Tiger Beatdown

And we — well, “me,” actually — are fucking exhausted. Let me tell you something: Vegas, as it turns out, will take it out of you. Although, if you are ever looking to get yourself super-weirded out, I do have some helpful hints! Like: Read Dostoevsky in a casino, whilst ladies wander around in black lace underpants serving drinks to gamblers at nine in the morning. Or: Ponder what it means for the state of modern political discourse that Nancy Pelosi is speaking in an establishment where a mechanical boat filled with Chippendales regularly descends from the ceiling to the tune of “Single Ladies.” Bonus points if you are attending a convention for online activists and the book you’ve chosen is “The Possessed,” which is apparently about how youthful activism will inevitably descend into murder, pedophilia, suicide, and learning all too late that it might not have been a good idea to dramatically throw money at the dude who’s offering to knock off your disabled wife for cash. But! I am back now. And no-one was assassinated, bankrupted, suicided (although it turns out I myself am all too vulnerable to the charms of indoor, air-conditioned, building-sanctioned smoking) or killed by a convict for being someone’s total bummer of a secret wife. So, success!

“But Sady,” you ask, “what did you do on the plane ride back? Other than count the hours until you could fill your lungs with sweet, sweet cigarette once again?” Well, my friends, it turns out I wrote a bit for Comment is Free! And you can find it here:

“Snark” is one of those fundamentally goofy internet neologisms that we could try to fight, but are better-off just learning to work with. The word denotes mean humour: sarcasm, venom, the art of the put-down. Mostly, it’s an attitude. Snark is the kids at the back of the class, heckling the substitute teacher; it’s the voice of people who feel stifled, talked down to, or left out; the tool of people who have discovered that honing in on the weaknesses of those in power, exposing them publicly (if only to their own circle of friends), and reducing them to figures of fun (if only in their own minds), makes them feel a little less helpless.

Of course, it’s a powerful tool in political writing. But like most sources of political power, it should be regarded with some healthy distrust, especially by those who feel called to use it.

And now, I have reached my limit for typing the word “snark” in 2010. But you should read the rest of the piece! Enjoy. Or don’t, whatever. Because now, for the fifth time today, I am going back to sleep.

Say! Anyone heard about this Polanski thing? It turns out that it really, really, really sucks! And, in case you were unfamiliar with the precise details of its sucking, I wrote a bit about it in over at the Atlantic’s Culture Channel for you. Specifically, on the subject of “artistic freedom.”

The people who stayed by Polanski, to increasing public denunciation, were artists—primarily people in film. A petition demanding his release framed the whole issue as a violation of artistic freedom: “It seems inadmissible to [us] that an international cultural event, paying homage to one of the greatest contemporary filmmakers, is used by the police to apprehend him,” it read. Signatories included Martin Scorsese and David Lynch, along with a mind-numbingly long list of other directors and actors. (When Wes Anderson released his first children’s film, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, in November, its delicate whimsy was somewhat marred by the suspicion that the director would have pardoned someone for molesting a member of its target audience, should that molester have the right resume.)

Writer Bernard Henri-Levy issued a steady stream of pro-Polanski statements, and another petition, this time with signatures by Milan Kundera and Salman Rushdie. Debra Winger accused the Swiss government of “philistine collusion,” said that “whenever this happens”—”this,” you would think, being pretty rare—”the whole art world suffers,” and expressed her anticipation for Polanski’s “next masterpiece.”

Conservative commentators, eager to spin another story about clueless Hollywood liberal elites, picked up the story and ran with it, and soon it was the ruling narrative: Slobs vs. snobs, aesthetes vs. philistines, the elite vs. the common folk, people who liked movies vs. people who thought convicted criminals ought to go to jail.

So, here’s the question nobody was asking: How does this relate to Buttman? Well! In more ways than you’d think, actually. Top Buttman trial-coverer and excellent blogger Amanda Hess of The Sexist and I will tell you how!

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[Yep! It’s still pledge drive week. For those who have not driven pledges already, now is your time! We even have a donate button for you, right here under this bracket. For those who have, we have this blog post! For those who don’t plan to help: What is your problem, Leechy? Anyway, I am writing about some books this week. So enjoy!]

Ah, Simone de Beauvoir! Simone de Beauvoir was many things: Novelist, memoir-writing enthusiast, feminist, role model for women seeking to integrate a political life with intellectual exploration, chief victim of the popular 20th-century French delusion that Jean-Paul Sartre was ultimately worth putting up with. But did you know that she was also THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’S MOST DEPRESSING RELATIONSHIP ADVICE COLUMNIST???

No? Well, that’s because she wasn’t! Until now. Yes, due to cutting-edge speaking-to-the-dead technology (read: Reading The Second Sex, and being willing to type out some of its pithier sections) we have been able to introduce the wit and wisdom of Simone de Beauvoir, Depressing Relationship-Advice Giver, to you! So go ahead and read it. It’s good for the subject, seeking transcendence the soul.

Dear Simone de Beauvoir,

I run a feminist blog on the Internet. On this blog, I often express strong opinions on political and personal matters, using much sarcasm and expressing an extreme confidence in my own opinions. Here is the thing: Men continue to date me, in spite of the fact that all of this information about me is freely available on the Internet. I assume this means they are cool with it! However, then we disagree on a political or personal matter. And they are shocked — SHOCKED! — to find that I express strong opinions, using much sarcasm and evincing an extreme confidence in my own opinions. To find that, in other words, I sound just like that chick that runs that one feminist blog on the Internet. What the heck, Simone de Beauvoir?

Signed,

Some Lady, You Don’t Know Her, We Just Thought This Was An Interesting Question of General Interest, That Is All.

Dear Lady,

It is clear that in dreaming of himself as donor, liberator, redeemer, man still desires the subjection of woman… The more man acquires a taste for difficult enterprises, however, the more it will please him to give woman independence. To conquer is still more fascinating than to give gifts or to release.

Thus the ideal of the average Western man is a woman who freely accepts his domination, who does not accept his ideas without discussion, but who yields to his arguments, who resists him intelligently and ends by being convinced. The greater his pride, the more dangerous he likes his adventures to be.

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[Hey, y’all! Guess what it is? If you guessed “Tiger Beatdown Pledge Week, AGAIN,” you would be totally right-on and a good guesser. If you also guessed “the weekend where Sady shares her THOUGHTS ABOUT BOOKS, ALL AT ONCE, Because of FABULOUS PRIZES,” you would be correct. There is so much going on! We do not wish to distract you with our pledge-begging! HOWEVER, we think it is time to make clear the basics of the deal: In order to have time to write the stuff you see here,  and to do all the other things that go into running this joint, Sady and the other writers need to be funded. If we don’t have the funding, we don’t write it. Because we will need to do other things, for food money. (Sell articles? Sure! Also, “TIGER BEATDOWN: THE PROFESSIONAL DOG-WALKING TEAM TO DEFEAT ALL OTHERS,” is a plan we have batted about.) So, a pledge to Tiger Beatdown is a pledge for 3,000-word essays on various aspects of The Gender Problem, because who else is going to let us do these things, at this length, so long after they have happened? Probably no-one in their right minds! Therefore, there is a Donate button here and at the end of this post — Google Readers, come to the main page! That is the only way it will work for you, now, for whatever reason! — and you can KEEP THE WALL OF TEXT COMING by pressing it. Thank you! We love you! FABULOUS PRIZES to be announced shortly!]

It’s weird, talking about “books through the lens of feminism.” At its worst, it can make you feel like some state censor, creating lists of Approved and Unapproved Materials. At its best, it can make you question why you care about books, or feminism, in the first place: It can make you go back to your sources, the works that speak most to you, and ask yourself why you care and what you’ve carried away. I am not in a position to create any definitive List of Appropriately Feminist-Friendly Books. For one, I like D.H. Lawrence a whole heck of a lot. And for two, I question whether any book that is not a feminist-theory textbook (a) can exemplify perfectly feminist attitudes, or (b) should try to.

What interests me, in the writing that I care about and enjoy — I like memoir and poetry, more than just about anything; I like fiction all right, but am neither schooled in it nor a great critic of it — is how it works to create and establish a personality, a subjectivity, on the page; how it renders other people, who are difficult and impenetrable and often immense causes of suffering, more transparent. I like being given a way into someone else’s head. In a sense, politics have nothing to do with this: The worth of other people isn’t determined by how much they agree with you. But in another way, politics are crucial to it: If we say that we want to “stand up for women,” or “stand up for queer folks,” or stand up for anyone else, then we can only know what “standing up” entails by listening to women/queer folks/whoever, by dealing with people as individual realities rather than as abstractions.

Which is all to say: When I agreed to talk about books, I knew I was going to end up talking about Colette. Simply because she’s so hard to claim, to smooth the rough edges off, to sort into any one category; simply because she was so very impossible.

“Me, a feminist? You’re kidding,” Colette said, in 1910. “The suffragettes disgust me. And if any Frenchwomen take it into their heads to imitate them, I hope they’ll be made to understand that such behavior isn’t tolerated in France. You know what the suffragettes deserve? The whip and the harem.” Or, you know, there’s this gem: “A woman who thinks she is intelligent demands the same rights as man. An intelligent woman gives up.”

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