd probably find it useful to examine, one by one, all the ways in which people are tempted to lie and the (emotional) reasons they have for doing so. Also, as an addendum, the reasons why some of us are unable to tell the truth about certain painful things in our own experience, and, so as not to lie, have to settle for just keeping those things under wraps until we die. That too.
One of the forms of lying I'd mention is the one exhaustively picked apart by Orwell in Politics and the English Language, viz. letting the pret-a-porter cliche steer your thought process, requiring you to ignore that twinge of momentary concern you feel at the precise point where the string of easy, media-spawned cliches breaks loose from the moorings of your own reasoning faculty and heads in its own direction. There's that. There's also the Godwin Reflex, otherwise known as shouting, or exaggerating. You know what I mean: I have few arguments and not very good ones, but if I SHOUT over my interlocutor and/or accuse him of being Hitler (or a misogynist, or a xenophobe, etc), I might still get out of this alive, and may even, as a bonus, by sheer force of virtuous ire persuade myself that I'm right. Then there's equivocation, aka slipperiness, where you depend on weasel words, loaded words and polysemy to dodge your opponent's punches. Then there's just being thick as a brick. I don't know if being thick is a form of lying, but I suspect it might be. After a certain point, being too stupid to see past the bobble of snot on the end of your nose has to be willed, has to be a life choice. Or at least so it seems to me, having today read this article in the Guardian.
Before proceeding, I invite the imaginary reader, regardless of prior persuasion, to peruse the article in question and scribble a list of all the points in it that strike her or him as particularly true, profound, perceptive or telling. Done? Good.
Unless I'm very much mistaken and a very poor reader to boot, that list will contain a sum total of zero items.
Instead, what you will be able to list without too much difficulty, having read the article, is lies. Not the in-your-face sort, the kind that ten minutes of fact-checking on Google will undress, but the sticky, stupid sort, the exaggerating sort, the deliberate misrepresentation of experience and feelings sort, the practised misdirection and hysterical imprecision sort. The stuff, in sum, that cults are made of. And I say this because, reading the comments of the women interviewed, I feel I am face to face with a cult: a weird superposition of comic-book fantasy onto a ghostly facsimile of the real world. I don't have time to do all of it justice, but let's look at a few examples.
Margaret Atwood [lazily quotes Dickens, briefly attempts to access lyricism with "the long patriarchy", then this]:
Now, I will admit I haven't read The Handmaid's Tale, and have been feeling guilty about that: it's a set book for IB, after all. But on the strength of the above, I now find I don't want to. A writer, even a female writer, who can perpetrate the idiotic phrase "penis-flexing" can't be that good. I assume that Ms Atwood hasn't had much personal experience of penises, else she'd have noticed by now that the human penis isn't a muscle, and therefore cannot (alas) be "flexed": even so, writers are supposed to have that precious saving instinct to look things up that they are not sure of. I guess that maybe in this instance the urge to associate an innocent body part with criminality (assuming she's referencing Weinstein), and thus tar the target gender by association, was too great to resist. But the biggest lie in this sentence is associating the "widespread female pushback" with the allegation of "squeezing female competition out of the workplace". I get that she's probably referencing Damore (if not, then what?): unluckily for her, Damore's memo was not about how to get rid of women, but on the contrary, how to attract more of them into Tech. As far as I know, there has not been a single reported instance anywhere in the Western world of anyone trying to "squeeze [women] out of the workplace" in recent memory: if there had been, it would constitute an international scandal. All the effort, as Ms Atwood well knows, has been the other way.
My objection to the phrase "power-play thrills": well, as already noted, I find lies take many forms, and this type is hardest to pick apart. It rests on the connotations of "thrills", as something frivolous, idly sought, and easily dispensed with. Whether we're describing pathological cases like Weinstein, or the broad mass of $metoo denunciations relating to a careless brush of a hand on a knee at a party twenty years ago, the word fails to deliver that precision which is a prerequisite to insight. Instead, it exploits a well-known but seldom remarked upon vulnerability of the female operating system, that of assuming that men's sex drive must be more or less equivalent to women's (since it's hard for anyone to imagine having a stronger sex drive than one in fact has - I know this because, as an old man, I already find the excruciating antics a younger me got up to - not to mention the sheer amount of money spent - in pursuit of sex wellnigh incomprehensible). Even though the studies are there to tell us that the female libido is a pale shadow of the male one, it is - I suppose understandably - quite hard for some women to take this on board, so instead they turn to the alternative explanation: men pursue sex ruthlessly not because they need it that badly (how could they possibly?), but simply because they are so terrifyingly privileged, powerful and thick-skinned in the face of rejection that there are virtually no significant risks involved, hence no good reason not to pursue it - immoral creatures that they are - as some sort of idle, aimless "thrill". Thus, the tragedy of otherwise good people being torn apart by their own sex drive, and tearing others apart in the process, is reduced to the level of a regrettable instance of ignorant proletarian boorishness, to be tut-tutted over by society's appointed moral guardians.
There's plenty more where that came from. "[T]he pornographication of male expectations means the meat-slabbification of women," we read. Again, sorry to be pedantic, but meat does not come in slabs, though sometimes on them, and it was never a good analogy to begin with. The only plausible points of comparison between tenor and vehicle, woman-having-sex and meat-placed-on-slab, turn out to be (a) a horizontal orientation, and (b) complete absence of voluntary movement: anyone who has actually looked at any pornography can vouch that neither of these is especially favoured by the genre, meaning that, contra Atwood, the more porn men view, the less meat-like they will probably wish their women to be (not that what they wish for is likely to make any difference). I'd forgive an eighty-something old biddy this, though, easily enough, if it weren't for the following:
Lola Okolosie:
Polly Toynbee:
Athene Donald:
Julie Bindel:
Well, Julie Bindel is Julie Bindel. You know what she's going to say, and she doesn't even pretend to be sane or reasonable. This is getting boring.
The alternative to lying like this? As Peterson reminds us, it's either tell the truth or shut up. Which of these women could, if they wanted to, tell the truth - about the world, about themselves, about being a woman or being a man, about experiences and feelings or even the bald, incontrovertible statistical facts on where and who we really are - I really don't know. I suspect none of them: not for lack of mental capacity, but because of an emotional commitment to The Narrative. It's simple and fun and the cheque is already in the post. Why make life difficult by asking hard questions? This gift horse will run and run.
I guess I'll need another post to get to the poems after all.
One of the forms of lying I'd mention is the one exhaustively picked apart by Orwell in Politics and the English Language, viz. letting the pret-a-porter cliche steer your thought process, requiring you to ignore that twinge of momentary concern you feel at the precise point where the string of easy, media-spawned cliches breaks loose from the moorings of your own reasoning faculty and heads in its own direction. There's that. There's also the Godwin Reflex, otherwise known as shouting, or exaggerating. You know what I mean: I have few arguments and not very good ones, but if I SHOUT over my interlocutor and/or accuse him of being Hitler (or a misogynist, or a xenophobe, etc), I might still get out of this alive, and may even, as a bonus, by sheer force of virtuous ire persuade myself that I'm right. Then there's equivocation, aka slipperiness, where you depend on weasel words, loaded words and polysemy to dodge your opponent's punches. Then there's just being thick as a brick. I don't know if being thick is a form of lying, but I suspect it might be. After a certain point, being too stupid to see past the bobble of snot on the end of your nose has to be willed, has to be a life choice. Or at least so it seems to me, having today read this article in the Guardian.
Before proceeding, I invite the imaginary reader, regardless of prior persuasion, to peruse the article in question and scribble a list of all the points in it that strike her or him as particularly true, profound, perceptive or telling. Done? Good.
Unless I'm very much mistaken and a very poor reader to boot, that list will contain a sum total of zero items.
Instead, what you will be able to list without too much difficulty, having read the article, is lies. Not the in-your-face sort, the kind that ten minutes of fact-checking on Google will undress, but the sticky, stupid sort, the exaggerating sort, the deliberate misrepresentation of experience and feelings sort, the practised misdirection and hysterical imprecision sort. The stuff, in sum, that cults are made of. And I say this because, reading the comments of the women interviewed, I feel I am face to face with a cult: a weird superposition of comic-book fantasy onto a ghostly facsimile of the real world. I don't have time to do all of it justice, but let's look at a few examples.
Margaret Atwood [lazily quotes Dickens, briefly attempts to access lyricism with "the long patriarchy", then this]:
"However, some men have been penis-flexing, combining power-play thrills with squeezing female competition out of the workplace and inspiring widespread female pushback."
Now, I will admit I haven't read The Handmaid's Tale, and have been feeling guilty about that: it's a set book for IB, after all. But on the strength of the above, I now find I don't want to. A writer, even a female writer, who can perpetrate the idiotic phrase "penis-flexing" can't be that good. I assume that Ms Atwood hasn't had much personal experience of penises, else she'd have noticed by now that the human penis isn't a muscle, and therefore cannot (alas) be "flexed": even so, writers are supposed to have that precious saving instinct to look things up that they are not sure of. I guess that maybe in this instance the urge to associate an innocent body part with criminality (assuming she's referencing Weinstein), and thus tar the target gender by association, was too great to resist. But the biggest lie in this sentence is associating the "widespread female pushback" with the allegation of "squeezing female competition out of the workplace". I get that she's probably referencing Damore (if not, then what?): unluckily for her, Damore's memo was not about how to get rid of women, but on the contrary, how to attract more of them into Tech. As far as I know, there has not been a single reported instance anywhere in the Western world of anyone trying to "squeeze [women] out of the workplace" in recent memory: if there had been, it would constitute an international scandal. All the effort, as Ms Atwood well knows, has been the other way.
My objection to the phrase "power-play thrills": well, as already noted, I find lies take many forms, and this type is hardest to pick apart. It rests on the connotations of "thrills", as something frivolous, idly sought, and easily dispensed with. Whether we're describing pathological cases like Weinstein, or the broad mass of $metoo denunciations relating to a careless brush of a hand on a knee at a party twenty years ago, the word fails to deliver that precision which is a prerequisite to insight. Instead, it exploits a well-known but seldom remarked upon vulnerability of the female operating system, that of assuming that men's sex drive must be more or less equivalent to women's (since it's hard for anyone to imagine having a stronger sex drive than one in fact has - I know this because, as an old man, I already find the excruciating antics a younger me got up to - not to mention the sheer amount of money spent - in pursuit of sex wellnigh incomprehensible). Even though the studies are there to tell us that the female libido is a pale shadow of the male one, it is - I suppose understandably - quite hard for some women to take this on board, so instead they turn to the alternative explanation: men pursue sex ruthlessly not because they need it that badly (how could they possibly?), but simply because they are so terrifyingly privileged, powerful and thick-skinned in the face of rejection that there are virtually no significant risks involved, hence no good reason not to pursue it - immoral creatures that they are - as some sort of idle, aimless "thrill". Thus, the tragedy of otherwise good people being torn apart by their own sex drive, and tearing others apart in the process, is reduced to the level of a regrettable instance of ignorant proletarian boorishness, to be tut-tutted over by society's appointed moral guardians.
There's plenty more where that came from. "[T]he pornographication of male expectations means the meat-slabbification of women," we read. Again, sorry to be pedantic, but meat does not come in slabs, though sometimes on them, and it was never a good analogy to begin with. The only plausible points of comparison between tenor and vehicle, woman-having-sex and meat-placed-on-slab, turn out to be (a) a horizontal orientation, and (b) complete absence of voluntary movement: anyone who has actually looked at any pornography can vouch that neither of these is especially favoured by the genre, meaning that, contra Atwood, the more porn men view, the less meat-like they will probably wish their women to be (not that what they wish for is likely to make any difference). I'd forgive an eighty-something old biddy this, though, easily enough, if it weren't for the following:
"Will you have solved these problems by 2118, women of the future? Will you have begun by equalising wealth, for instance? Surely that’s a key piece of the puzzle.""Equalising wealth", i.e. stealing from people, is not an aspiration calculated to instil sympathy in any reader who is not, themselves, a thief. But this is the Guardian, so maybe I should be kind and assume she's playing to the gallery. Let's move on.
Lola Okolosie:
"In the next 100 years good quality childcare will become free for the poorest and affordable for the rest because it is women who pay the economic price of this lack." (my italics)Well, at least she's honest. Roughly paraphrased: I'm a woman, so naturally I think anything women want should be free, whereas anything men want they should have to pay for. That's equality.
"One hundred years from now, women will be able to make the choice to have children and not have to accept that this will make them poorer."I'm a woman, so naturally I think women should not have to pay for the choices they make, whereas men should (since someone has to). That's equality, didn't you know.
Polly Toynbee:
"...liberation for women means digging up the roots of human culture, nothing less."
"$metoo... grid girls... darts... Presidents Club dinners... Miss World 2018... The Potus (sic)"I may be wrong, but I'd hazard that the author of these words has a nice house, a nice husband, nice friends, a nice restaurant near home to go to, a nice job, a computer with an Internet connection, a Twitter account, a car, shelves full of books, and a private school for a kid or two. In other words, I suspect she's done pretty well out of "human culture" so far: certainly, remarkably better than those humans who have, at any time in history, not had access to any of that culture. But the culture in question has to go - every last pericycle of it - sometime comfortably in the future (not just yet, please), because it is simply unconscionable that any human culture should accommodate such unspeakable horrors as young women being forced to dress in short skirts at seedy events, or being occasionally groped by overpaid Hollywood actors or drunken public-school toffs, or being encouraged to win prizes on the basis of having stick-insect legs and vacant, simpery faces. This will not do!
"Forget French or Russian political revolutions"Yes, better had. Wouldn't want people finding out about the sort of thing that happens when cultures are "dug up by the roots" in the real world, as opposed to Never-never Land. Let them carry on thinking that having your bottom pinched is a final descent to the absolute nadir of human barbarity.
Athene Donald:
"I am astonished by the depth of vitriol that feminist commentary still stirs up. Rape and pillage have been going on for millennia and I’m not entirely convinced they are going to be eradicated."She's not a writer, so I'll excuse "depth of vitriol". But the juxtaposition is eloquent. If you object to any specific instance of "feminist commentary", no matter what it says, you are practically a Viking marauder.
"Let me get scientific briefly: if you think about waves, they build up and die away again, but maybe the waves of disgust at the way women are treated will get bigger and bigger and the baseline will move up. Votes for women was initially only for 30-year-old women after all. "This is bizarre verging on parodic. A professor of physics at Cambridge, no less, says "let me get scientific", then proceeds to talk about "waves of disgust at the way women are treated". Presumably this is an extension of the de Broglie hypothesis to encompass bad metaphors. Interesting work, as Dr Necessiter once said on a similar occasion. As for the votes thing, the matchless Straughan has taken this apart too many times for me to feel like bothering. Clue: not all men could vote back then, either. Suffrage has to be fought for. Sometimes with nine million dead in France and Belgium, sometimes with one unfortunate encounter with a horse. Depends on who you are, really, innit.
Julie Bindel:
Well, Julie Bindel is Julie Bindel. You know what she's going to say, and she doesn't even pretend to be sane or reasonable. This is getting boring.
The alternative to lying like this? As Peterson reminds us, it's either tell the truth or shut up. Which of these women could, if they wanted to, tell the truth - about the world, about themselves, about being a woman or being a man, about experiences and feelings or even the bald, incontrovertible statistical facts on where and who we really are - I really don't know. I suspect none of them: not for lack of mental capacity, but because of an emotional commitment to The Narrative. It's simple and fun and the cheque is already in the post. Why make life difficult by asking hard questions? This gift horse will run and run.
I guess I'll need another post to get to the poems after all.
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