Tiger Beatdown

So, last week. Last week! We had a Theme Post Party! I was called a militant radical misandrist lesbian recruiter by (some of) the readers of The Atlantic, for disagreeing somewhat on the finer points of Ms. Caitlin Flanagan’s Boyfriend Story! My gentleman caller and/or a puppy arrived in my living headquarters, and it was very exciting! Also, in Things That Happened Last Week: I ended up giving not one, but two interviews. And filming a panel. And at a certain point in this process, Dear Reader, I began to flip the fuck out.

It didn’t help that I read the Lynn Hirschberg profile of M.I.A. that ran in the New York Times Magazine recently. That piece: It got under my skin. It disturbed me, in many visceral and icky ways. It seemed, to me, exemplary of the ways and means by which women who use their voices politically are knocked down, knocked over, and fucked up for the public’s entertainment. And people liked it. People I like, people I admire, at least one person I’m particularly close to: They responded, joined in the group-kick, were eager to denounce M.I.A. as a liar and a fake and a fraud and a bitch and a bad activist. And over what? Over passages like this:

Unity holds no allure for Maya — she thrives on conflict, real or imagined. “I kind of want to be an outsider,” she said, eating a truffle-flavored French fry.

The fact is, valuable things were uncovered in that piece. M.I.A. has been inconsistent, and misleading, about her father’s involvement with the Tamil Tigers. And I appreciated that voices other than M.I.A.’s were given the chance to speak out, in a widely read forum, about Sri Lankan politics and the Tigers; the allegation that she’s being overly and dangerously simplistic, in her unconditional support of the Tigers, is probably true. What I don’t appreciate, however, is the fact that these things were only brought up as a means of destroying M.I.A.’s political credibility — shortly before attacking her credibility on more or less every other front.

M.I.A. is a fake, the article more or less says; no matter what she says or writes or records about global capitalism being a bad thing, no matter how fiercely she would seem to defend marginalized people, she’s just a shallow, narcissistic, bossy, stupid woman who only wants your attention, only wants to be famous, only wants to be a star. And did you hear that she was having contractions when she sang “Paper Planes” at the Grammys? Shocking! Provocative! Fame-whorey! Regular-whorey! Unfeminine! Selfish! Bad mother!

(Continued)

[Yesterday, we took a break! Sometimes it happens, my friends. I hope you did not miss us all too terribly! But today, we are back again — and will be back, again and AGAIN — with What We Read When We Don’t Read The Internet. And today, the person who is back is me! Managing to talk about the Internet, somehow, again!]

Intimacy is female. Love, marriage, domesticity, parenthood, even close friendships — basically any situation in which you might find yourself having a feeling, without the option of resolving that feeling by shooting something to death — have all, pretty much, been assigned to the chicks. Men have more interesting things to deal with! Things like war, and politics, and careers, and swordfights, and occasionally landing on the motherfucking moon! Granted, men also have families and homes and friends and (I’m told) feelings. But such things are not manly! Let us not speak of them! The chicks, it is their job to discuss these things!

It’s why Jane Austen is boring unless someone adds in zombie fights. (Ha ha, the commodification of female sexuality due to women’s restricted ability to participate in the public sphere, and the resultant struggle of women to simultaneously leverage their sexuality for status and money, restrain all sexual desires that did not stand a chance of turning a profit, and forge happy, affectionate partnerships with men: ZZZZZZZ.) It’s why raising a child isn’t book-worthy unless parent and child are both also dudes trekking through an apocalyptic wasteland filled with feral baby-eating hill folk. It’s why Jonathan Franzen freaked out when his novel about a family got picked up by Oprah’s Book Club and thereby lumped in with all of those other, female novels about families; it’s why “chick-lit” is a derogative; it’s why even girls don’t want to read about girls. Intimacy, privacy, domestic life: All of these are associated with women. And when we associate something with The Ladies, we assume that it, much like The Ladies themselves, is not worth our time.

It’s also, in case you wondered, why one of the best ways to insult somebody’s work is to say that it “reads like a diary.” Because diaries: They are pretty much for the chicks, as well! They have unicorns and heart-shaped locks and glitter on them and everything! And the process of documenting your own intimate life, often admitting to feelings about it, is a very extremely girly thing to do. (Except for when men do it, in which case they are Bravely Sharing Their Innermost Feelings and must never be criticized for anything they actually say.) Like: Remember when people were trying to figure out why there were No Female Bloggers? “There are no female bloggers,” went the line, “but why?” And then people pointed out that there were female bloggers, lots of them, and the line was then, “but why are they not so widely read?” And then people pointed out that they were widely read, but not by the people asking those questions. And then the line was, “well, but women write about Personal Things. And men write about Real Issues and the News. And that is why we do not read female bloggers, which is why there are none. The End! We figured it out!” It works the way patriarchy always works: We tell girls to do certain things (care about dating; care about motherhood; Be In Touch With Their Feelings), and then when they do them (care about dating enough to write about their dates; care about motherhood enough to start a mommy blog; Be so In Touch With Their Feelings that they consider those Feelings important enough to consider at length and then share with the world at large) we tell them that those activities are worthless and stupid and a waste of our time.

I wrote these notes at home, when I had a good deal of time to myself and thought no-one would notice what I was doing. Everything that I have seen and felt is included. Since much of it might appear malicious and even harmful to other people, I was careful to keep my book hidden. But now it has become public, which is the last thing I expected… I was sure that when other people saw my book they would say, “It’s even worse than I expected. Now one can really tell what she is like.” After all, it is written entirely for my own amusement and I put things down exactly as they came to me. How could my casual jottings possibly bear comparison with the many impressive books that exist in our time?

Friends: Consider Sei Shonagon.

(Continued)

So, the “menaissance.” It’s a thing! Granted, it was also a thing in 2008. But it went away. Presumably because people figured out what a stupid name it had, and decided not to engage in it any further. And yet, the Menaissance is upon us once again! It’s a Menaissance Renaissance up in here!

What is the Menaissance, you ask? Well, it seems to have a bit to do with the recent invention of the “retrosexual” gentleman (because nothing is more clenched-jaws-and-fisticuffs-level masculine than a cute little nickname for your gender presentation), a bit to do with those deodorant commercials about how men smell really super bad all the time and that’s what makes them dudes, probably something to do with that one Burger King sandwich that’s got all the beef in it (dudes EAT THE SHIT OUT OF beef, apparently), and, as always, a lot to do with good old-fashioned heterosexual male castration anxiety.

The chicks today, they get to do so many things! Why, they can vote, and attend colleges, and even drink and smoke in public,! These chicks: An alarming number of them have jobs! And, like, financial autonomy, from the jobs, and hence a socially assured position of power from which to negotiate the terms of their relationships and lives, thereby making them not entirely dependent on the funding and/or goodwill of men for their continued survival and status, and so they’re all able to make decisions and expect fair treatment and… dude, it’s a mess, I tell you. Because it turns out, after like fifty-some years of this business, none of these chicks is impressed enough by your penis!

“Excuse me, madam, I happen to have a penis,” you say. (Because you do. A trans variety of gentleman has no place within the Menaissance!) “Would you, perchance, like to hear about all of my thoughts and feelings as they relate to this penis, and also how important it makes me, and furthermore how it qualifies me to boss you around?” And the chicks today, they don’t particularly care to listen! They used to listen. They used to have to. It was, like, their job.

(Continued)