Bradley Manning, Not the Pride Committee, Embodies Spirit of Stonewall

In the spring of 2004, I got an email from an acquaintance asking if I wanted to be nominated for LGBT Pride parade grand marshal.  I was surprised, because I never thought of myself as grand marshal material. In point of fact, I've never been very much in tune with "marshals" - grand or otherwise.  "Marshal" sounds too much like "martial" for my taste, and the marshals at demonstrations are always telling me to stand inside the yellow line or something.

But I agreed because, first of all, I understood that it wasn't about me, it was a way of spotlighting the work of queer folks in support of Palestinian liberation, and more broadly, of anti-assimilationist queers opposing U.S. militarism in all its manifestations.  And second, I assumed I wouldn't win.  I was already back in Palestine when I got the notification that I'd been elected.  I ended up concluding that I couldn't afford to come back for the parade, but before I did, the mayor cancelled a scheduled reception at City Hall, apparently in fear of what I might do.

The Parade Committee came in for plenty of abuse for honoring a "terrorist" but they basically shrugged it off.  It didn't hurt them at all.  What it did do was make a lot of people who had been feeling less and less included in the mainstream queer community feel a little more connected.


Unfortunately, the rampant militarism and dissent-squashing of the last ten years has not spared our community. Yesterday, the Washington Post reported that the Parade Committee Board had voted to rescind the election of Bradley Manning as honorary grand marshal.

Manning recently admitted to leaking documents to Wikileaks including the "collateral murder" video showing an air assault on Iraqi civilians by a US helicopter crew.  The Parade co-chair cited a contention that Manning's actions had jeopardized American soldiers, which has never been proven.  We all know that the only way to protect US soldiers is to get them out of Afghanistan and all the other places where they commit atrocities like the ones Manning revealed.

Bradley Manning is openly gay and was bullied in the Army because of that.  As I discussed in a previous post, his sexual orientation and gender fluidity were exploited by the persecution and for a long time unacknowledged by his supporters, most of whom are straight.  For the last two years, though, there have been Free Bradley Manning contingents in the SFLGBT Freedom Day Parade, as well as in other Pride parades around the world.
I wrote the following letter to the Pride Committee and urge all of you, especially if you're queer, write your own (eek! looking at their website I just realized a friend of mine is board vice president now!). Send it to them at info@sfpride.org, ed@sfpride.org and feel free to call them as well at (415) 864-0831.

Dear Pride Committee,

As a former Community Grand Marshal, I am outraged that you have nullified the vote of the Electoral College to name military whistleblower Bradley Manning as an honorary grand marshal.

When I was elected in 2004, in recognition of my work in Palestine, there were plenty in the community who criticized the Pride Committee for that choice. I was really proud of the way that then-Executive Director Teddy Witherington stood up to those critics. He was no supporter of my politics, and I had been deeply critical of his efforts to commercialize and restrict the Pride celebration. But he wasn’t standing up for me or my politics. What he eloquently defended was the democracy of the process and the diversity of our community. He recognized that while I might not represent his ideals, I did represent those of many queer people, who had a right to be heard and honor whom they chose.

Your cowardly decision to cave in to pressure from militaristic and authoritarian forces betrays this legacy. It betrays the best in queer history, from Harry Hay to Harvey Milk to Stephen Funk, who were all anti-war activists. It betrays the very history that the LGBT Liberation Day Parade commemorates. The Stonewall Rebellion was made by gay people who fought back against injustice, not those who acquiesced and followed orders.

The modern queer liberation movement was inspired by the civil rights movement, the feminist movement and the movement to end the Vietnam War. Bradley Manning acted in the tradition of the soldiers who revealed the atrocities at My Lai and the sexual harassment at the Tailhook Symposium.

The queer community should be – and is – proud to claim him as a symbol of our continuing struggle for all liberation.
You have no right to silence our dissent and rob us of our place in Pride.

Please reinstate Bradley Manning as a honorary grand marshal.

Sincerely,

Kate Raphael

Gay Marriage, or why I hate the equals sign

We need to ask ourselves why same-sex marriage is building support, even among conservative Republicans, at the same time that:

• Tennessee is about to punish poor kids who don’t do well in school by starving them.  
• 16-year-old Kimani Gray has become the latest symbol of the non-stop assassination of young people of color by police
• 41 states have introduced 180 laws to restrict voting rights in the last two years.  A majority of African Americans in Michigan are living under unelected leadership appointed by their governor through emergency powers.
• William Bratton, who brought “Stop and Frisk” to New York and Los Angeles, is on the march in Oakland.  Bratton says that cities who don’t use stop and frisk are “doomed.”  In New York, over 85% of those stopped and frisked were Black or Latino, and over 90% were not breaking any laws.
•  At least 41 of the prisoners in indefinite detention in Guantanamo are on hunger strike; some advocates say it’s more than 100.  Ten of them are being force-fed, in violation of international law.  Most of them were cleared for release years ago.  The military is refusing to give press access to the hunger strikers.
• Obama and Kerry are poised to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, despite the major spill when a pipeline broke in Arkansas last week.

Street art from a few years ago - some things never get stale

Whatever else it is or isn’t, the marriage rights movement is not the “new civil rights movement.”  Civil rights are for everyone.  Marriage is about broadening the class of people eligible for certain privileges, most having to do with who gets your stuff when you die, and how much they get taxed for it.  Every possible benefit of marriage – health care? immigration? could be more effectively established by demanding genuine equality for everyone.

The marriage cases are also not comparable to Loving v. Virginia.  Loving decriminalized relationships between whites and non-whites.  It was more analogous to Hardwick v. Georgia than Hollingsworth v. Perry.

I don’t have anything against people getting married – hey, I’m going to a gay wedding later this month.  But what does it mean to demand equality in a country that is so fundamentally unequal?  Once you have your equality, what are you going to do with it?  Buckle down to abolish the prison state and raise the minimum wage?  Fight for teacher unions and against high-stakes testing?  Don't you see that they're just trying to buy off those of us they think are acceptable, to recruit us into the war against people who aren't? 

The Human Rights Campaign just had to apologize to one of the speakers at the rally on the Supreme Court steps last week.  Just before Jerssay Arredondo went on stage, a staff person told him not to say he was Undocumented, because it would "hurt their image" and "distract from the issue."  Might want to take that equal sign off your facebook profiles.

My friend Elana says:  “Sometimes there's a neon sign: if this is the result of your actions, you better rethink those actions.”

Come on, my queer people – start rethinking!

The Anti-Feminist Mystique?

I think I must be the worst feminist journalist/blogger in the world, or at least the country.

It’s tempting to pretend that I was just too cool to write about 50^th anniversary of The Feminine Mystique’s publication, but the truth is I had no idea.  I somehow managed to get left off the list for review copies of the reissued volume, no one invited me to be on a panel on its impact, and goddess knows my friends weren’t talking about it.

courtesy: www.tressugar.com

In fact, the date might have slipped by me altogether if I hadn’t bought a Kindle last week and celebrated by spending even more money on a subscription to the New York Times.  So yesterday, on my way to work, I read an article by Janet Maslin reflecting on the book’s impact, and it had links to a piece that had appeared a couple days earlier and that referred to another piece – you get the picture.

Everyone, it seems, was celebrating this momentous day except for contemporary feminist activists.  Amitai Etzioni diaried (is that a word? Why not if “diarist” is?) about it on The Daily Kos.  Historian Peter Dreier wrote about it on The Huffington Post and Truth Out.  New York Times Op-Ed Columnist Gail Collins, who wrote the introduction to the 50^th Anniversary edition, hosted a video round table and gave an interview to The Atlantic.  (The Atlantic, incidentally, has had no less than six articles about the book in the last few months, most by men and fairly uncharitable).  Third-wave feminist Kathleen Parker wrote a snotty “Who needs it?” column in The Washington Post.

So what’s left to say?  Not too much except that:

(1) A surprising number of the major pieces were written by men, and many of the ones by women – especially the hostile ones  – mainly quote men;

(2) Nearly all the comments on the aforementioned video debate – which is highly entertaining and I recommend it – are by irate men who clearly have not read the book but think they know what it says;

(3) It’s amazing how much outrage the book still provokes – again, mostly by people who never read it, as Stephanie Coontz documented in her book A Strange Stirring; and

(4) People are, as always, quick to condemn prominent feminists where they would be more forgiving of almost any other icon who was but a product of her time.

I only saw Friedan in the flesh once.  She came to speak at my college.  All the feminists on campus were there.  A Black woman – that’s how they identified then -- got up and asked a question, I don’t remember exactly what it was but basically she was taking Friedan to task for ignoring the specific oppressions of women of color and poor women.  Friedan reacted like a skunk whose tail had been stepped on.   

“Don’t make me the enemy,” she screamed. 

 The woman she was screaming at, a friend of mine, ran out of the room in tears, followed by other Black women who gathered around her.  I and some of their other white friends followed.

“That’s why we’re not in the movement,” I heard one Black woman say to the woman who’d been the target of Friedan’s venom.

I was so humiliated.  I couldn’t believe she’d done that – this woman that we all looked up to.  It was just a terrible day all the way around.  It was doubly shocking because obviously that wasn’t the first time Friedan had been challenged on racism.  It’s kind of like how angry Bill Clinton used to get when feminists criticized his policies or his mediocre record on appointing women to high positions.  You always think that years of being publicly criticized would make people grow a tougher skin – or maybe even be able to listen and hear what people are saying.

Given that experience, it’s surprising that I feel like defending Friedan now.  Or maybe it’s not.  Maybe I’m remembering times when I didn’t behave well in public.  Or maybe I’m thinking ahead to a time when something I did or said that seemed groundbreaking is going to seem antiquated and even counterrevolutionary.

Either way, it’s hard not to scream when I read something like Ashley Fetters’ “4 Big Problems with The Feminine Mystique,” in The Atlantic.  Fetters begins with “It’s racist. And it’s classist.” (quoting the estimable bell hooks for the specifics) but quickly moves on to quote biographer Daniel Horowitz to support the claim that, “It’s founded on a lie.” The lie in question is Friedan’s choice to deny her past as a union organizer and “radical leftist” (Horowtiz’s phrase).  So are we supposed to disrespect Friedan because she was concerned about working class women, or because she wasn’t?  Or are we just supposed to disrespect her -- because?

(Because I know how very interested you are in the minutiae of my life, let me just mention that this is the first blog post I've been able to do completely from home, having finally gotten my place wired on Saturday.  It's fabulous.)

16-Year-Old Protester Killed as Bahrain Uprising Turns 2

It's hard to believe that a year ago, I was in Bahrain. I haven't had time or strength to write anything about that, but wanted to share this update from the Bahrain Center for Human Rights. It's so sad that one year later, people are still being killed by the regime in their freedom struggle. Yet inspiring that they continue to rise unabated. When people say, "Well, no wonder the Occupy/Decolonize movement died down, look at how violently it was repressed," I can't help thinking of the Bahrainis. According to the NYT blog, at least 88 people have been killed since the beginning of the uprising two years ago today. Bahrain's population is roughly equivalent to that of the city of San Francisco. What if 88 Occupy protesters had been killed? And our government continues to arm to Bahraini monarchy. All I can say to my Bahraini friends is, I continue to be amazed and inspired by you all.

February 14 Summary Anniversary of an Uprising

The Bahrain Center for Human Rights Releases below a summary report of the first major day of protests to mark the second anniversary of the pro-democracy movement. At the time of writing, major protests are still ongoing through the night in Bahrain. European arms are assisting in the brutal repression that already claimed the life of one young, unarmed and peaceful protester today. Date: 14 February 2013 (Bahrain) – The human rights situation is rapidly deteriorating in Bahrain on the second anniversary of the pro-democracy movement. Security forces in full riot gear have swarmed the streets with armored vehicles and helicopters; many streets are filled with tear gas. The government’s response has been, throughout the day, wildly out of proportion to the largely peaceful demonstrations. Since the earliest hours of the day around dawn, protesters took to the streets in large numbers, groups of hundreds gathered in all parts of the country, the vast majority of which were peaceful. Protesters have established roadblocks of their own to prevent riot police from driving at high speed into the villages. The security forces used consistently excessive and disproportionate force against protesters across Bahrain throughout the day. Photo: Hussain Al-Jazeeri photos Due to the culture of impunity being practiced by Bahrain authorities and the continued use of excessive force, a 16 year-old protester, Hussain Ali Al-Jazeeri, died this morning as a result of a close-range direct hit from a police officer’s shotgun to his abdominal area which led to sever lung injury & pneumothorax. He was shot while he was peacefully protesting in the area of Daih. There is no evidence that AlJaziri was representing any kind of threat to the policeman who fired on him and killed him. Al-Jazeeri died in the ambulance before reaching the hospital. This video shows the medic who was trying to rescue Al-Jaziri in the ambulance ( http://youtu.be/76dYQPj5Sbw ). The Bahraini riot police continue to use the birdshots against the peaceful protests in Bahrain even after 2 years, during which dozens were killed with shotgun, including the first man who was killed on Feb 14, 2011, Ali Mushiama. Photo : Above : Shotgun Injuries, Below: Extensive use of Teargas Dozens of injuries were documented today, including tear gas suffocation, shotgun pellet injuries, fractures and bruises. The number of shotgun pellets injuries have rapidly increased today. Many of those injuries were in vital areas of the body including the face and chest. Photo : A protestor getting arrested. The Bahrain authorities arbitrarily arrested a number of peaceful protesters during the day. In an attempt to prevent information on human rights abuses from spreading; agency photojournalists Mazen Mahdi (DPA), Hassan Jamali (FP) and Mohammed Al-Shaikh (AP) were arrested this morning while they were covering the protests despite the fact that they have valid ID; they were released several hours later without any explanation of why they were arrested. Due to the fact that there are many protests organized during the night and in the coming days, the BCHR fears that the escalation of the violations will continue. The security forces continued the widespread use of pellet shotguns, despite the fatality that occurred this morning. The birdshot canisters, which were found on site where AlJaziri was killed today, are from Cyprus Victory Starlight cartridges. In other areas, Italian manufactured weapon (Benelli M4 Super 90 shotgun) and German-owned South African Tear Gas canisters were spotted as being used against protesters. The BCHR also calls on the United States, the United Kingdom, the UN and all other allies and international institutions to put pressure on the Government of Bahrain to stop its use of excessive force in response to the continued peaceful protests, and to consider a meaningful solution to resolve the persistent political issues of instability in the country. The BCHR calls on the European Governments and other ally Governments to Bahrain to stop supplying the government of Bahrain with arms that are used against peaceful protesters, which cause severe injury and death among them. Read more in BCHR two-year anniversary report: Deaths and Detentions: Documenting Human Rights Abuses During the Pro-Democracy Movement in Bahrain http://bahrainrights.hopto.org/en/node/5644

Strong to the Finnish - Commies and Finns and Jews, O My!

A couple months ago I heard a guy named Michael Kazin interviewed on the radio.  He’d written a book about how left-wing movements in the United States, despite appearances of having failed dismally at most of what they tried to accomplish, actually significantly influenced the politics and culture of the nation.  I was skeptical – don’t we have the most entrenched plutocracy in history, with skyrocketing inequality, deep-seated racism and widespread misery mitigated only by our position as a global empire with unprecedented firepower and technology?  Nonetheless, I thought the book would cheer me up and I had an Amazon gift card to use so I bought it.

American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation was interesting but of course practically every chapter ended with “They failed to realize their goals but did have a social impact,” which for me blunted the feel-good experience I was hoping to have.  The main lesson I drew from it was that nearly all mass left-wing movements in this country have sprung from immigrant or African American communities.  That in turn made me reflect on how effectively the U.S. elite was from the beginning and remains to this day able to substitute white racial solidarity for class solidarity across racial lines.  (That has made me watch with new enthusiasm the increasing militancy and effective action of the Dreamers and other immigrant organizers.)

But leaving aside that sweeping generalization, by far the most interesting piece of information in the book was this:  In 1923, 40% of the membership of the Communist Party of the United States were Finnish – the largest ethnic component with about 7000 members.

Huh?  What about the received wisdom that the core of the Party were Jews?

Well, timing is everything, for one.  In the late twenties, about half the Party membership was Jewish, a fact apparently lamented by the leadership, which felt that would keep it from developing an “American” identity.  To counter that problem, says Kazin, no Jew was ever elected to lead the national party in its heyday.  There was a Finnish general secretary – Gus Hall (born Arvo Gustav Halberg).  (As it happens, just before reading the Kazin book I read the autobiography of Peggy Dennis (born Regina Karasick), who told the story of how Hall finagled to assume the leadership over the dying body of her husband, Eugene Dennis (she was Jewish, he wasn’t).)  There was, apparently, in the twenties, something of a battle between Jews and Finns for the soul (or for control) of the Party.

That aside, I didn’t even know there were 7000 Finns in the U.S. in 1923.  In fact, I never thought about there being a Finnish community at all, though why would there not be?  I started reading up on them.  In the process I found out most of what I thought I knew about Finland and its neighbors was false.

Before I started, what I knew about Finland was:

They have the “best school system” (whatever that means) in the world.  They provide free meals at school and kids don’t learn to read until they’re seven.  About two-thirds of kids go to college and only the top 10% of college students get to become teachers.  (That stuff is true, as far as I know.)

They speak an idiosyncratic language unrelated to any other European language (false: it’s related to Estonian, Hungarian and some other Baltic languages like Livonian, Votic, Karelian, Veps, and Ingrian).

The scene in the movie “Reds” where Diane Keaton scales snow-covered cliffs to crawl over the Finnish border into the Soviet Union was historically inaccurate.

Here’s what I learned from my research:

Sweden – known for its excellent health care and social welfare programs, home of the Right Livelihood Award and Ingmar Berman, was a major and pretty vicious imperial power from the thirteenth through the eighteenth centuries.  Swedish crusaders invaded Finland on their way to Russia, and for four centuries frequently battled Russia, and sometimes Poland and Denmark as well, for control over Finland and other parts of the Baltic.  Sweden moved settlers into southern and western Finland, and the kings gave land grants to their allies in Finland’s coastal areas, thus creating a Swedish-speaking Finnish elite.

The Swedish empire lost big during the Napoleonic wars, and Sweden ceded Finland to Russia, which controlled it until Lenin recognized Finland’s independence in December 1917.  The Russian general strike and attempted socialist revolution of 1905 had a counterpart in Finland.  Some Finnish socialists made their way to the U.S. in the aftermath of that revolution, as did some Russian Jewish socialists.  Others fled to escape increasing conscription into the Tsar’s army – the same threat which brought my grandfather to this country.

In 1906, the Tsar implemented some reforms in efforts to forestall future uprisings.  One of those established the Finnish national Parliament and the Finns insisted that it be elected through universal suffrage, making it the second country (after New Zealand) to give women the right to vote.

The period between 1870 and 1930 is known as the “Great Migration” of Finns to North America.  They concentrated in the upper Midwest, especially Michigan, where they currently constitute 16% of the population of the Upper Peninsula.  There’s a television show broadcast there called “Finland Calling.”

Many became mineworkers and steelworkers, and they were heavily organized by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).  When 160 IWW activists, including Wobbly leader Big Bill Haywood were arrested and charged with treason during World War I, five of the defendants were Finns.

The Finnish Socialist Federation (FSF) affiliated with the Socialist Party in 1908, at which time they made up 12% of the Party’s members nationwide.  In 1922, the FSF (later the Finnish Workers Federation) changed its allegiance to the Communist Party, which was then called the Workers’ Party.

The U.S. government, at the deportation trial of labor organizer John Swan, introduced the argument that Finns were actually related to Mongolians, therefore were subject to the Asian Exclusion Act.

After the Russian Revolution, about 10,000 “Red Finns” left the United States and Canada to settle in Finnish areas of the Soviet Union.

Not actually Berkeley - it's Butte, Montana
courtesy drbutoni

In the first half of the twentieth century, the West Berkeley area around University and San Pablo was known as Finntown. There never were really that many Finns there – only about 650 at its peak, but they built institutions including the Finnish Hall at Tenth and Addison, where we used to hold various radical meetings in the 1980s.  Finns also started the Berkeley Consumers’ Cooperative Stores, which when I moved to Berkeley in 1980 had four massive stores (down from a high of twelve) – groceries at Shattuck and Cedar (now Andronico’s), Ashby and Telegraph (now Whole Foods), University and California (now vacant, after sojourns as Living Foods and I can't remember what other chain) and a hardware store on University.

Famous Finnish Americans include actors Matt Damon and Christine Lahti (whose grandmother, Augusta Lahti, was an early American feminist), Clan of the Cave Bear author Jean Auel, and Dr. Amy Kaukonen, who in 1921 became the first woman elected mayor of an Ohio town (Fairport).

Gillian Flynn and the Myth of the Murderous Moms

Recently a coworker who knows I like mysteries handed me his copy of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl.

I was ambivalent it because, one, I had read Flynn’s Sharp Objects, and didn’t like it that well, although it had some good elements.  I particularly didn’t like the fact that all the villains were women or girls and all the men were kind of saintly, if clueless.  And two, it meant lugging a hardback book around for a week.

In the genre fiction writing class I just took, the teacher was talking about why some genre writers “cross over” into “literary” fiction, while others don’t.  Gillian Flynn’s name came up.  He said the difference between her and all the writers stuck in the “pocket mystery” section of the used bookstores is that she has a better agent.

But Gone Girl was such a huge best-seller, and the only other mystery writer in my writing group had raved about it (though she and I don’t necessarily have the same taste).  So I decided to give it a whirl.

Near the end of the first half, I told a friend, “This book really surprised me.  I kind of love it.”  It’s extremely well written.  It’s not necessarily more “literary” than a lot of other mysteries – Marcia Muller does great place evocations, Sara Paretsky builds unforgettable characters, and they both do great issue coverage as do Walter Moseley (who may also be considered “cross-over”) and Tony Hillerman.  But Flynn’s writing combined the quality most important to me – which I inelegantly call “unannoyingness,” with a biting satire that made me want to jump up and cheer.

One bit in particular has already risen to the level of feminist classic.  If you’ve read the book or a review of it, you know what I’m referring to.  But in case anyone hasn’t, here it is (again):

Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.

Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men – friends, coworkers, strangers – giddy over these awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them. I’d want to grab the poor guy by his lapels or messenger bag and say: The bitch doesn’t really love chili dogs that much – no one loves chili dogs that much! And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be. Oh, and if you’re not a Cool Girl, I beg you not to believe that your man doesn’t want the Cool Girl. It may be a slightly different version – maybe he’s a vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe he’s a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is a tattooed, bespectacled nerd who loves comics. There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain. (How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: “I like strong women.” If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because “I like strong women” is code for “I hate strong women.”)”

If you’re a feminist, you can’t not love a book that contains those two paragraphs.  I tore through the alternating chapters counterposing the diary of Amy, the embittered trying-to-be-Cool Girl with the present-day tribulations of Nick, the apparently bumbling, lying, philandering wife-killer.  Now I knew that the story was sure to turn, because it could not be so simple as it seemed, and I had more or less guessed how.  But I was unprepared for how cheated I felt when I realized that the character I’d grown so fond of was as fictitious as Cool Girl is.

The book kept me turning the pages, I’ll say that for it, and it retained flashes of brilliance.  But by the end, I threw it across the room, saying, “This woman is anti-feminist.”

How could Flynn go from uber-feminist to anti-feminist in 200 pages?  The only possible answer is that she’s neither.  I looked online to see what other women were saying.

The best thing I found is “Gone Girl and the Specter of Feminism” from a great blog called interrogatingmedia:

Ultimately, Gone Girl is done in by its ambition. It desperately wants to do interesting, subversive things, but in trying to, falls into some really misogynist narratives and implications. …

In the end, I suppose Gone Girl is really indicative of a post-feminist mindset, wherein the problems of misogyny become somehow the fault of feminism. Perhaps this is why the novel has a weird jab at post-feminist men. Perhaps that’s how one can say brave rape victims are tired, and go on to write a novel like Gone Girl. Or how we can blame the lack of diverse female characters on girl power. It’s a strange world out there for feminism, but this particular mystery isn’t fooling me.

Unfortunately, Ms. Interrogating and I seem to be out there mostly alone in the feminist blogosphere.  Most bloggers and reviewers quote the Cool Girl passage, nod to Flynn’s formidable writing skill, and accept her skewering of feminist tropes as so much good storytelling.

“There’s a difference between writing misogyny for misogyny’s sake and pointing out that misogyny exists and is as insidious in fiction as it is in the real world, and that’s what Gone Girl gets right.” http://earlybirdcatchestheworm.wordpress.com/2012/11/22/gone-girl-by-gillian-flynn-review/

“But even with this feminist treatise hidden within, Gone Girl has no particular affiliations. It’s not really a feminist novel, nor is it a political one. It’s just a damn good book about murder, marriage, and mystery.” http://www.literarytraveler.com/books/murder-she-wrote-reviewing-gone-girl-by-gillian-flynn/

“Gone Girl is ultimately a political novel. More accurately, it is a feminist novel, and it is at its most exhilarating in this particular manifestation of its existence.
Gone Girl is a feminist novel in the elementary sense that it would have been impossible for a man to have written it. No man writing today would be allowed to take the side of a falsely-accused rapist and portray his alleged victim as not only a fraud but a vicious aggressor.” http://tychy.wordpress.com/2012/08/02/book-review-gone-girl/

Had I not read Sharp Objects, I would have dismissed Gone Girl as basically falling into the “wanting to do something different” trap and ending up being predictable in an under-analyzed way.  On her website Flynn says the reason she writes women villains is that “I’ve grown quite weary of the spunky heroines, brave rape victims, soul-searching fashionistas that stock so many books. I particularly mourn the lack of female villains — good, potent female villains.”

I don’t know what Flynn’s been reading or watching, but in the mysteries I read or watch on TV, I would say a woman is the killer eight times out of ten.  Even if it’s a guy – as in Tana French’s In the Woods – a woman pulled the strings.  There are whole television series devoted to women who do bad things, from “Snapped” about women who kill to the British hit series “Bad Girls” about women in prison to the Broadway mega-hit “Chicago,” you can’t turn around without seeing evil women.

A couple years ago I was bored one night so I decided to check out “Law & Order: Los Angeles” on on-demand.  (Okay, I was really really bored.)  I started watching the first episode.  Since the teenage actress was the first suspect, I figured there was a certain probability that she wasn’t actually the killer, but when it turned out to be her mother, I turned it off and went on to the second.  In that one, a young woman who’s recently been released from prison is found dead and the killer turns out to be her rapist cellmate.  Tried the one about the mistress of the Congressman.  It seemed like the woman’s ex-husband had done it, but no, the Congressman’s wife had hired him.  In the one where the female pro golfer is killed, the prime suspect is the male golfer she was besting, but of course his mother turned out to be the mastermind.  I think the series went eight for eight that night.  The only thing you see more of in television cop-and-lawyer shows than female killers is Black women judges.

Flynn’s fascination with female killers, she says, came from her childhood love for Brothers Grimm fairy tales.  “Screw the blonde, gentle heroines, it was those wicked queens and evil stepmothers I adored.”

The fact is that those fairy tales, just like the murderous-masterminding-mother-wife motif in Law & Order, expressed the fear of women’s power in a gender-stratified patriarchal society.  It’s not that I think anyone is sitting there saying, “Let’s make all the women killers so people will agree with taking away women’s right to abortion.”  But it’s nonetheless true that in a country obsessed with stopping women from “killing their babies” it helps to have images of murdering mothers all over the media.

Gillian Flynn may be “tired of brave rape victims,” but unfortunately, men are not tired of rape.
 

Newtown, Occupy and The Book of Mormon

1.  When I first heard about the school shootings in Newtown, I didn’t have a particularly strong reaction.  I saw the headlines, I saw the number 20, then it became 26, but I didn’t read the details.  When a friend said on the phone, “That’s so sad,” I agreed without really thinking about it.

Friday evening I went to a meeting at a café.  The Palestinian owner served my wine.  I noticed he looked upset.

“How are you?” I asked and he said, “Not very good.”

I asked why and he pointed to the television.  Military guys were moving around ambulances and at first I thought something must have happened in Palestine.  But the words on the screen said it was Connecticut.

He has an 18-year-old daughter.

It was only then that I stopped to feel the news.

 

Omar al Masharawi, killed by Israeli shelling
in Gaza, November 14

2.  The mainstream media is nonstop funerals, speculation about the shooter, debates on gun violence, tedious interviews with the same law enforcement people and politicians.  The progressive media has moved on to speculations about how different the discourse would be if the victims or the perpetrator had been people of color, at home or abroad.  They remind us of all the deaths we’re not grieving, from kids killed by gun violence in Chicago (117) to kids killed by drones in Pakistan (168) to kids killed in last month’s Israeli bombing of Gaza (30) (read their names).

These are totally valid things to remind us of, fair and even necessary questions to raise.  Usually I’d be right there with them.  But the efforts at parallelism are making me uncomfortable.

I think that’s because it emphasizes the profound alienation we leftists feel from the rest of our society.  It feels like we want to wallow in our alienation and fling it in people’s faces.

And I can’t help feeling that wallowing in alienation is what brought Adam Lanza to the point where he could think it was right to kill 20 children and 6 women.

Aren’t drones the ultimate expression of the alienation our society promotes?  It’s a form of warfare that alienates the actor from their actions, the shooter from the target, the person from their compassion. I don’t want to encourage any more alienation, by seeming to criticize people for their emotional response to the suffering of other parents.

I know that’s not what my friends and fellow leftists are aiming for.  They want people to feel the same compassion for the parents in Gaza and Pakistan and Oakland that they feel for the parents of Newtown.  But I can’t help feeling that heaping negative information onto people’s consciousness will only encourage them to distance more, to dull their awareness of other people.

For years, I believed that if only people knew what was happening, knew the cost of our policies, they would care, and they would do something.  But the evidence is that it doesn’t work that way.  What it usually takes for people to change their positions or their actions is deep personal contact with someone who is hurting.

Would white Americans feel the pain of Palestinian parents if they could see a Palestinian father grieving for the families in Newtown?

 

3.  In my writing class on Saturday, we discussed the first few chapters of my novel, Murder Under the Bridge.  Most people found the American peace activist highly annoying.  (Everything I do to try to make her more sympathetic seems to have the opposite effect.)

A young woman said, “I knew a lot of people like her in college.  They all went into the Peace Corps.”

“Yes,” said the teacher, “people who go into the Peace Corps are usually annoying.”

“They’re idealists,” someone else said.  “And idealists are annoying.”

That’s true, I realized.  In our culture, idealists are considered very annoying.  Why?  Because their refusal to be suitably alienated makes us question our own alienation?

 

4.  A friend and I saw The Book of Mormon on Thursday night.  (Please do not ask how much we paid!)  It’s hilarious.  It’s also deeply offensive on so many levels: casually racist, sexist, making jokes about things that aren’t funny like AIDS and rape.  A lot of its comedy is mean-spirited, but it’s sharp and the music and dancing is incredible. I couldn’t decide which I was more ashamed of: enjoying it or criticizing its political incorrectness. I’m pretty sure the fact that it’s such a huge hit says something about how we can do such terrible things to each other, not to mention those we consider Other.  Cynicism has become our religion.  Idealists are annoying.  Alienation is our god.

 

5.  Karl Marx predicted that under capitalism, workers would “inevitably lose control of their lives by losing control over their work.”  But Marx did not see capitalism continuing for this long.  He foresaw that the working class would rise up and reassert control over their lives through socialism.  Aren’t these mass shootings, at their most basic level, a response to the prolonged alienation of people from our labor, our environment and each other?

But a transition to socialism, whether by revolution or some more gradual means, can only take place if the alienation that separates us from each other is somehow lessened or challenged.

Occupy was the answer.  People were coming together, relating without the mediation of wages and commodities, representation and hierarchy.  That’s why it had to be so swiftly and thoroughly repressed.  It might also be why the crime rate in Oakland declined during the encampment at Oscar Grant Plaza.  But the repression succeeded.  The new manifestations of Occupy, smaller, targeted campaigns for foreclosure defense, debt relief, labor support, are great but they do not offer that broad, easy access to an alternative vision of what our society can be.

What the brief flame that was Occupy/Liberate/Decolonize did was cut through the cynicism that says that idealism is just annoying.  It made a space for ideals and the people who hold to them to be loved and cherished.

 

6.  Today is the Solstice, the End of the Mayan Calendar, The Great Turning.  Let it be a turning toward a world in which idealism is cherished, not annoying.