Conformity

Re-Learning to Not Speak

vintage-war-censorship-poster There was a poem by Marge Piercy that I responded to when I read it in college. It was called “Unlearning to Not Speak.” (I recalled the title as “Unlearning Not to Speak.”) An excerpt:

Phrases of men who lectured her
drift and rustle in piles:
Why don’t you speak up?
Why are you shouting?
You have the wrong answer,
wrong line, wrong face.

I’ve been writing lately, so I haven’t been posting much. But that isn’t the only reason. I haven’t known what to post. Or I haven’t wanted to. The truth is, speaking in public feels more fraught than it ever did before. Them are fightin’ words! Doesn’t it seem like the bulk of cable news involves catching public figures saying controversial things on Twitter? It is a nationwide game, like Pokemon Go.

We would all like to be recognized, and we want online interaction, at least of the positive kind. The best way to do that is to choose an audience and stay in your lane. You will not be attacked if you say things that people already agree with. (Or if you are, you can write off those people as “the others” and rally your base with pithy comebacks.) You might even be re-tweeted or liked. It’s easy enough to do: here is my take on what y’all are discussing. It’s reaching the same conclusion but in my words.

What becomes weird is when you say something just a bit outside of the discourse and people can’t process until they figure out what side you’re on, or they make assumptions that because you said this you must also mean that and therefore you’re one of them and… click…unfollow. I can’t even listen to you. That’s called “assumption creep.”

I had a weird conversation with a friend some time ago during one of the government shut downs. She had posted a petition saying members of congress should not take a salary while the government was shut down. I responded that, as most members of congress were multimillionaires, that would be more symbolic than anything and that it would be more effective to threaten their chances of keeping their seats. I went round and round with this friend asking me what I really meant. What I really meant, honestly, was that I thought there were more effective tactics to end a shut down, less symbolic. But what do you mean? What are you really saying? What is your political angle? Honest to God, I wasn’t saying anything but what I was saying.

I don’t fear being attacked by people who disagree with me as much as I fear being misunderstood by those who do not. It feels terrible to have someone take something you wrote or said, explain that you meant or said something else, and then attack you for it. I find these days I spend way too much time explaining what I am not saying along with what I am. I can’t even say that I am often criticized or attacked. But I am a regular witness to verbal attacks on Twitter and in blog comments, where giving and taking offense is sport. I’ve developed a reflex, the same way I know not to put my hand on a stove burner whether it appears hot or cold.

You have the wrong answer,
wrong line, wrong face.

To really explore ideas, the best place is a diary, where you don’t have to think about anyone looking over your shoulder.

I don’t think I am alone in this polarized era in feeling as though every subject is potentially controversial. It looks like a group of academics is planning to launch a journal where scholars can publish anonymously so they can express their controversial views. Anonymity makes sense. Then readers can, at least in theory, debate ideas and not comment upon the kind of person they believe are making them.

If a lot of people are feeling like I am: re-learning to not speak, then I wonder where our novel ideas will come from.

The Christmas Spirit

evening public ledger dec 24 1921 This 1921 news story, which I found posted on a blog called Strange Company, reminded me of something odd that happened this Christmas, which I hadn’t planned on mentioning. Frankly, I’m not sure I come out so great in this tale.

I woke up on Christmas morning and as is my habit when I first get up, I quickly checked my various communications media, my e-mail, Facebook and twitter feeds. I noted with passing interest that the topic of the day seemed to be that the president had made some claim about bringing back the phrase “Merry Christmas” and this inevitably had people declaring which side of the culture wars they were on.

In the comments on one post was something from a man (I assume) with an American flag image for his picture. For whatever reason, before I headed off to enjoy the time with my family, I responded to what I thought was an a-historical appeal to tradition by pointing out that the Puritans had outlawed the practice of Christmas in the early days. Not that it matters, but my point was that we Americans have never been entirely unified in our traditions around Christmas or anything else. (The whole “War on Christmas” thing is not really about history or tradition, but about declaring what segment of society ought to be treated as the default “real Americans” now.)

By now I was enjoying a house full of kids, parents, stockings and sweets. I noticed the notification when I took my phone out to snap a picture of the cousins in their Christmas light necklaces. This elicited three responses with far more capital letters than I thought necessary. The general themes were that America was founded as a Christian nation and that I was an ignorant fool. His replies made it clear that it was not the specific tradition of saying “Merry Christmas” but the notion of America as Christian that was important to him.

There is something about someone condescending to you that is hard to ignore, as much as you ought to. So I responded. I pointed out that I knew a fair amount about history and that I didn’t agree with his premise, but that it was Christmas and that I had family commitments and didn’t want to spend the day arguing about what text should be on the banners in shopping malls. I wished the stranger a “Merry Christmas.” I expected that we would agree to disagree.

The next time I took the phone out there was another condescending response beginning with LOL taunting me that the only reason I was leaving the discussion was that I knew he was right. He was determined to have the last word.

In spite of myself, as the kids tried to plunk out Christmas carols on the piano, I found myself getting aggravated. “Are you arguing that we should have an official state religion?” I wanted to ask.

But I stopped myself. We had driven 14 hours to be with our extended family for Christmas. Christmas is one day a year. Here we were together, and this annoying and senseless debate was intruding. What am I doing? What should I care if some person I don’t know or respect thinks he bested me? It’s Christmas! I should never have commented to begin with. I deleted my original tweet and all the replies and blocked the stranger so there would be no temptation whatsoever to get drawn back in.

Isn’t it ironic (don’t you think?) that someone felt so strongly about keeping the “Merry Christmas” in Christmas that he was willing to spend Christmas day arguing with strangers about it?

Adam Ant, Anthems and Oscar Wilde

“And even though you fool your soul your conscience will be mine, all mine.”-Adam Ant, Stand and Deliver.

This past Saturday I went to Cleveland to visit an old friend and see Adam Ant at the House of Blues. A couple of weeks ago I wrote an article for Booklovers Boook Reviews about the role of curiosity in inspiring, and giving an author the momentum to write an entire book.

I was looking back at the perennially popular essay I wrote the last time I saw Adam Ant in concert, and I was surprised by the date stamp that said it was four years ago. Adam seems to have gotten younger since I saw him last, which is a good trick. It made me think that maybe I could choose not to age as well.

What I did not realize at the time I wrote that last Ant essay was that the experience of going to the concert would spark my imagination to the degree it did. Had I not been gifted those Adam Ant tickets in 2013, I would probably not have written my second novel, Identity Theft. You never know what will jog that part of your brain. With literary curiosity on my mind, I’ve been thinking about my Oscar Wilde curiosity and my Adam Ant curiosity to see if they come from a common source.

Adam Ant’s current tour is “The Anthems Tour” and I think the anthems are key. Something occurred to me on Saturday as I was watching the opening act, an energetic, fun all-female band called the Glam Skanks. There was a time when I had my own dreams of fronting a rock band. Although I had a decent voice, I never took the steps. Maybe I was waiting for an invitation?

The truth is that I could never put myself out there enough as a performer to be a rock star. I needed to keep a foot in the world of good girl respectability. If I’d been in a band with a name like Glam Skanks what would my dad think?

Slut fear is survival fear. When you’ve been branded a slut, you’re outside of society’s protection. So that was something I was never going to risk. If there had been a real “insect nation” I don’t think I’d have been brave enough to “throw my safety overboard” and join it. Ridicule, at age 13 or 14, is the thing you are most afraid of, Prince Charming.

But the call appealed to me. The desire was there, and I could at least sing the anthem and take occasional vacations to the Insect Nation in the form of concerts. I was an “antperson” in a consumer fashion. I owned the white vinyl and picture discs. I was not a culture warrior. (I did wear unmatched shoes to school once on purpose.) But Adam Ant made me want to be brave.

The fear of being shamed runs through Identity Theft. The vague sense that I missed out on some experiences because of fear finds its way into the novel in the form of the character Lydia. Lydia, a middle-aged friend of the protagonist, half-jokingly says she regrets not having been more of a slut when she was younger, and unwittingly encourages Candi down a path that turns out to be disastrous.

We are attracted to the idea of throwing off social constraints in proportion to our fear of it. Oscar Wilde played on that dynamic in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Readers could indulge the fantasy of throwing off social convention, giving in to every impulse and desire. There is a fascination as well with the figure of Oscar Wilde the transgressor. But both Dorian and his author were destroyed by their transgressions, at least that is what the mythology about Wilde suggests. His is the story of the wrath society can bring down on those who transgress. The desire to conform, and the desire to be free of constraints do a constant dance, and we always question our own choreography.

Adam Ant has an Oscar Wilde quote tattooed on his arm. (I have never been close enough to read his arm myself, but Reuters tells me this is true.) It says, “Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.”

Da diddly qua qua, da diddly qua qua…

“Religious Liberty”

For some reason, I don’t know why, I am on the e-mail list for the National Organization for Marriage, the organization that opposes same-sex marriage. I know I did not sign up, and I can only assume someone else signed me up to influence my opinion?

In any case, today I decided to click through and take a look at a petition they are circulating asking their members to contact Jeff Sessions and encourage him “to protect the religious liberty rights of individuals and groups who hold traditional viewpoints on marriage, life, gender and similar issues.”

Now, the phrase “religious liberty rights” on its face would seem to mean the right of people to practice their religion without the government taking sides. So you can worship God as a literal judge who sits in the heavens, while I am free to “affirm and promote the interconnected web of life of which we are all a part.” You can practice religion by wearing a specific costume and doing a particular dance, and I can practice by reciting tales of my ancestors or praying five times a day.

But what this petition is requesting is not liberty in this sense, rather it is asking for the government to take sides and protect a specific set of religious beliefs and practices– they don’t want to protect everyone’s liberty, just the liberty “of individuals and groups who hold traditional viewpoints…” (If you would like to read my views on this notion of “tradition,” incidentally, do a search on that word, and you’ll find a number of old posts.)

This wording aside, an argument could be made that those who created the petition are not asking for their religion to be given preference over others. Fundamentalist Christians who take the Bible literally are a minority religion, after all, in spite of their loud voices. Christians in general make up almost 80% of our population, but most are not Fundamentalists. As I have mentioned here before, a poll done by a Christian organization showed that only 30% of self-identified Christians approach the Bible as the literal and inerrant word of God. So the case can be made that a religious minority is asking to be excused from certain aspects of civil society, as a pacifist Quaker might ask to be excused from participating in war. They will not impose their faith on others if we agree not to impose our values on them.

This point of view, however, is undercut by some of the comments posted on the petition’s page. The very first commenter expresses his or her concern that “My fear is that an Executive Order would also likely have to provide ‘religious protections’ to other religious groups…” This person was especially worried about the “Big Love” scenario, in which fundamentalist Mormons and Muslims would push for plural marriage. (Plural marriage is, as it happens, quite well represented in the Bible.)

The result of the nightmare scenario of giving other religious groups the same freedom to opt out of mainstream law and practice is clear to the poster. Plural marriage would be accepted and “the Muslims will be breeding like rats on the public dole until they gain enough numbers to subvert the US into an Islamic Republic under Shariah!” (They’re going to have to get busy, as Muslims currently make up .8 percent of the U.S. population.)

This should make it clear enough that the petition is not really about “liberty.” A second poster agreed that what we really need to do is to “start asserting our right to keep all people who do not want to assimilate to our way of life out of this country.”

Using the language of individualism and choice, these posters are asking to have their traditions, and only their traditions, enforced. They don’t want to just be left alone to practice their minority religion in peace, they want those of us who are not practitioners to assimilate or get out. They are asking for the right to define the “real America” as people like them.

Conditioned Like a Lab Animal

“To some degree, I was being conditioned like a lab animal against ambition.”-Catherine Nichols.

This quote, by author Catherine Nichols sums up in a more concise and personal way what I took hundreds of words to say in an essay about the different “happy ends” for stories aimed at men and women.

(Actually, I was tempted to shorten the quote so it read “…I was being conditioned like a lab animal against ambition,” but I decided that the hedging, equivocal version demonstrated its own point.)

The Guardian yesterday ran an article on Nichols essay for Jezebel in which she reported on the different level of success she had sending queries with a male pen name over her own name. Spoiler alert: George was taken much more seriously than Catherine.

What is particularly insidious, however, is how differently writing is perceived when it comes from the pen of a man or a woman and what story we–and men and women are equally guilty–expect the writer to tell.

Responses from agents to Catherine Nichols included comments such as “beautiful writing, but your main character isn’t very plucky, is she?”; responses to her male pseudonym, whom she imagined “as a sort of reptilian Michael Fassbender-looking guy, drinking whiskey and walking around train yards at night while I did the work”, were “polite and warm”, even when they were rejections, describing the work as “clever”, “well-constructed” and “exciting”.

I ran into this wall of expectation a couple of years ago when I was trying to find an agent for my novel Identity Theft and later when I was trying to get reviews for it. Identity Theft opens essentially like a romantic comedy in which you have a woman who longs for romance with an exciting and glamorous man and you have an unglamorous man who comes into her life through fate and a bit of deception.

A potential agent read the opening chapters, which introduce the characters, and felt that he knew exactly where the book would go. He was ready to represent what he viewed as a well-written version of the female story. The agent did not like my ending, which he had encountered only in the synopsis and outline. He did not realize that the book actually subverts the “love through deception” romantic comedy trope and turns into more of a thriller than a romantic comedy at its midpoint.

The agent was convinced based on the opening that there was only one right ending and that the female protagonist should end up living happily ever after with the unglamorous man. In the end I did make some changes to my original concept to make the work more in line with audience expectations, although I did not simply turn it into the romantic comedy the agent assumed it to be. Thus this quote from the Guardian article resonated with me:

“A small series of constraints can stop the writer before she’s ever worth writing about. Women in particular seem vulnerable in that middle stretch to having our work pruned back until it’s compact enough to fit inside a pink cover,” she believes.

After Identity Theft was published I booked a “virtual book tour” to promote it and one of the potential reviewers read about as far as the agent had and gave up on it because she deemed the book to be “predictable.” That is to say, she had guessed at where it was going, deemed the book “one of those” and decided she didn’t have to read any further. Reviewers who finished the book, whether they liked it or not, universally found the ending surprising.

This experience led me to think about reader expectations and gender and to conclude that there is a different happy end for “male” stories and for “female” stories and that there is a much larger social effect to this. Boys and men are being primed to do things in the world where as women are, as Nichols said, conditioned against ambition. In my essay two years ago, I used The Devil Wears Prada as an example.

In “The Devil Wears Prada,” the main character is dumped by her boyfriend because her demanding job does not allow her to devote enough attention to him. As an audience we are expected to take his side and to agree that she is going the wrong direction.

This same type of conflict is quite common in films with male protagonists. A man becomes obsessed with a mission of some kind– winning a legal case, catching a killer, saving the world from aliens– what have you. At some point he argues with his wife who feels he is shirking his family responsibilities. In this case, however, the audience is expected to understand that his mission is vitally important. We do not want him to decide that catching the killer isn’t that important after all in the greater scheme of things and that he should walk away to focus on his authentic emotional life. What generally happens, instead, is that against all odds, with no one backing him, the hero completes his mission winning the admiration of his wife in the process.

Prada is not an isolated example of the “female happy end” where the woman shuns worldly status. One of the most popular films of all times is “Titanic” in which bold and feisty Rose realizes that her upper class life is empty after she meets working class Jack Dawson on deck. She walks away from a life of riches and even throws a priceless gem into the sea.

The female protagonist has a happy end not when she has status in the world, but when she transcends the desire for status.

No one ever taught me this in so many words, but I learned it all the same. When I looked back at my own writing, I found that my early fiction, written when I was in high school and college, almost all fit the female happy end model. The female protagonist faced a difficult challenge and reached a resolution not by overcoming the odds and succeeding but by learning to accept herself just as she is. Success through self-esteem! In the real world, this leads to a culture in which we try to “empower” girls by making them feel good about themselves, whether they actually achieve anything or not.

As women, we are all “conditioned like lab animals against ambition.” There is no “to some degree” about it.

Bowie and Branding

“I am very anti-consistency,” David Bowie says in an interview clip in the middle of this obituary.

It is a good thing no one told Bowie back in the 1970s that he needed to “find his platform” and “build a brand.” Or, if they did, it is good that he didn’t listen.

Living up to Specifications

“Life imitates Art fare more than Art imitates Life.”-Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying

When my father passed away, a little more than a decade ago now, I went through his papers– articles, correspondence, drafts– and compiled a book of quotations for friends and family. I had cause to revisit that collection again recently, and I came across this observation from a letter he wrote in 1990:

You know, for all my book learnin’, I have to say I’ve learned more about life from ordinary folks trying to muddle through. From a guy who specializes in military procurement, that means he develops tanks and airplanes and such to Army specifications, comes what I think is a truly insightful thought. He said, “an old rule of thumb is if a weapon can’t do its job, find out what it can do and make that its job.”

In other words, let the thing — or the person — define what its job is. As simplistic as this sounds, it rarely happens. The norm is for “them” to define what’s important, and for the individual to attempt to live up to those mandated “specifications.”

This is certainly true. Rather than allow people’s talents and skills to present themselves and making use of them, we go looking for people to match job descriptions we create in advance.

But I would go further and say that it is not only in employment but in life that this is so. We start with stories about what life is supposed to be like, what goals we ought to have, what love is and friendship. There are stories about how you’re supposed to feel when you get an award of suffer a loss. We go along always comparing ourselves to these stories and seeing how we match up. Very few of us start with what we are and make that our life.

Pluralistic Ignorance

I learned some new jargon via Sociological Images. You may recall that a few years ago, while I was promoting my novel Angel, I came upon a study that showed that Christian ministers, as a group, believed they were more accepting of gay rights than their congregants. Christian church members, on the other hand, thought that they were more accepting of LGBT rights than their pastors. That is to say, each group wanted to come out as pro-gay rights, but was afraid the other party was not ready to make a change. The ministers were afraid they would alienate their congregations, the congregants were afraid of being out of step with the minister.

A few days ago Sociological Images reflected on the controversy surrounding the confederate flag and concluded that something similar has been at work in the South:

My guess is that what’s going on is not a sudden enlightenment or even much of a change in views about the flag. To me it looks more like the process of “pluralistic ignorance.” What these people changed was not their ideas about the Confederacy or racism but their ideas about other people’s ideas about these matters. With pluralistic ignorance (a term coined by Floyd Allport nearly a century ago) everyone wants X but thinks that nobody else does. Then some outside factor makes it possible for people to choose X, and everyone does. Everyone is surprised – “Gee, I thought all you guys wanted Y, not X .” It looks like a rapid change in opinion, but it’s not…

…With the support for letting that flag fade into history, it looks as though for a while now many Southerners may have been uncomfortable with the blatant racism of the Confederacy and the post-Reconstruction era. But because nobody voiced that discomfort, everyone thought that other Southerners still clung to the old mentality.

You can read the entire Sociological Images article here.

Identity Fluid (Part II)

One of the main characters in my soon-to-be-released second novel Identity Theft (shameless plug: you can place an advance order via the “Identity Theft” link above) is an 80s pop star. Thus I have been a bit nostalgic about my musical loves past. (As some of my recent articles here will attest.) Today I found myself with a sugar craving for “Karma Chameleon” which led me to check into what became of Culture Club (seems they’re back together and have a new single), which led me (as the internet tends to make you do) to various old interviews and articles about the band. This, in turn, led me back to my current thematic obsession– identity and the social categories we inhabit in life.

Back in the days when I was selecting potential new fantasy boyfriends from among the bands on MTV Culture Club’s drummer Jon Moss (second from left) seemed to have a lot of potential. That is a long-winded way of saying that when I was 13, I thought he was cute. (You will have noticed by now that I probably had more than my fair share of rock star crushes.)

Anyway, I never dated Jon Moss. He was, instead, dating Boy George. After that significant union ended, he went on to marry a woman, have children and divorce. I was reading an article about an earlier Culture Club reunion around 1990 today, which I am afraid I was not able to find again to quote directly. The main point, though, is that the writer of the piece was essentially slamming Moss for giving the impression that his four year relationship with George notwithstanding, he considered himself to be primarily heterosexual. More accurately, if I remember the article correctly, he seemed to be shying away from expanding his relationships and feelings into any identity label.

The writer of the article clearly thought the notion that Jon Moss could be anything but gay was laughable and worthy of scorn. This led me to wonder a number of things. For example, why the author believed he knew someone’s sexual orientation better than the individual himself, and why he cared how this particular musician chooses to describe or think about himself.

The reason this interests me is that my first novel, Angel, features a character who is surprised to discover he is attracted to another man. He, too, has a hard time with the various categories and labels. He recognizes that he is the same man he has always been. He has always considered himself to be “straight” and nothing has changed about his essential nature. He has to admit, however, that given the circumstances the label no longer fits. Yet none of the other labels seem to fit how he feels about himself either.

Angel, of course, is fiction. But an interesting thing happened after the book came out. I’ve had a surprising number of “straight” people tell me that they related to Paul because they had experienced something similar. They’d felt at least one strong attraction to someone of their own gender. “Who hasn’t had that happen?” one friend asked me after reading the book. This is entirely anecdotal, of course, but I suspect that this phenomenon is much more common than we are led to believe.

A lot of people seem to be very uncomfortable with this notion. People are becoming much more fine with the idea that there are homosexuals and it is ok to be one. Yet they like to have a nice clean line separating “us” from “them.”

“If you’ve had sex with someone of your own gender you are gay– just admit it.”

I do understand this. The assumption is that the only reason someone would deny being gay is shame. They want to encourage people to “own” the label, not to contribute to the notion that there is something wrong with being gay.

You will notice that people do not argue with people who call themselves “gay” if they have had sexual relationships with people of the opposite sex. You would not expect anyone to say, “You may be with a man now, but you were with a woman before. You’re straight. Just admit it.” No one thinks anyone would try to hide their heterosexuality.

I remember when Ricky Martin went on Oprah. He said that his relationships with women had been real, not for show, but that he did not consider himself to be bisexual. “I am a gay man.” This was met with applause from the audience. Why did they clap? Why did they express greater approval of the notion that he wanted to be identified as “gay” than being identified as “bisexual”? Is having the capacity to be attracted to the opposite sex in any degree considered “safer” than being entirely attracted one’s own?

This interests me because the way people tend to defend gay rights is by saying “it is not a choice.” This implies that if a person had any capacity at all to love someone of the opposite sex we think he should have to conform. We only tolerate it because we believe he can’t. Given this, shouldn’t “bisexual” be the less “safe” label? This would be a person who does “have a choice” and yet does not conform. It should theoretically be more brave for Ricky Martin to say “I am a bisexual man.” Yet I don’t think that would have been an applause line.

And so I continue to wonder– I do not have the answer– why it is that sexual orientation has become such an important part of our social identities? Why do people seem to need to know what category to put each other in? Why do some people become so uncomfortable when someone’s self description fails to match the categories they hold?