Peeking into the rock

(I've been back almost a week, I have internet, but I am also jetlagged so I will only be gradually be catching up with reading everything you all wrote while I was having offline adventures, and also only gradually catching up on telling you about those adventures. Also, I have book news, but I will save that for later today).

I want to take note of, and respond to, a couple of trends I have noticed online the last week or so. Of course both of them have been around longer than that by a long shot, but now is when I want to talk about them.

The first one is this. A fellow, usually someone who makes their living from something publically geeky, will write about how he was doing something with his daughter and had a feminist insight. There will be some memorializing about how the activity in question resonates with his earliest and truest experiences as a boy and young man, how he dearly wishes to share this experience with his child, the degree to which he does, his deep love and admiration for his smart, strong, interesting daughter. There will be a crushing experience--no girl characters, someone saying something terrible to his daughter: the kinds of things girls experience in a gendered way (of course, I say pre-emptively, boys have crushing experiences, and even gendered crushing experiences, but it's not symmetrical, and that's the point). The father is appalled and furious that his daughter experienced this, and wants to let you know about this. Partly he wants to make a statement that he Gets It, partly he wants to speak to other men who might not get it and say "This is why I get it, and why you should to," and sometimes there's even a bit of "what is to be done," that is, a call for specific action or discussion.

The second one is a response. There are lots of different responses out there, many of which amount to "You lovely man! I am so glad you Get It now." But there's this other one that is "I am so tired of you men who only Get It when you have a personal stake in it. Where were you ten years ago before your daughter was born? All you're doing is posing to get praise. I don't buy it. You're self-absorbed, not feminist. I excoriate you."

Of course he's self-absorbed. He is a person who is writing about intimate personal and family experiences on the internet, frequently with adorable pictures of the daughter in question and/or his own smiling self. Seriously, that's not much of an accusation. And yes, of course he wants his readers to think he's brilliant and caring and forward-thinking. Again, not much of an accusation. But to say that his insight is worthless because it came on the heels of a personal experience is odd. Is it that his referencing his own family is to ignore the rest of the world of women and girls who suffer all these and more every day? Is it that some of us don't want fellows like him to stand over here with us?

I'm going to stop here for a second and wander down a side road in my mind. The very first man I heard day that any man with a daughter has to be a feminist was the fellow I married. He told people about looking at the world from this perspective, how he couldn't stand that people would limit his daughter's passage through the world. He was an imperfect feminist, too. He said things at times that he only later realized were awful. But I wouldn't say he suddenly became a feminist because of one of those experiences he talked about. He was developing into a feminist before I met him, and unlike many women I've known, wasn't reluctant to call himself one even around his most misogynist associates. I suspect that at least a large number of these men writing about their feminist insights with their daughters were like him, and the insight did not pop out of nowhere.

But that's a side trip. It's not the important thing. We're better off if the internet is chock full of conversion moments where men who Don't Get It become men who Get It and write impassioned personal pieces about it replete with cute photos and references to beloved cultural icons. We're better off if every self-absorbed man on the internet decides he's a feminist now because he has some shocking personal experience. These men vote: they spend money: they talk to other men: they even talk to men I can't stand to be in the same room with. No, you don't need to respect them more than the woman who has spent her life fighting the good fight at every turn and getting beat for it. But why spend your bile on them? We have actual enemies in this world, and they are better organized than to attack the person who wishes to give them support.

Content advisory: this contains very personal, possibly contentious, potentially offensive material about religion and its place in the current cultural and political landscape.  I'm not looking for a fight.  I'm not looking to be convinced I'm wrong, or to be vindicated by other people's experience. I'm mourning a personal loss. (most of the performer links lead to different songs from the ones I'm talking about)


I've told Emma about this.  I've lost a big chunk of my heritage just recently.  I grew up listening to old scratchy records, some of them older than my father, largely from the South (black and white).  The soundtrack of my childhood was the Carter Family, the Ernest V. Stoneman, the Skillet Lickers, Ma Rainey, of course Bessie Smith,  and Memphis Minnie, Bob Wills, Jelly Roll Morton,  Jimmy Rodgers, and I could go on and on but the point is just to express the range.  I remember my mother asking my father how come I sounded like Maybelle Carter whenever I opened my mouth (I wished I sounded like Sarah instead, but there it is). We had a great big speaker (one, this is before most people had stereos, and the old records were all mono), and I practically climbed into it, picking at the woven straw that covered the friont while I sang along with the Blue Sky Boys. (that link leads to "Are You From Dixie?" -- if you're suffering from the same problem I am, you probably shouldn't click this.  On the other hand, if you worship fine mandolin technique . . .)

A lot of those songs are highly religious.  Some of them were really, really reactionary, but in the political landscape of my youth they seemed quaint rather than threatening.  These days, because of the aggressive, highly organized, and increasingly effective war that the religious right is waging against the world, I can't sing some of my favorite songs, and I turn the radio dial when I hear music that should make me nostalgic -- honestly, if I hear even a certain singing style or a certain kind of instrumentation, unless I very quickly recognize the song to be one that doesn't make me sick to my stomach, I'll turn the radio off.

I can't hear Uncle Dave Macon singing "Shall We Gather at the River?" without remembering that at least half a dozen of his songs were direct attacks on learning and science, and without realizing that the import of that song and others like it -- "Diamonds in the Rough,"  "Bringing in the Sheaves," "Where the Soul Never Dies" -- is that the state of this world and its future do not matter because the elect will leave it all behind and go live with their god who made this jewel and then sanctioned its destruction.

I can't hear "Amazing Grace," even, though it was one of my favorites to sing at the sink when the kids were growing up, even though the story -- that the man who wrote it had been the captain of a slave ship, and had come to realize how horrible it was, and quite, and become religious somewhere in the process --that story used to seem so sweet to me.  Now I hear it, and I hear smugness in the voices of the people who sing it (don't bother telling me that there are some upstanding freedom fighters who love to sing this song.  This isn't about that: it's about my own state of terror).



Honestly, it all sounds like the Horst Wessel song to me at this point.  All of it.  Even Blind Lemon Jefferson singing "See that my grave is kept clean."  Even Doc Watson singing about old Daniel (you can see a bit of Pete Seeger listening in that video), or Mary and Martha, or Paul and Simon.  Especially Dock Boggs singing "Oh Death."

It's an extreme reaction, but I'm looking at a hideous, hideous thing, dressed up in traditional values, threatening to make The Handmaid's Tale look like The Poky Little Puppy.  (and what the hell, Wikipedia?  how is that more notable than Nick Mamatas?)  I was raised to embrace everybody's culture, to celebrate the best of everybody's values and traditions, to tolerate different world views.  It all seems so luxurious now, with respectable politicians coming right out and saying out loud in so many words how little they value my people and my land, how much they hate people like me.  And by people like me, I mean: Women.  Mothers.  Working people.  People who don't make a lot of money.  People whose jobs enable other people to work and go to school and live better lives.  People who need health care in order to live productive lives. Non-christians.  People who work to defend the actual living world we're in.

Fortunately, "Life's Railway to Heaven" is not a complete wash -- there's still the labor version,  "Weaver's Life is Like an Engine." (which I cannot find on youtube, naturally)  However, if I should hear the instrumental intro, am I going to stick around for the probably trauma, on the off chance that I'll get to hear the good old voices reminding me that there are times and places where the USian working class thinks for itself and has opinions that are not vile and slaved to the interests of the richest of the rich?

My stepmother Moher took me to see "I love you man," because everything else that was playing was brutal (except a couple which took themselves too seriously for the moment).

It's shockingly good. I expected to have that men-are-pigs lie rubbed in our faces over and over, and there were a few men who used it to structure their lives, but it was celebrated as just one of the ways people lived in the movie. It was sort of a lovesong to a certain upwardly-mobile community in LA (people I personally don't often like in life but who deserve their own movie), not the ones who make their living in Hollywood, but minor realtors in major firms, personal trainers to the middle-level and lower-level businessmen, investors who don't live in big glass houses on obscure canyons, and so on. The women were their own real people, and they had that look of women who have swallowed the fashion magazine standard of beauty, or more importantly, who think their men have: but they didn't look like actresses in a movie dressed and made up fashionably, they looked like realtors and beauty parlor managers and lower--level businesswomen and yes, I noticed that I said the women looked like they sat exactly one rung below the men, and I think it's interesting and lifelike.

The main thing is that the men were all different -- and out poor protagonist who is trying to make friends so he'll have a best man on his wedding day meets some very different men who have very different understandings about what their doing. I remember getting in an online argument years ago about this very thing in whih some men got very heated defending the men-are-pigs lie (though I really gathered that most of them didn't actually live by that lie, they just wanted it in readiness to fall back on if they felt they needed it as an excuse), insisting that all men are alike and they would all do the same things that they have been taught are reprehensible, vulgar, selfish, or dirty if given the chance. The obvious rejoinder is "what's stopping you then, Mr. I can can do anything I want because I'm a libertarian?"

What's stopping them is that enculturation is actively participated in on both sides by men as well as women. It isn't just women and girls putting pressure on men and boys to believe and act certain ways. It's also men and boys developing their own patterns of thought and behavior, thankyouverymuch Mr. Piaget for articulating it so clearly.

The man who articulates the "men are pigs" theory in this movie glories in it. He's pretty vulgar. He does some things you wish he wouldn't. But -- and if there is a point to the movie, this is part of the slope that goes to it -- he's in many ways (though not as many as the people in the movie come to believe) a pretty good guy and a loyal friend.

So there are other pretty good guys who live by other beliefs. There's a couple of actually nearly evil guys in the movie -- one you get to see his meager redemming features in a way that lets you knoiw he's still a pig, very nicely done, all around, that guy. Another is a kind of a cartoon, but it's a clown shoes movie in a lot of ways so it's appropriate.

I'd go on but Truffle is letting me know she needs to go out right now.