Now Zeus was a womanizer,
Always on the make.
But Hera would usually punished her
That Zeus was wont to take.
-Cake, "When You Sleep"
Both stories are built around the reactions of an older woman when she hears that a charming, successful older man she knows has been accused of sexual assault or sexual harassment. In both cases, they are reluctant to believe the charges, and in both cases, that's partly because they're of an older generation that understood the rules of interaction with men differently. They understood them how Caitlin Flannagan explained them in 2018 when she reacted to accusations by Aziz Ansari's date that he'd been overly aggressive trying to get her to have sex with him. After acknowledging that the articles and books on sex she'd read as a young woman didn't prepare her to be a scientist or a captain of industry like today's women are ready, Flannagan also claims that they did make her generation "strong" in a way that modern women aren't:
But in one essential aspect they reminded us that we were strong in a way that so many modern girls are weak. They told us over and over again that if a man tried to push you into anything you didn’t want, even just a kiss, you told him flat out you weren’t doing it. If he kept going, you got away from him. You were always to have “mad money” with you: cab fare in case he got “fresh” and then refused to drive you home. They told you to slap him if you had to; they told you to get out of the car and start wailing if you had to. They told you to do whatever it took to stop him from using your body in any way you didn’t want, and under no circumstances to go down without a fight. In so many ways, compared with today’s young women, we were weak; we were being prepared for being wives and mothers, not occupants of the C-Suite. But as far as getting away from a man who was trying to pressure us into sex we didn’t want, we were strong.
It felt very much like "The Children are Fragile" was responding to exactly this kind of thinking about the younger generation among some older women. In this case, the point-of-view character is the older woman Marsha, who goes by the rather pregnant nickname "Mars," suggesting both the warlike, strong god of war as well as a reversal of the old book on relationship advice "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus." Mars is definitely not from Venus. One of the things she will not brook is being called "Marsha," perhaps because in "Mars" she is more able to deny her sense of affinity with other women. She's been through a rape in her life, a "survivor" in the current lingo, although she herself hates that particular expression. She instead recasts it, as she does her name, by referring to Greek mythology:
She didn’t think of herself as a victim, but she also didn’t like being called a “survivor”— it felt condescending, like an award given out after battle by the people who had stayed home. When she thought of herself in relation to that event — which was not often — she thought in the terms of Greek melodrama. Oedipus putting out his eyes, Agamemnon punctured with swords, Odysseus exiled far from his home. Something about men in the face of implacable power: they could fight and lose without being weak. She had fought and lost, but she would never agree to think of herself as weak.
Mars has two parallel questions she is dealing with in "The Children are Fragile," and they are linked. Fist, she is hearing one accusation after another being levelled against the charming director of a theater she's known casually. She, too, had seen some warning signs, but nothing definitive, and she was in any event conditioned, as a "stronger" woman of her generation, to not make too much of it. As the accusations mount, she is forced to ask herself whether she should have seen it coming. The second question she has to ask herself is what responsibility she has to protect Sheila, her student in playwriting. Sheila has been complaining about a roommate who gives her "looks." Mars doesn't exactly blow off Sheila's concerns, but she doesn't offer her any useful advice, either. Over time, Sheila is more and more rattled by the roommate's allegedly creepy behavior, and, after writing a string of erratic short plays about murder, disappears from class. Mars makes some effort to make inquiries, but it probably isn't really enough.
Every time Mars tries to rationalize some behavior that the older generation would have met with "strength," Sheila insists that it should be met with community disapproval and sanctions. This is true from the first moment they discuss the accusations against the theater director, and it continues throughout. Sheila gets impatient and even angry with Mars for using words like "questionable" to describe men's bad behavior instead of "appalling." While Sheila is determined to believe women, Mars rejects "believe women" as a slogan and therefore, like all slogans, not useful.
Mars' own words as evidence of thematic center
One could think of "The Children are Fragile" in the same sense as "This is Pleasure" as leaving it up to the reader to decide whether the older generation or the newer one is right, but I think the weight tends to lean in favor of the younger generation being, if not totally right, at least less wrong than the older one. The evidence comes in Mars' own words. Early on, when discussing the idea with the soon-to-be-disgraced director of getting exposure for the plays of some of her students, she talks about how important it is, at this stage, to provide them with "encouragement."
The director responds with the rather Darwinian suggestion that maybe there's too much encouragement, that it might be better to let the kids who are "doomed to write," who would "do it even if they had nothing," come to the fore. Mars responds with, “But wouldn’t you like to see what those kids can do if they aren’t constantly worried sick about having nothing?” In this case, Mars is explicitly rejecting strength as a requisite for success in life.
Furthermore, Mars insists twice, which is twice too much, that she "doesn't spend a lot of time worrying about what other people think." She means it in one sense, the self-empowered sense of being one's own judge. What she misses, though, is that her own toughness has made her forget about the other sense of caring what other people think, which is known as empathy. In this case, she should be especially empathetic to Sheila, because Mars is supposed to be the older, wiser woman who can help Sheila learn how to navigate the hazards particular to women, especially those in theater.
The story ends with Mars wondering impotently, after equally impotently making weak attempts to help Sheila, whether she should be looking at things differently. It ends with an "I don't know," but the "I don't know" isn't really ambiguity; it's an indictment. Mars should know. She should know better. Mars thinks at one point about Sheila that she was "capable of a ferocious conviction that Mars herself had not possessed at that age. For this reason, among others, Sheila both irritated and impressed her." Mars' agnosticism at the end isn't ambiguity; it's lack of conviction.
Women propagating mistreatment of other women
There was an article recently in Vox about the "mounting, undeniable backlash against #metoo." When I saw this article linked on Twitter, I also saw a lot of comments from people who hadn't read it saying things like, "It's about time," and, "I'm glad to see this article, because clearly it's gone too far," etc. The article, though, was actually not critical of #metoo, but was written from a feminist perspective. It claimed that the backlash was inevitable and part of a historical trend. Whenever women began to make advances in society, like they did in 2017, there was always a movement to restrict their rights, especially their rights to earn money or to reproduce freely. The article looked at the overturn of Roe v. Wade as part of the backlash.
What both "This is Pleasure" and "The Children are Fragile" get at--the latter much more than the former--is the way that the inevitable backlash against women is often coming from women. One of the justices behind overturning the right to an abortion was a woman. As studies on the practice of female genital mutilation show, the forces that keep women from gaining equality aren't always exogenous; often, the forces that keep it in place are from the older generation of women. That's what "The Children are Fragile" is about. In its critique of the "strength" narrative of the older generation, it was responding to pieces like the one Flannagan wrote for The Atlantic. I'm not entirely convinced, actually, that the story isn't also responding directly to "This is Pleasure," which had a more ambiguous view of the gray areas of sexual misbehavior. When she meets with the director early in the story, he tells her it's for pleasure not business, although she can discuss business if she wants. Mars responds, "“I always have business to discuss...but it gives me a great deal of pleasure.” Was this a sly reference to Gaitskill's story?
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| The original "women should be stronger when men try to take advantage" proponent. |
Another implication of #metoo
There's one of those "talking past each other" dialogue sequences in "The Children are Fragile" that made me think there might be a better way to communicate what #metoo is all about. Or maybe what the inferences of #metoo are for most men. Most men aren't actually going to force themselves on women to the extent that, say, Harvey Weinsten did.
I think there is some genuine concern that too much focus on explicit consent might ruin some of the genuine fun of flirting. That might be a bit of what makes the ending of "This is Pleasure" so hard to pin down. To kill off all unwanted advances, we'd probably be killing off some actual wanted ones. There is sometimes a thin line between pleasure and its pain. That's where some of the pushback to #metoo has been coming from, some of it from women.
When Mars and Sheila were talking about the looks Sheila's roommate was giving him, Mars very often came close to offering helpful advice. She never quite got there, though, because she was focused too much on clearly over-the-line behavior or on clearly communicating feelings about not-quite-over-the-line behavior. Sheila understood that neither was going to happen. If she'd have tried to communicate to her roommate how his looks made her feel, everyone would have said there was no ACTUAL harm done, and they'd side with him. This is maybe one of the most important lessons of the #metoo moment that comes from listening to women's stories.
There are three levels to male bad behavior that have gotten into the news:
1: Clearly requiring sex based on one's position of power
2: Not clearly requiring sex based on one's position of power, but still pushing it on someone who felt pressured because of a power relationship, and
3: Behavior that is gray, such as jokes or innuendoes or "bad boy" behavior that some people like, some people feel neutral about, and some people really don't like. As Karen put it in her blog, "there are looks and there are looks." Not everyone agrees on which are which.
Both "The Children are Fragile" and "This is Pleasure" are operating on this third level, with maybe some of level two. While "This is Pleasure" is a meditation on the ambiguities of level three, "The Children" is about how serious violations of level three can be to the psyche of the offended. Even if violations on this level never go beyond unwanted looks or comments, those alone can be damaging. They may be damaging to some people and not to others, but it's important not to cast this is in terms of "strength." It's especially important to avoid referencing preferences relative to ambiguous gestures and words with a strong/weak dichotomy. Because really, the point for everyone relative to third-level questions is not what is absolutely right or wrong, nor what women should be expected to take or not expected to take. It's a renewed sense of consideration. It doesn't matter if a man should be able to look at a woman if he doesn't touch her or say anything to her. What matters is whether it bothers the woman in question, just as I may have a right to blare my music with my car window down, but I still shouldn't, because it's likely most people in my listening blast radius don't like K-pop much.
The two considerations of level three behavior that "The Children are Fragile" brings up are that women shouldn't determine how strong other women should be about level-three behavior they don't like, and men looking for unspoken confirmation that their gestures or words are wanted should assume they're not as good at reading signs as they think they are.
Now you know how I felt a few years ago when I wanted to make a big deal out of Schrodinger's Cat but you'd already done it - or more recently, the infinity thing. But hey, I did it anyway.
ReplyDeleteCause not everyone is going to read both blogs. And in this case, it was inescapable - I have to wonder if this was a deliberate reply to that story, given the similarities.
So much of contemporary culture clash seems to be about "I have a right to..." taking precedence over "Don't be a jerk." But in the business world, a lot of it is about power and intimidation, which is a very different thing - and has existed forever, though how men dominate/intimidate other men differs from how they attempt to dominate/intimidate women.