Bad-Acting Men, and the Women Who Reward Them

This week, the usual suspects got afflutter when Rob Bliss Creative, a self-described “viral video agency,” distributed a two-minute Web film of actress Shoshana B. Roberts, dressed completely non-provocatively, walking silently through Manhattan, absorbing catcalls and sexual taunts from random strangers. It snagged twenty million views in two days. Feminist proclaimed proof—proof!—that patriarchy trivializes women. Misogynists sent death threats. Same old same old.

This video has significant problems. Hanna Rosin notes that, though the final title card claims Roberts got over 100 catcalls, averaging one every six minutes, nearly every face shown harassing Roberts is brown. I’d go further. Nearly every shot features boarded-up windows, graffiti, and men idling curbside, classic emblems of poverty. A white woman wandered into blighted, predominantly brown neighborhoods and expected… what exactly? It’s a classic honey trap.

Worse, despite the editors’ focus on men acing loutishly, nearly every shot backgrounds men not catcalling her. If she got one-hundred come-hithers in a city of eight million people, then even just on the streets Roberts walked, that’s thousands of men notably not embracing the opportunity for misbehavior. So even if Roberts didn’t directly acknowledge the men around her, Bliss Creative gave them exactly what they wanted: attention.

I’ve written previously about feeling skeeved when men harass women. I received several e-mails after one incident put me permanently off Big Bang Theory. My story of “Nelson,” a middle-aged white guy, forcing his attentions on “Daniela,” a young Hispanic co-worker, resonated with several people. Apparently, we’ve all known somebody who treated women with such naked arrogance. Fellas, if you can’t recall anyone, take one solid look in a mirror.

Unfortunately, since writing that, I’ve noticed more complex interactions in play. While enough colleagues finally complained to force Nelson off the line, several other men treat Daniela largely the same. Many are senior technicians whose experience and skills make them difficult to replace. One machine operator, “Jack,” seems incapable of going an hour without flirting with Daniela, tickling her, attempting to startle her, and otherwise displaying sweeping Freudian behavior.

Shoshana Roberts

Watching Jack’s behavior toward Daniela, I’m clearly witnessing the very conduct for which our company wrote its sexual harassment policy. His actions make Shoshana Roberts’ verbal catcalls look tame and courteous. Daniela answers Jack (who is married) by laughing, bantering, and flirting back. Recently, Jack crept up behind Daniela, grabbed her in a bear hug from behind that pinned her arms, and lifted her clear off her feet. Daniela laughed, gave Jack a play punch in the chest, then hugged him.

You’d think they were old buddies. I wholly cannot understand Daniela’s response, given her visible antipathy toward Nelson. There’s literally no difference between how Jack treats Daniela, and how Nelson treated her, except how she responds. Nelson’s attempts to gain Daniela’s attention merited disdain; Jack’s attempts merit reciprocation. Therefore, the only discernable difference between Nelson and Jack, is that Nelson can’t take a hint.

On a personal note, I’ve tried talking to Daniela. No matter what I say, I get monotone two- and three-word responses. I’ve finally given up.

Perhaps economic class matters. Nelson, a fellow peon, has little to offer Daniela, while Jack can offer networking opportunities to climb the company ladder. (We’re emphatically not a meritocracy.) But consider the three responses Daniela’s shown. Jack and Nelson both tried to put the make on her. She responded to one positively, one negatively, for reasons I cannot spot. I tried showing her respect and talking to her like an adult; she received me with indifference.

I never particularly realized, until it happened to a woman I care about, how much time and effort women invest daily in avoiding seual harrassment, degradation, and rape. I have every sympathy with Shoshana Roberts and her message, even if I question aspects of its presentation. So when I see women creating incentives for continued misbehavior, I feel physically queasy. Yet my response matters little; the behavior continues unabated.

Who knows how many men who didn’t harass Shoshana Roberts thought they were showing her respect? Yet all attention accrued to men showing active disrespect. By that criterion, acting loutishly achieves the desired goal. Maybe I’d get Daniela’s attention if I behaved like an asshole. But even thinking that way makes me sick to my stomach, it so thoroughly contravenes my constitution and the way my momma raised me.

If women’s attention is the desired reward, oafish conduct seems to work. If women want harassment to stop, they must first subvert this reward system.

Paleoconservatism 101

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 40
P.J. O'Rourke, Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government

When Republicans swept mid-term elections in 1994, newly elevated House Speaker Newt Gingrich encouraged his fellow Republicans to do something almost completely unprecedented: rather than living full-time in Washington, DC, legislators should reside in their home districts, only commuting into Washington for Congress’s notoriously short workweeks. The results have been disastrous. Legislators who once shared neighborhoods, taverns, and taxis have become complete strangers. Nobody reaches across the aisle anymore because nobody talks to one another.

This, probably PJ O’Rourke’s most influential, least doctrinaire book, appeared halfway through the George HW Bush administration, when elected officials still kept company, and Congressional floor debates still influenced votes. Ideas mattered. Therefore, though O’Rourke’s Libertarian conservative credentials permeate his analysis of American federal government, his side-splitting timbre has bipartisan bite; he cares less about parties, more about consequences. It’s a unilateral debunking clarity broadly missing from political commentators anymore, including, sadly, from O’Rourke himself.

PJ O’Rourke made his bones doing on-set script doctor work for Rodney Dangerfield films, which comes across in his comic timing, frequently coarse humor, and knack for unornamented language. O’Rourke and his close friend John Hughes called themselves the “token conservatives” at National Lampoon magazine; later, O’Rourke wrote this book, originally as separate articles, during his hitch as “National Affairs Desk Chief” at Rolling Stone. He claimed to share an office with Hunter S. Thompson.

This mélànge of influences glimmers through O’Rourke’s humor. “Democrats are also the party of government activism, the party that says government can make you richer, smarter, taller and get the chickweed out of your lawn. Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work, and then they get elected and prove it.” What O’Rourke wrote as joshing exaggeration is sober fact anymore. Elsewhere, he characterizes the three branches of government as “Money, Television, and Bullshit.”

P.J. O'Rourke

O’Rourke describes a government beholden to conflicting forces: spending programs lingering from Great Society liberalism, underwritten with tax structures colored by the Reagan Revolution. Despite today’s ubiquitous Reagan worshippers, O’Rourke notes that, even in the Gipper’s long shadow, killing, or even cursorily remodeling, grandfathered programs was virtually impossible. O’Rourke’s unsentimental skewering of government priorities makes an excellent antidote to today’s unthinking Reagan hagiographies. (Many programs O’Rourke mocks were later dismantled under Bill Clinton, a Democrat.)

One reads O’Rourke’s description of a typical Congressman’s workday—he followed an actual Congressman for one day—with out-and-out nostalgia. Not because we ever remember doing anything similar ourselves; no, his description of eighteen-hour frenzies of meetings, debates, and gladhanding feels downright nightmarish to anyone lacking a Congressman’s ego. Rather, as O’Rourke describes his anonymous Virgil leading him around, we realize, he’s talking with colleagues, constituents, and regular citizens. Real conversations, not pre-scripted press junkets.

That human touch is broadly absent from today’s political scene. O’Rourke cracks wise about “the president act[ing] as a human augury” at budget meetings, or “the president heal[ing] the sick” by signing the Americans With Disabilities Act. Indeed, we still roll eyes at the meaningless ceremony attached to government actions. Yet these activities involve speaking with people holding different opinions. Like coelacanths, we know such beasts still exist; we’ve just never seen one.

Thus, O’Rourke’s cuttingly comical tracts reads like a time capsule. Though inarguably conservative in outlook (his disdain for public welfare and reverence for Reagan loom large), O’Rourke describes philosophical precepts uncolored by partisan cable news, web aggregators, and Koch Brothers talking points. In 1991, even talk radio was still nascent. Commentators like O’Rourke couldn’t expect ideologically unswerving audiences; communication with people who disagreed remained mandatory. This book reads like he cares what ideological opponents think.

O’Rourke describes a utilitarian conservatism here, one interested in reaching vast, diverse audiences, not just an ideological base. Tea Party loyalists certainly won’t appreciate his willingness to acknowledge complexity and nuance. But centrists and leftists would enjoy debating this version of conservatism, largely because it disdains dogma and sloganeering. O’Rourke channels Reagan’s folksy charm, Russell Kirk’s thought, and Jonathan Swift’s hilarious intolerance for hogwash. That’s why this notorious conservative enjoys many fans on the left.

Sadly, since this book debuted, O’Rourke’s views, increasingly untempered by interaction with diverse influences, have become increasingly partisan and dogmatic. He treats disagreement as indicative of stupidity, and reduces complex arguments to idiotic caricatures. Recent books have become virtually unreadable for anyone who doesn’t share his strict Libertarian nationalism. Worst, they aren’t even particularly funny. But for one shining moment, O’Rourke gathered a massive multilateral audience around this hilarious exegesis of Washington’s notorious power edifices.

The Great Lesbian Murder Circus of Victorian Tennessee

Alexis Coe, Alice + Freda Forever: A Murder in Memphis

On January 25th, 1892, 19-year-old Alice Mitchell brutally slashed 17-year-old Frederica “Freda” Ward’s throat on a crowded Memphis boardwalk. She apparently intended to kill herself afterward, but surging crowds prevented her suicide; after a brief delay, police arrested Alice, who never walked free again. Though gruesome, Mitchell’s actions probably wouldn’t have mattered beyond Memphis itself, until her motivations became clear. Mitchell and Ward were in love, but conservative families thwarted their plans to get married.

Mitchell’s spectacular actions, and the media pageant following, gripped national, even international, attention throughout 1892. However, these events are now mostly known only among historians and gender scholars. San Francisco-based author Alexis Coe has written on gender issues for multiple high-gloss magazines; in her first book, she purposes to return Alice and Freda to popular awareness. If telling their story raises awareness about America’s deep-rooted sexual framework, both then and now, so much the better.

Alice Mitchell’s influential, well-heeled father, a fixture in the Memphis economy, preemptively declared Alice clearly insane. Why else, he reasoned, would a well-bred white girl think she could disguise herself in men’s clothing, marry another girl, and get (gasp!) a job to support them? Alice’s defiance of Victorian gender standards quickly became a two-pronged fork, supporting her insanity defense while titillating newspaper readers nationwide. In Coe’s telling, nationwide journalism quickly descended to slut-shaming and voyeurism.

Alice and Freda made elaborate plans. Alice intended, adopting the male identity of “Alvin J. Ward,” to elope with Freda, marry in church, and set up housekeeping in St. Louis. Freda helped Alice device subterfuges worthy of Hollywood Gothic, and their letters, which remarkably survive, reveal mutual affection worthy of celebration. But when their families discovered their romance, fraught with complications that seem tragicomic after what followed, they were ordered to stop. Alice couldn’t obey.

This story unfolds with alternating tones, careful historical research intercutting with gripping narrative. Coe’s story starts with Freda’s murder, then unfolding both ways, revealing the girls’ “unnatural” romance while the sensationalized trial transforms backwater Memphis into a global hotspot. Judge Julius Dubose, a consummate showman and benchmark of spotty ethics, contrasts splendidly with ambiguous Alice, systemically silenced by the men around her, still an enigma a century after her spectacular trial and subsequent mysterious death.

Coe promises, in her introduction, to eschew complex gender politics and sexual identity ideology which colors most modern writing about this case. She’s more successful at some times than others. Gender issues dominate this story: the white men steering Alice Mitchell’s story, including her father, her attorneys, and the judge, keep bringing gender back into the proceedings. The antiquated gender standards applied to Alice’s evaluation will surely strike modern readers as pseudo-scientific, dictatorial, and bizarre.

White girls’ upbringing in 19th Century Memphis seems remarkable to modern viewers. (I say “white girls” deliberately; Alice’s lopsided relationship with an African American kitchen servant looms large in her narrative.) Segregated education cultured domesticity, submission, and servility. Strangely, though Victorians couldn’t imagine same-sex love, girls openly practiced “chumming,” a practice of affection and play courtship among schoolmates which, parents imagined, prepared girls for mature relationships with men. That’s how Alice and Freda’s romance began.

Alice must’ve been deranged, eminent physicians argued, because she suffered adolescent nosebleeds—”vicarious menstruation,” they called it. Her asymmetrical face proved homicidal capacity. Seriously, doctors, white males all, made these diagnoses. Alice’s fondness for baseball, and disinterest in dolls, ostensibly proved her lunacy. And what well-bred merchant’s daughter could possibly live satisfied in a marriage that couldn’t ever produce children? Alice and Freda’s shared acceptance of child-free marriage basically secured Alice’s ultimate “present insanity” finding.

Coe’s narrative benefits from Sally Klann’s copious illustrations. Klann recreates the visual texture of fin-de-siècle Memphis, a world removed from today’s standards. Beyond its horse-drawn simplicity, Memphis’ deeply hierarchical society divided populations by gender, race, wealth, and family prestige. (Alice’s trial coincided with the People’s Grocery Company lynching that galvanized Ida B. Wells.) Klann’s illustrations also help expand Coe’s text, which is remarkably brief: too long for a magazine article, but barely standard book length.

Reading Coe’s narrative, I received two impressions. First, alienation: the shoddy science, cash-and-carry justice, and haughty moralism make Memphis a foreign landscape. Second, recognition: these characters have their blinders, but who doesn’t? Will my grandchildren feel about our era as we feel about Victorian Memphis? We cannot know what implications we miss because we don’t know where to look. Coe’s story, like all true classics, old and new, succeeds because ultimately, it’s all about us.

The Hilarious Verse and the Terrible Truth About TV

John F. Buckley & Martin Ott, Yankee Broadcast Network

Poetry has always dwelt in strange neverlands, caught between today’s commonplaces and an idealized, probably allegorical past. Poets address today’s needs using bygone methods. From Homer to the medieval troubadours to modern MFA workshops, poets have always somehow not belonged to the present. Therefore, despite repeated pronouncements of poesy’s long-overdue demise, poetry today, if anything, matters more. Barraged by media messages and ever-shifting issues too fast to comprehend, we’re all somehow outside our time anymore.

Welcome to the Yankee Broadcast Network, home of such undying television classics as “Lusts of Midgard,” “Real Housewives of Wayne County,” and “The B-Team.” This network’s gelatinous onslaught of reality TV, plaintive melodrama, and pandering blockbusters keeps audiences hypnotized, while advertisers strategically market dissatisfaction and ennui. This dystopian hangover of television’s reptile-brain impulses blurs boundaries between life and semi-scripted potboilers, reducing viewers to a dreamlike fugue where fever visions increasingly resemble MTV montages, or vice versa.

Casual readers might easily mistake Buckley and Ott’s satirical poetry for mere light verse, interesting but forgettable like Edward Lear. But as poems mount up, as verse styles both traditional and experimental tease readers’ expectations, and as pop culture references meld with ancient poetic tropes to create new hybrids, easy judgments vanish. Eighteen years ago, Ani DiFranco sang “Art imitates life, but life imitates TV.” Buckley and Ott assert those are outmoded distinctions in terrifyingly half-joking poems like “Commercials of the Apocalypse”:

When even the walls began to turn on each other
and kids kicked around skulls in the wreckage for fun,
from skin to sin they sought to sell us things, and so
advertising was born again. Who can forget Zom-B-Gone

with its blend of seventy-three special herbs and
pesticides, able to repel hordes of undead salesmen
and make scorched lawns lush once more? Doesn’t
everyone still hum the jingle from Crazy Ed’s Eyeglass

Emporium and the double-eye-patched pirate’s ayayays?

Poets seldom collaborate today; we’ve come to expect solemn navel gazing interspersed with outbursts of Billy Collins-style try wit. It’s tempting to parse these poems seeking which lines Ott wrote, which Buckley. But that misses the point of their extroverted, non-gloomy experiments, reminiscent of that stalwart theatre class game, “Yes And.” Try to miss the improvisational implications veritably streaming, jazz hands aloft, from poems like “Coming Soon to the Disaster Channel!”:

\

Martin Ott (right) and John F. Buckley

Tornado week features The Traveling Travails
of Tracy, a ragdoll that flew from Tulsa to Tallahassee,
her left arm torn when it toppled a telephone pole
in Mobile, Alabama, the snapping of the pretty hem

on her tiny gingham dress sawing Baton Rouge oaks
into splinters. Will she and eight-year-old Stacy,
her newly homeless owner, ever be reunited?
Tune in Tuesday at 9PM for a whirlwind adventure!

It’s easy to recognize the time-delayed rubbernecking popular from cable TV, the hackneyed “History” Channel train wrecks too real for parody. Yet these poets capture not only the voyeuristic excess and shameless hucksterism behind the shows themselves, but also our childlike will to permit such content into our homes and minds. This perversely symbiotic relationship between producers and audience informs poems like “Better Living Through Television” and “Television Through the Ages: a Smithsonian Walkthrough.”

Buckley and Ott experiment with forms. Besides formless free verse, traditional techniques like sestina, ghazal, and terza rima appear periodically. Many of their best poems have lines too long to excerpt for review. Images which originate in one poem reappear elsewhere, giving the collection a Sherwood Anderson-like internal consistency. For example, Hayden Smunchner, evolves from promising talent, to vulgar, fawning huckster, before appearing one final time, in the painfully topical “Fireside Chat”:

The fireplace has been replaced by a TV
cracked open like a dinosaur egg, a blue
flame flickering inside the screen. President

Smunchner, half-ruined face still swoon-worthy
from the right, patiently waits for the drums
to subside, for children to trust they won’t be

eaten. The purple mountains proudly wear
their scars, the length of battlefields smoking
onscreen like Tinseltown toughs. His voice

is low, clear, reasonable—there’ll be extra
rations for rebuilders. His words are not
important; they rarely are. He has taken

the country as a bride, the smoldering
dream of courtship denied...

Reading this surprisingly funny condemnation, we progress from cognizant laughter, to squirming amusement, to undeniable realization: if TV does this to us, we’re willing participants. We’ve chosen the passive path, while producers like YBN merely sell what we’ve already purposed to buy. Like all good, timelost poets, Buckley and Ott ultimately don’t write about TV; they write about us.

Why Gay Marriage Won't Lead To Legalized Incest

When the moderately conservative op-ed magazine The Week published an article in late September entitled How Liberals Are Unwittingly Paving the Way For the Legalization of Adult Incest, most audiences probably only noticed the absurdly long title, if they noticed it at all, and kept moving. We’ve all heard such sentiments before. Pro-gay marriage advocates have grown bored with such naked scare-mongering, while anti-gay marriage traditionalists nod stoically along, already aware such opinions are common.

I’ll paraphrase author Damon Linker’s argument. In an “anything goes” atmosphere, where we’ve progressively dismissed the taboo against homosexuality, we must inevitably accept all forms of non-coercive sex as essentially equal. This means, if blood relatives of consenting age engage in sexual relations, we’d necessarily treat their relationship like we’d treat a heterosexual marriage. The German Ethics Council, a non-binding government committee, has already endorsed this reasoning. In time, such libertarianism is an unavoidable consequence.

Damon Linker

If Linker’s argument sounds familiar, we’ve heard his core claims dribble from the lips of reactionary moralists before, from Rick Santorum to Laura Schlessinger. It was crap then, and it remains crap now. It relies on false equivalency, that all sexual expressions besides man-on-top heterosexuality are mere self-indulgence. By implication, it insists all change is decline, and in moral categories like sexuality, it makes all change into decadence. Linker aims to scare, not inform, readers.

Same-sex marriage has achieved widespread acceptance in developed countries today because we have sex for different reasons than in the past. In bygone days, when infant mortality was high, infectious diseases more commonly terminal, and economics dependent on constant resupplies of human labor, procreation had important social weight. Marriage established legitimate continuity of family authority, resource allocation, and work. Before second-wave feminism, marriage also helped establish social hierarchy: male privilege and work, versus female domesticity.

We marry, procreate, and have sex today for different reasons. First, and perhaps most important, we moderns marry for love. This sounds obvious, but that concept only extends backward to Victorian times. It’s a product of economic stability and confidence. And it corresponds with changing sexual mores: not just rising acceptance for homosexuality, but for women’s ability to divorce abusive husbands, a woman’s rights following rape, and her authority to decide whether to give birth.

By itself, we might suppose similar claims apply to sex between blood relations. Though healthy individuals cringe at the thought, we can imagine situations where adult siblings and cousins could experience romantic love. But besides reifying love, marriage serves another responsibility. Imagine society as a pyramid. Individuals form the foundation, which coalesce into families, then civic organizations (schools, clubs, congregations, etc.). These merge into local communities, then regional governments, and upward, to nationwide federal authority.

Stephanie Coontz

Marriage, whether heterosexual or same-sex, guides individuals outward, into society. Incest guides individuals inward, away from society. Incest jeopardizes rudimentary social structures by permitting individuals to retreat from their public, communal obligations. If I marry, or anyway sleep with, my sister, I don’t create new family relations, I simply perpetuate old ones. Same-sex couples wish to join public society, drive culture, and make families. Incestuous relations are cowardly, essentially fleeing contact with larger human community.

Laws regarding marriage state how society’s pyramid peak permits us, the foundation, to constitute the second level. For about seven generations, we’ve accepted that individuals form families based on love, though until recently, we’ve assumed love meant men and women. Permitting same-sex couples to legally wed asserts that love is our society’s fundamental organizing principle. Forbidding same-sex marriage associates marriage with procreation, limiting society’s foundation to its members’ sexual capability, the veriest definition of plebian.

Under that reasoning, society should retain the authority to forbid incest, even among consenting adults. When individuals have sex with blood relations, even discounting the genetic consequences, these individuals, and the families they perpetuate, essentially fragment from society. When we marry non-related individuals of either gender, we strengthen society’s bonds and build new families. With incest, we abrogate our responsibilities to common humanity. (See Stephanie Coontz’s Marriage, a History for more detail in this direction.)

Conflating gay marriage and incest is a time-tested scare tactic, designed to silence debate. Reactionaries lob this one bomb into the public discourse and make somebody else clean the rubble. Essentially, it’s the opposite of discussing issues on their merits. Propagandists of ignorance like Damon Linker should be ashamed, except I doubt they’re capable of shame. Society isn’t changing, it’s already changed, and Linker’s pathetic histrionics signal allegiance to a cultural dynamic already long dead.