I have some sympathy for Carmen Callil. Her actions are counterproductive, though, because now everyone’s going to be passionately defending Philip Roth’s literary reputation for weeks (well, days) and complaining about sour feminists, when if they’d just given him the prize without any controversy, everyone would have been like, “Roth again? Yawn! Why didn’t they give this one to Marilynne Robinson?”

But I think she just snapped, and we’ve all been there – as a reader, how many times are you told, “Okay. This guy was really messed up about women, but you just have to ignore all the blatant horrifying misogyny, and then, you have to admit, he’s a genius!” It’s constant. And most of the time, because women are great about doing this, because we – and it can’t be said often enough – do it all the time in every form of culture ever, we concede the point. We forgive the constant brutal, graphic rapes and the ‘mothers are manipulative, evil hags’ stuff and ‘I just want to kill my castrating wife’ stuff and the constant reducing of all women to two-dimensional jizz receptacles, and we overlook all that and say, “Yeah, you’re right. If you overlook the 90% of it that’s repeatedly telling us that we better never for a second think we have any power or status in our society whatsoever, it really is an amazing work of art.” (Meanwhile, ask some guys to come with you to see a movie with women in it, or pink somewhere on the poster, and it’s like you’re asking them to lick a public toilet.)

Anyway, eventually every single reading woman (and sometimes, a reading man) reaches that point where she just goes, “That’s it! That is it! I’m done! I do not have to overlook it and admit the genius! I do not have to admit any fucking knob’s genius anymore! I’m done! I am only ever reading stuff by women from now on forever and that’s it! YOU can overlook the dress descriptions and the stupid wedding at the end, and admit that this woman is a genius! YOU OVERLOOK SOMETHING FOR ONCE, DAMN IT!”

And then you have to go off by yourself for awhile and take some deep breaths, especially since you weren’t even talking to anyone specific, but just yelling at the air in front of your face, and you weren’t even reading anything at the moment, but just sitting there, thinking about stuff and seething. Plus, some of your favorite writers are men.

Ideally, you do not throw this tantrum publicly, while you are serving as one of the judges for a major literary prize.

Anyway, we’ve all been there. I can understand how Callil feels, although I don’t have an opinion as to whether or not Roth should have won – I’ve only read American Pastoral (I read it in Vietnam, which I think informed and added to my reading experience¹), and I haven’t read everyone on the shortlist, but most current readers are not all that sad that the days of RothMailerUpdike dominance are ending (although I still plan to get around to reading those dudes some day).

If you ever have a moment of literary despair, it pays to remember that contemporary fiction is absolutely exploding with awesome writers, many of them women. Look at Jennifer Egan! I mean, I didn’t like her book that much, but everybody else loved it, and she won both the NBCC Award and the Pulitzer. Additionally, up-and-coming male writers have finally realized that being entirely dismissive of and confused about half the world’s population rather limits your ability to be a great recorder of the human condition, and literary misogyny is (I really think, though some people will argue with me) on the wane.

Here are some fantastic books I would recommend for anyone who needs a little break from being reasonable and open-minded about offensive content. Not only are these great books about women (I think? Maybe a couple are about men²), but they are not about “women’s issues”. They are not specifically about feminism or stifling marriages or dealing with abuse or anything like that (well, maybe some of them are a little bit, but those are not the elements I primarily remember about them)(and not that there’s anything wrong with books on those topics, but that’s not what we’re after here):

• The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt (Everyone should read this! Why has everyone not read this?)
• Molly Fox’s Birthday by Deirdre Madden
• Bad Marie by Marcy Dermansky
• Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida
• Here They Come by Yannick Murphy
• Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen
• Wetlands by Charlotte Roche (warning: look into this before you read it; it is not for everyone)
• Winner of the National Book Award by Jincy Willett (Hilarious! Read it!)
• The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
• Bee Season by Myla Goldberg
• Novel About My Wife by Emily Perkins
• Heir to the Glimmering World by Cynthia Ozick
• The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin
• anything by Marilynne Robinson
• Any others? What can you recommend in this category?

And I don’t even know, so many more! Those are just the ones I happened to think of, that I’ve read recently. So never feel like you have to read Philip Roth, and never feel like you have to not read Philip Roth, either. Read everything! There’s enough great stuff out there for anybody in any kind of mood, is all I’m saying.

(Image via)
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¹I know, aren’t I tiresome?! If we were at a party, you would have just spotted someone you had to go talk to over there.
²Actually, two of these books (Atmospheric Disturbances and Novel About My Wife) are about men searching for their mysteriously missing (and not actually missing) wives. Weird!

First five minutes of driving for the first time in about eight years:  ”Ohmygodohmygodohmygod, I can’t believe this is a universal daily activity. This car is a death trap! It is insane that people do this! I will surely die at any moment.”

Ten minutes later:  ”If these freaking slow-ass geriatrics don’t get the hell out of my way, I’m going to have a heart attack from pure fury!!”

(Image via)

Women: in case there was any doubt in your mind, the media this month would just like to remind you that men hate you. Reading my usual feeds over the last couple of weeks has been one installment after another of victim blaming and rape apology. As far as journalists assigned to cover these things go, it’s like the 20th century never even happened. Women victims are pushed off the page, relegated to the margins, and, when they are mentioned at all, insulted and blamed for their own abuse.

The most egregious example is the NY Times coverage of the lengthy and premeditated gang rape of an 11-year-old girl in Cleveland, Texas. James McKinley, who wrote the article, chooses to focus the piece on the devastating effect this crime has had…on the Texas community. He includes three quotes for the article. The first is a quote about how all those poor boys (the 18 males, from middle-school-aged to 27, who gang-raped an 11-year-old over a period of hours in two different locations, and taped it, the better to brag about it later) were going to have to live with this the rest of their lives. The second quote is about how the child dressed like a young tart. And the third quote is about how the child’s mother let her run around by herself.  To be fair to the reporter, it looks like the town of Cleveland truly is entirely populated by horrifying shitheads.  Still, the way the article was framed did not question the residents’ interpretation of the events:  ”…how could their young men have been drawn into such an act?”  he muses.

Of course, other media outlets have reacted strongly to this mind-blowingly backwards coverage, but the Times has not apologized or taken the article down. They did publish a single, rather mild letter that rebukes the reporter for his victim-blaming, though it doesn’t mention the bizarre ‘oh, those poor boys,’ slant to the story.

As always, The Onion is not so much a parody of the actual news as it is a parallel.

Also in the Times, Anna Holmes writes that the Charlie Sheen fiasco is notable (or par for the course) in that before, when Sheen was merely physically and psychologically abusing women, he was a celebrity in good standing, but now that he’s going around bashing his employers, coworkers and Hollywood generally, something must finally be done about him.

Finally, the New Yorker’s Talk of the Town section features a sympathetic, humanizing profile of Mike Tyson, pigeon trainer. Mike Tyson is often the subject of these sorts of cuddle-fests, because the contrast of a violent, meaner-than-spit boxer enjoying various gentle, emotional activities or fake-crying or whatever is a hilarious juxtaposition that requires no effort to think up. Mike Tyson’s most notable violent act is that he once bit Evander Holyfield’s ear during a boxing match. People don’t gloss over this about him – it is always referenced when he does guest cameos in movies, and is dutifully mentioned here in the pigeon profile.

Oh, Mike Tyson is also a convicted rapist. But nobody ever mentions that. It wouldn’t be fair to Mike.

And Halloween is really a one-two punch of fun fascism because, in addition to being told that you must have fun, you are also told how you must dress for it.  This whole idea of needing a day in which everyone agrees to look crazy so that you can feel comfortable dressing up is beyond me.  Isn’t the whole point of costuming yourself to stand out and be noticed?  Why demand that a unified front screen you?  Grow some balls, people.  Someone recently was saying that Halloween as a concept is pointless for anyone who’s a performer/ex-performer – remind me if that was you, or you know who was saying it, because you/they phrased it really well, and now I can’t remember.    

Anyway, I really enjoyed this Sloane Crosley article about how Halloween in NY is the new New Year’s:

Beyond dressing-up, it’s that creeping pressure to do something insanely fun for Halloween. This is a trickle-back attitude from New Year’s. What a smack in the face of fun. Other holidays don’t have this problem. The words “What are you doing for Thanksgiving?” invoke turkey, familial dysfunction and airport security. It’s a sincere question, not a fishing expedition. Never has someone said “I’m going to my aunt Hilda’s house in Wooster” and been met with a “That sounds great. When are we leaving?”

I don’t know why I’m bitching, really, because I have some awesome plans for Halloween this year (although no costume, unfortunately – I’m thinking I will wear a few slips, black my eyes, rat up my hair and go as Helena Bonham Carter in something).  On Sunday, I am going to see THE DRESDEN DOLLS, and I am SO EXCITED! 

Also, despite all my protests above, last year I participated in a group costume that was probably the greatest Halloween costume ever.  Someone else thought it up and someone else put it together – all I had to do was put it on.  If that were the case every year, I’d have no problem dressing up.  Anyway, we were sexxy Dharma initiative and we were amazing.  Regard:

Related Articles

• Bobbing for a Lost Apple (opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com)

I enjoyed this article about a rent-a-friend service.  I’m not at all surprised such a service exists now, and also, of course, various people are absolutely obligated to react to it as if it is the next horribly scandalous step up from rainbow parties and ritual sacrifice, but as someone who has routinely moved to an entirely new location where I have no friends or contacts, I can certainly see the use of such a thing.

It is nearly impossible to make friends as an adult, at least in this country, at least in my experience.  If you’ve never had to try it, here are the problems you run into:

For one thing, people do not talk to each other, or at least people don’t talk to me.  I never understand it when others rhapsodize about how easy it is to meet people, how everyone’s so friendly and outgoing.  Perhaps I give off some uncomfortable vibe I’m not aware of, but my conversations with strangers are never successful.  They usually go about like this:

Stranger:  ’Hey, is anyone sitting here?’
Me:  ’No.  Go ahead.’
[Long, awkward pause, carefully avoided eye contact on both sides.]
Me:  ’Have you heard this guy read before?’
Stranger, jumping as if I’ve just announced I have recently really gotten into cannibalism:  ’What?!  Oh.  No.’
[End of all possible conversation forever.]

This is what happens if you go to readings or mingle-events or shows or craft’s fairs or volunteer events or whatever trying to meet people:  other people hang out with their scads of friends, trying to strike up a conversation with a stray will likely get you maced, and before very long, a bizarre and smelly old, old, old man will begin a conversation with you from which you will never escape.  You will spend your entire night listening to a very, very old man’s political conspiracy theories and theories on women and he will lean far too close into your face and you will go to the bathroom and then sit in a far-away place and he will come over and find you and sit by you there, too, and when the event is finally over, he might even follow you to the train station.  True, sometimes he is younger, sometimes he is female, sometimes the drift of his conversation varies, but always, always he is obnoxious and boring and completely deaf to social cues.  I mean, avoiding this old man alone is reason enough to rent-a-friend:  to buy some out of work actor two beers to come to the reading with you and sit next to you and make jokes with you all night.  If you met that same unemployed actor at the event and tried to strike up a conversation with them in the old-fashioned way, they’d probably piss themselves from the social impropriety of it all.

I think my generation has been raised to be overly suspicious of strangers and the implied message we’ve internalized (if you wind up talking to some loser, everyone will think there’s something really wrong with you) is making it really difficult for all of us to meet new people.

In fact, I’ve paid hundreds of hundreds of dollars to make friends.  On the dotted line, I was paying for improv classes, but you know what I really didn’t need at the time?  Improv classes.  And some classes, you drop you hundreds of bucks and get there, and then you spend weeks doing something you’re not that interested in with a bunch of people who never go to the bar after class, because they need to get home to their families.

Also, like the rich getting richer, those with friends get more friends.  Once you manage to make one friend, you’re pretty much out of the woods.  It’s a lot easier to meet new people when you’re out with friends you already have than when you’re out by yourself.  In our society, unattached people are viewed with suspicion.  People are rightly afraid that if they’re nice to you, they’ll never get rid of you (see:  old man above).  But when you have friends along, other people know they’ve nothing to fear from talking to you – you won’t demand a commitment at the end of it all – plus these other people don’t find you crazy, so you must be alright.  So really, if you don’t have any friends, then renting a friend might enable you to meet new, actual friends.  Sort of like a wedding band gets guys hit on, because, hey, some woman thinks they’re worth sleeping with.

I’ve always made friends the same way:  I pony up for classes I don’t want until I locate a likely target, and then I force myself on them.  I invite them places and invite them places and invite them places, and I invite myself places with them, and when I meet their friends, I do the same with their friends, and I just keep at it until somehow I am in the midst of their friend group, even though I’m the only one who didn’t go to college with them all.  I’ve done it twice now, in two different major cities, in the exact same way.  It works for me, but it takes about 6 months to a year, plus money and time for whatever classes, and I can certainly see how some people would prefer to just pay $25 or so for a stranger to come to the movies with them.

On an only slightly related note, the article above has some people spouting off about how a “friend” you have to pay is no “friend” at all, which obviously.  This has become a trend in cranky cultural commentary lately, with the most frequent lament being “thousands of Facebook ‘friends’ aren’t really friends at all!”  Well, no shit.  Nobody thinks they are.  People who complain about this are saying, ‘I define a friend as someone with who you have a long-lasting, personal and caring relationship over a period of years based on mutual respect and shared experiences, and I will apply that definition to any usage of the word ‘friends,’ no matter how casual or commercial, and cry the end of civilization accordingly.’  We all still know what a friend is.  Nobody really thinks a blog ‘friend’ is a friend in the sense above, or that a rented ‘friend’ is, either.  By ‘friends,’ Facebook means ‘networking contacts,’ and this rent-a-friend site means ‘companions’ or ‘people you can pay to go to dinner with you, so that you can enjoy yourself and not have to feel like a self-conscious loser the whole time, and that’s fine, even if these people are clearly not going to attend your wedding or your funeral.’  It means, basically, escorts from back before escort became a coded term for prostitute (was there such a time?  There was, right?).  There is a need for a paid, platonic companion, and I can think of many situations where it would be helpful to pay for a fake date, in order to make a social situation less awkward for any number of reasons (for example, even after you have friends, sometimes showing up somewhere with a “date” is a quick, easy, no-hurt-feelings fix to a brewing problem, but somehow, you never have a date to bring just when you really need one).

God, sports suck so bad.

Now personally, I’ve never seen a woman who looks like this, whether in real life or on the catwalks, but apparently, they are legion.

In reality, my figure looks more like this:

I’m ok with all of this.

But what I am not ok with is that Google – as well as it knows me – is absolutely certain that I would like to turn all of my applications into social networking sites. First, Gmail was retooled in such a way that the horrid gchat was featured prominently in a sidebar – even in my igoogle page! – impossible to get rid of. For the longest time (though I will admit this has since been fixed) gchat kept signing me in over and over again, even though I had my settings indicating I never wanted to be signed in.

And can I just take a second here to explain why I despise gchat, AIM and the like? Despite having come of age in the glory days of AIM, I have never used chat, because I think it’s really fucking obnoxious. If I’m browsing online, it’s because that’s what I want to be doing right then. I’m not waiting for someone to pop up in the middle of whatever I’m looking at, and deliver me from my contemplation with small talk. Chatting is what I do when I have the pleasure of someone’s actual company – and preferably, there will also be drinks, or summer sun or some other added sweetener. I put up with occasionally tiresome chatting because it’s nice to be with people. So, why on Earth would I want the chatting without the people? That’s like wanting commercials without programming!

So, anyway, imagine my spitting fury when I signed into my google reader the other day to find that google has added some sort of ‘share network’ bullshit in the sidebar that you can sign out of (or just refuse to participate in), but cannot get rid of altogether. Why the hell would anybody want to turn their feed reader into a social sharing site? There are all kinds of places where people can post a running tally of what articles they are reading if they so desire – Twitter, Facebook, their blogs, posting a ‘my feeds’ widget in the sidebar of their blog. Apparently, that’s not enough – some people want other people actually reading over their shoulder at all times! Well, I don’t want people in my feed reader, or in my email inbox, or in my Netflix cue or in my Amazon checkout cart. I don’t care if other people do (although I don’t understand it), but there should at least be some way to completely opt out of all this stuff, and not have it continually coming up.

And now at the top of all my items in my feed reader, there’s a stupid little cartoon face with ‘X-number of people liked this!’ next to it, and if you click on that, it gives you the user names of all x-number of gazillion people who clicked that they liked that particular item. Come on, Google! Do I really fucking care that iceprincess3 liked something Ezra Klein posted? No! No one does! Let me read my feeds in peace.

And let me hasten to add that I love spending quality time with people in the flesh. I love having actual, live conversations with people. I love getting emails from people. I love reading other people’s substantive blog posts, that they’ve put time and effort into, and I love love love it when people get into a dialogue here on my blog, where I post things I actually want to communicate to people, and while my posts may not always be brilliant (or even slightly interesting), no one ever has to come here and read my blog – I don’t pop my posts up in the faces of all of my friends while they’re trying to read the NY Times Op-Ed page or whatever.

As I said at the beginning of this post, I love Google. I use nearly all their tools and have given my reputation entirely into their keeping. I just don’t love these sharing, chat and otherwise pointless features in areas that have absolutely no need to be networking platforms. There are plenty of places to go out and mingle online; I don’t see why some things can’t remain (cosmetically) private.

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After twenty-two years, it seemed a little bit coy to still be playing the Canadian card. I felt like the butt of the joke about the proper lady who, when asked if she would have sex with a strange man for a million dollars, allows that yes she would do it. But when asked if she would do the same thing for a can of Schlitz and a plastic sleeve of beer nuts, reels back with an affronted, ‘What do you think I am?’ to which the response is, ‘Madam, we have already established what you are. Now we’re just quibbling about the price.’

On page 7, Barbara Bush the Younger is described (to absolutely no point whatsoever) as “W’s liquor-swilling, Girl Gone Wild, human ashtray of a daughter.” Particularly gratuitous, as Rakoff’s real beef is with Barbara, Sr. (page 8: “Stupid fucking cow.”).

Admittedly, on page 8, we do have a derogatory physical description of a man: “The hairy-knuckled, pinkie-ringed lawyer for a Vietnamese fellow behind me….” No mention of the man’s genitals, of course, or sexual appeal or lack thereof, but still, not exactly a flattering comment. But then on page 9, we’re back to women, describing a “Russian woman in her early forties” who has the misfortune to be standing on line nearby:

She wears painted-on acid-wash jeans, white stilettos, and a tight blouse of sheer leopard-print fabric. The sleeves are designed as a series of irregular tatters clinging to her arms, as if she’s just come from tearing the hide off the back of an actual leopard. A really slutty leopard.

It’s safe to assume that leopard was also female.

But here on page 9, we also have our first woman appear without being described physically, or with any tossed-off, irrelevant sexual slurs attached to her person. This is Agent Morales, who interviews Rakoff for citizenship. Then, by page 11, we’re on to Rakoff’s friend, Sarah (who, based on her introduction as “a self-described civics nerd,” I’m assuming is Sarah Vowell), and nobody describes their friends as pointless and/or distasteful vaginas, so we’re in the clear.

And that’s it, for the rest of the book’s 222 pages: no more offensive comments about women, at least not that reached out of the pages and slapped me, like these first ones. In fact, I really enjoyed the book after page 10. The essays were tart, well-written, observant and entertaining. Why the packed in slurs up front?

So, the moral here is: writers and editors (whether male, female, gay, straight or other): when you have your manuscript all ready for publishing, go through at least the first twenty pages or so, with an eye to how you describe or comment on any women mentioned, as contrasted with how you describe or comment on any men. If you note that every, single woman you bring up is described as a slut, a bitch, a stupid bimbo, a nag, or has been physically detailed for no specific reason (ugly, fat, wart-faced, saggy-boobed, clothes too tight, past her prime, sex on legs, etc.), and that every man is described in terms of his personality traits and actions, then think about whether or not you genuinely want half the population to toss you and your book right out at that point. Because not all readers are as patient as I am. A lot of women won’t make it to page 11. And I’d like to think some men wouldn’t either.

I really don’t direct the above rant particularly at David Rakoff. His is only the most recent book I’ve read to follow this off-putting pattern. But really, Don’t Get Too Comfortable is great otherwise. Rakoff is a sharp and articulate social satirist, and his targets aren’t the easy ones. If there is a unifying theme to these essays, I would say it is what we desire and what we buy, and why, and what we tell ourselves about it, with occasional diversions into the weird and often unpleasant things people like to do for fun. He has drawn a bead on class hypocrisy, and conspicuous consumption. He covers foodies, high fashion, fasting, plastic surgery, cryogenics and Puppetry of the Penis. He goes along on a Playboy shoot, attends a midnight scavenger hunt in Manhattan, forages for edible plants in Prospect Park and works as a pool boy at an upscale resort. He waits outside the Today Show, visits Martha Stewart’s crafts department, and shadows the director of the mystifying Log Cabin Republicans.

Fun stuff, all. With the above-mentioned caveat, I’d recommend it.

I absolutely hate it. I used to rudely rebuff all physical contact, but as I got older, I began to be more sensitive to intent, and gradually grew to tolerate pyramid-shaped hugs of welcome and farewell from friends both close and casual. I still didn’t like it. But I put up with it.

Then, the cheek kissing began. I don’t know if it was an age thing, or a geographic location thing, or a general trend, but it seemed to start up all at once, and now it’s ubiquitous, and I Fucking HATE it! I don’t want to be kissed! And now, horror of horrors, it’s verging into actual, close-mouthed kissing! I have experienced this once or twice, and it’s just awful. I don’t even want to be hugged! Why can’t people respect that without my having to be rude? Why is it assumed that I’m down with being physically touched? Why can’t we just make warm eye contact, which frankly, in my opinion, is more than enough intimacy to be going forward with?

You know, I understand wanting a bit of physical contact to demonstrate affection and personal connection, to distinguish friends who approve of each other from merely tolerated professional acquaintances. And I think that the best form of physical connection is…a solid, gripping squeeze on the upper arm. Seriously. It’s distant, but warm; it enables you to make eye contact; it’s familiar, but not overly so; it’s physical, but not romantic. It doesn’t involve lips, or breasts squashing against each other awkwardly, or chins bashing into each other. You can vary it in intensity and duration according to occasion/level of sentiment to be expressed. It’s perfect.

Can we somehow usher in the upper arm squeeze as the new friendly hello-and-goodbye physical gesture? I’m going to start doing it; hopefully, it will catch on.