Two Nouns # 19: Gender Trouble
Happy '20s from me! Many end of decade (that snuck up) articles savaged the ‘10s as the one in which the Internet got bad. I’m inclined to agree. Yes, there is the camera in your pocket, the BBC Dad and the best of TikTok, but there is also the barbarism of one-day-shipping and Instagram scammers and anonymous comments on websites.
I remember the day of 2019 when being online felt so toxic I thought: Is this the bad place? This was the day of the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearing, when 20 million people watched (and then dissected) the hysterics of a judge incapable of grasping accountability, and the calm of a woman who wouldn't be broken.
Legendary.
I've gradually donned the digital equivalent of earplugs against large chunks of the web (consider an adblocker!). Yet the era of ugly comeuppances for dudes – Weinstein, Lauer, R. Kelly, chefs, opera stars, whomever is next – is one very good byproduct of the Internet. #MeToo legitimized and amplified voices once kept outside of the gate, lending the mechanics of giant servers protected by armed guards to ten million status updates using Tarana Burke’s hashtag. The volcano erupted and the lava is still roiling downhill. We can’t expect it to cool just yet.
As women have used the Internet as a force multiplier, telling their stories or simply adding their web persona to the global tally, the motivations and interior life of the gender "on trial" have been opaque to me. We know who is in trouble, and who is going down swinging, and we are beginning to carve out the connection between economic power and sexual predation – but I’m not sure we’ve hit the bone of what men think of this gender trouble.
Which is why I’ve been consuming episodes of a podcast called “Hey Man.” I mentioned this to a male friend, who confused it for a podcast called “Uh Yeah Dude” because of course there is a bull market for mumbly man-gazing audio storytelling. It’s an advice format featuring two men talking about man things. This isn’t Joe Rogan, however -- the show covers body positivity, spiritualism, disability, meditation, fashion and consent culture, and one of the hosts is a therapist. I’ve learned lots from the eclectic guests (male and female). And I’ve enjoyed it because to me it’s offered access. Conversant as I am in the majority cultures I live and work within, it’s not often that I get to be a fly on the wall while cis-het-white 30-something men try to get vulnerable.
Public Service Announcement in Mexico City.
Mosaic from the Chapel of Jimmy Ray in San Miguel.
A stretch of the show that stuck with me was hearing one of the hosts (I can’t quite tell them apart) confess he didn’t like being called a feminist. I gasped. These are the dudes of Brooklyn! How is feminism still contentious? Then I listened harder: He told their guest, the impressively nontoxic Jason Rosario, that he felt like claiming feminism made him feel like less of a man.
Rosario: What’s the hesitation do you think?
Host 1: On the one hand it sounds like something that’s a women’s movement, so it’s not really about me, I’m just a supporter. And then there is a part of me, the middle-schooler in me, who would use slurs about what it says about me if I called myself a feminist.
Host 2: Even the word sounds like 'feminine.'
Host 1: Like, I’m feminine.
And then Rosario gave a defense of modern feminism whose sanity brought tears to my eyes:
Rosario: I consider myself a feminist and I do think the movement is about me. … It does hold men accountable to the behaviors that we’ve exhibited over centuries. So calling yourself a feminist is not necessarily saying that you’re emasculating yourself… You’re not taking anything away from your manhood and masculinity, you’re saying that … your manhood and the way you have been taught that has been complicit in the oppression of women and femininity. So as a feminist you are an active accomplice in that. For me it’s about including, not bifurcating.
In the same episode, the two hosts also – kudos for candor – confessed apprehension at the idea of sharing preferred pronouns to be supportive of the trans community. I happen to believe appending “She/Her” to the close of an email is a costless way to show solidarity with those asserting a nonbinary identity. These men, however, see costs to their own self esteem.
Host 1: All of these things I intellectually agree with... The reason I am still not putting it in my bio is because I feel like it’s something other than an act of generosity, it’s a belittlement of myself.
This conversation helped me understand the "not all men" reflex better. But however honestly stated, such resentments are an antihumanist force. From the myth of sirens causing shipwrecks to Mike Pence’s refusal to speak 1:1 with women, progress is forced to scale high walls patrolled by habit and, unfortunately, male fragility.
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A respectably female book stack that I shared on Instagram.
Last year I read many books by talented female writers (Arnett, Brodesser-Akner, Carty-Williams, Hope, Tolentino, Wolitzer, catch them all). Most to some degree engage the problem of female independence in a world that is, as Caroline Criado Perez demonstrates in Invisible Women, literally designed for men. People who identify as women want – and now need – to work, and to live, maybe to thrive, ideally free of the tyranny of the ideal woman. We deserve it.
But subverting deep habits requires subversive measures. One ju-jitsu tactic occurs in Maaza Mengiste’s new book on the Italian – Ethiopian war of 1935. The Shadow King animates an unloved history of resistance and desperation through the eyes of a young female servant-turned-soldier named Hirut. One casualty of the war is her autonomy, as she’s abused and eventually raped by fellow fighters with higher social status.
Pause to note I have read many efforts to write violation. This version was a revelation because, in the midst of some genuinely harrowing shit – a war fought by overmatched men and women wearing linen and wielding ancient rifles – a commanding officer pins down a vulnerable woman, and she yawns. A few sighs from this lioness work better than pepper spray. Her attacker is humiliated, and shuffles off, and I thought to myself: Is that all it takes?
Another subversion technique is erasure. In Girl, Woman, Other – Bernadine Evaristo’s genius novel of nested female lives in contemporary London, the author empties her universe of male perspectives. As though collectively seeking to conquer the Bechdel test, the black women in her book hold the center firmly – fiercely or loosely attached to one another, and mostly unburdened by the acts of male counterparties. This universe is a strange cousin of Gilead, the misogynist dystopia created by Margaret Atwood, Evaristo's co-winner of the 2019 Booker Prize. I found it inspirational, and hopeful, and hope lots of people will read it.
Three Women, Lisa Taddeo’s buzzy nonfiction chronicle, takes the inverse tack – exploring the impact of men on the titular women in excruciating detail. The student manipulated by her teacher, the woman untouched by her husband, the sylph caught up in group sex and the beauty myth – all of them experience life in the shadow of flawed men as a painful disappointment. Taddeo hasn’t written a universal story (Three White Women, am I right?), but if it were, the lesson might be that desire will crush you. You’ll lose; a boot on your neck. It’s hard to read, and yet the commercial success of this book is probably because women want our pain and deference to at least be seen and accounted for.
I could go on. I am constantly recommending that people read women's writing because these stories, as with #MeToo confessions and revelations, help us understand the legacy of male power, and respect the complex emotional dynamics that can make a yawn into a roar.
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Something to watch:
Mati Diop's film Atlantics, which is, briefly, about love and migration and ghosts, won the Grand Prix at this past Cannes Film Festival -- the first such award given to an African female director. Even if you don't care about that kind of thing, the film is available on Netflix. It is gorgeous and sad and a reminder that humanity's macro struggles are best understood up close.
Something to appreciate:
Lighter fare given the overall terrible condition of the world: Re: re: re: re, a multimedia project from California Sunday Magazine, simply reprinting the WhatsApps, photos and letters of people who are far from one another right now.
Thank you for letting me write to you -- hope your 2020 is brilliant.
Dayo