In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Category: The Cultural Canon

Rejoice!

The Bulwer-Lytton Contest winners have been announced!

The winner:

Detective Bart Lasiter was in his office studying the light from his one small window falling on his super burrito when the door swung open to reveal a woman whose body said you’ve had your last burrito for a while, whose face said angels did exist, and whose eyes said she could make you dig your own grave and lick the shovel clean.

Jim Guigli
Carmichael, CA

Can I Have Mike Adams’ Job?

When a college professor is recommending these books for summer reading, you know you’ve got a problem (for the record, I’d be saying the same thing if he was recommending Stupid White Men and the DaVinci Code). For those attending the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, I’d recommend avoing Adams’ class, unless you’d rather read second-rate right-wing conspiracy-lit than anything worthwhile.

For what it’s worth, if I were a college professor suggesting some good summer reading, my list would go something like this:

Midnight’s Children and/or The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
Skinny Legs and All by Tom Robbins
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde
White Noise by Don Delillo
The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
Women, Race and Class by Angela Y. Davis
Against Love: A Polemic by Laura Kipnis
Interpretor of the Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow
Old School by Tobias Wolff
Backlash by Susan Faludi
American Pastoral and/or Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
Beloved by Toni Morrison
The Color Purple by Alice Walker

There are a million others, but I’ll stop while I’m ahead.

Add your suggestions in the comments.

Don’t Worry, Ladies, There’s Always a Plus to Being Past Your Sell-By Date

According to John Derbyshire, you’re a whole lot less likely to get raped — because who wants to rape an ugly old bag anyway?

(That, coming from this).

Some of the most vituperative emails I have ever got came in after I made an offhand remark, in one of my monthly NRO diaries, to the effect that very few of us are physically appealing after our salad days, which in the case of women I pegged at ages 15-20. While the storm was raging, biologist Razib Khan over at Gene Expression (forget philosophers, theologians, and even novelists: the only people with interesting things to say about human nature nowadays are the scientists) decided to look up some actual numbers. Reasoning that a rapist is inspired to his passion mainly by the physical attractiveness of his victim, Razib went for rape statistics.

There’s your first problem: Rapists aren’t “inspired to passion mainly by the physical attractiveness of his victim;” he’s inspired to do violence against someone who is weaker and more vulnerable than himself. Many incidences of aquantaince-rape involve someone who was in a position of power over the victim. And while we know that rape is about both power and sex, it’s certainly not about an overwhelming passion that the rapist simply couldn’t quell. Ask any decent man you know if he’s ever been so “impassioned” at the sight of an attractive woman that he had to physically attack her, hurt her, and have violent sex with her. Rape is an act of violence and pathology, not passion or attractiveness.

But that’s not what the Derbs thinks (then again, this is the same guy who thinks that 15-year-olds are sexy.)

Now perhaps I’m just bitter, being past my sell-by date and all, but Derbs really got my creep-o-meter going off the charts with this bit:

He found a 1992 report (Rape in America: A Report to the Nation) from the National Victim Center showing the age distribution of female rape victims. Sixty percent of the women who reported having been raped were aged 17 or less, divided about equally between women aged 11 to 17 (32 percent) and those under eleven (29 percent). Only six percent were older than 29. When a woman gets past her mid twenties, in fact, her probability of being raped drops off like a continental shelf. If you histogram the figures, you get a peak around ages 12-14… which is precisely the age Lolita was at the time of her affair with Humbert Humbert. As Razib noted, my own “15-20” estimate was slightly off. An upper limit of 24 would be more reasonable. The lower limit really doesn’t bear thinking about. (I have a 13-year-old daughter.)

Read More…Read More…

Mark Twain’s Hawaii

Hunh. I never knew that Mark Twain had visited Hawaii, much less wrote about it. This article, a travel piece, offers some excerpts of Twain’s 1866 letters from the Sandwich Islands, at a time when whaling ships visited the islands, where France, Britain and the US were competing for influence, and when Kamehameha V was king.

My sister Kat lived in Hawaii for years, and her son H is part native Hawaiian (which I always find amusing, given how blond and blue-eyed he is). H is eligible for the Kamehameha Schools, but not other native-Hawaiian programs. Anyway, Kat enlightened me about the fact that Twain’s (really, Clemons’s) letters are quite well known in Hawaii. But, since it’s my blog, I’m going to post my own excerpts from Twain’s letters and mourn the fact that I have spent a grand total of four days in Hawaii, most of them on a military recreation base.

Determined to “ransack the islands” for his dispatches, Twain rented a horse and rode until he was laid up with saddle sores. He rode by moonlight through a ghostly plain of sand strewn with human bones, the remains of an ancient battlefield. He scaled the summit of Kilauea during an eruption, standing at the crater’s edge on a foggy night, his face made crimson by lava-glow. He hiked through misty valleys. He surfed.

You heard right, Huck: America’s greatest writer took a wooden surfboard and paddled out to wait, as he had seen naked locals do, “for a particularly prodigious billow to come along,” upon which billow he prodigiously wiped out.

“None but natives ever master the art of surf-bathing thoroughly,” he wrote.

. . .

“The greater part of the vast floor of the desert under us was as black as ink, and apparently smooth and level; but over a mile square of it was ringed and streaked and striped with a thousand branching streams of liquid and gorgeously brilliant fire! It looked like a colossal railroad map of the State of Massachusetts done in chain lightning on a midnight sky. Imagine it — imagine a coal-black sky shivered into a tangled network of angry fire!”

The Best American Fiction of the Past 25 Years

Congrats to Beloved. It is, indeed, an amazing book, and well-deserving of this prize. I’m also glad to see that the runners-up and other nominees included three books by Don Delillo (including my favorite, White Noise), American Pastoral, and A Confederacy of Dunces. But interesting to see who’s making up the list of Best American Writers: of the 25 novels listed, two were written by women. Two (that I know of) are written by people of color. All the rest are by white men.

80s Flashback

We’re still arguing about Salman Rushie? Really?

This news is a few days old, but for those who haven’t heard, Rushdie is scheduled to speak at Nova Southeastern University and some students are upset because Rushdie “blasphemes” Islam in The Satanic Verses. Now, I can certainly understand being more than a little sensitive to all the anti-Muslim nonsense going on right now; I can understand being upset about the crap that regularly appears on conservative websites, about racist cartoons, and even about what Rushdie wrote. However, the fact remains that Rushdie is one of the greatest writers alive (and yes, I’m probably a little biased because I really enjoy his work). He’s been at the center of one of the biggest free speech conflicts of the past quarter century. He’s a man of great intelligence and integrity, not to mention incredible talent. Universities should be — and I’d imagine are — chomping at the bit to have him come and speak.

Should every student get in line and go see Rushdie if they can’t stand him and think he’s personally insulting? No. They certainly don’t have to attend graduation if they find him so abhorrent. But suggesting that he’s an inappropriate choice is just silly. Universities should, and usually do, pick speakers who reflect their values and the character of their community. It would, for example, probably be a poor choice for a school like NYU to invite someone like John Ashcroft to speak at graduation, because he’s so far out of line with NYU’s instititutional values. It would not be such a poor choice for them to invite EL Doctorow, or Toni Morrison, or even Al Gore. Is Salman Rushdie the kind of person whose reputation runs counter to all the things that institutions of higher learning should hold dear? No. He represents what higher education seeks to achieve — skillful writing, expression of inborn talent, and personal courage. So it saddens me to see students at NSU speaking out against him for the least courageous reasons:

“Who is to say there is not someone willing to try and kill him while inflicting harm to everyone else at the ceremony?” said NSU student Randy Rodriguez-Torres in an editorial published in this week’s NSU student newspaper.

I can understand being offended. If, for example, John Ashcroft was the speaker at my graduation, I might consider not attending. I support and respect any individual student’s choice not to go to their own graduation because they disagree with what the speaker stands for. But I’m not sure that there’s a good argument to be made that Rushie is an inappropriate choice, or that a graduation speaker must be someone who pleases everyone in the audience. I can see a better argument against selecting controversial political figures, since those people tend to be inherently polarizing. But agitating against the selection of one of the most well-regarded literary figures alive? Give me a break.

Octavia Butler Dies at 58

Truly tragic.

She was one of the first and most prominent African American science fiction writers.

“She is a world-class science fiction writer in her own right,” Jewell said. “She was one of the first and one of the best to discuss gender and race in science fiction.”

Butler described herself as a happy hermit, and never married. Though she could be very private, Bear said, she had taken classes to improve her public speaking and in recent years seemed more outgoing.

“Mostly she just loved sitting down and writing,” he said. “For being a black female growing up in Los Angeles in the ’60s, she was attracted to science fiction for the same reasons I was: It liberated her. She had a far-ranging imagination, and she was a treasure in our community.”

Categorizing Race in the Bookstore

Jeff has an interesting post up about how bookstores tend to place any book written by an African-American author in the “African-American interest” section, even if the book has nothing to do with race or identity at all.

And remarkably, I actually agree with him on at least one point:

books written by blacks that are not “about” blackness or African-American studies belong with books written by non blacks about the same subjects. Similarly, books on African-American studies written by whites belong in the African-American studies section, if we insist on maintaining such a thing.

That seems fairly obvious. If a black author writes a science fiction novel, it should be in the science fiction section (although, in my opinion, no one should be writing science fiction novels… but that’s a different story).

Now, I’m one of those bookstore users who likes the fact that sections are divided into “Women’s Studies” “GLBT” and “African-American interest.” But when I go to the Women’s Studies section, I expect to find books about feminism and gender issues, not every book ever written by a female. Ditto for the other categories. Jeff uses the example of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, a book that I happen to quite like. Beloved, to me, is first and foremost a piece of fiction, and should be shelved with all the other fiction books — and if there’s an American Classics section, it should be shelved there, too. But, considering that it largely about blackness, I can see why some would think it should be in the African-American Interest section. But these sections, to me, imply sociological and non-fiction texts, not novels. Putting Toni Morrison there seems about as logical as putting “2,000 Leagues Under the Sea” in the Travel section.

Check out his post. Thoughts?