cheese it, the cops!

things i wrote this year

I reviewed a couple of books for the Times Literary Supplement: John Kaag's wonderful Hiking with Nietzsche, the incomparable James C. Scott's Against the Grain

For the New York Times' "Stone" series (the thing cannot possibly be described as a 'blog') I wrote on The Oscars and the Illusion of Perfect Representation

I haven't been rolling the opinion section of the Wall Street Journal quite as heavy as I had been the previous couple of years, but I notched a few: Mark Zuckerberg or Xi Jinping? Russian memes didn't steal the election, rural voters' pride and left's prejudice, the opposite flaws of trump and mueller, hatred enhaces your self-esteem

I had a couple of essays in the Los Angeles Review of Books' Philosophical Salon: western philosophy as white supremacism and before and beyond left and right (in early 19th c america)

For Times Higher Education I did an essay on some of the difficulties i'm having in teaching today's undergrads

For Standpoint I recapitulated my ridicule of Ludwig Wittgenstein

 

I must be getting toward two hundred columns for splicetoday over the last few years. In praise of my outlet I want to say that splice gives you some of the liveliest and most various and fun writing you'll find. Some 2019ly items:

I solved Brexit through the miracle of mereology

refuted Fukuyama and identified the actual end of history

narwhal horns and moral scorekeeping

mass shootings and the stories we tell ourselves

the powerlessness of positive thinking

male aging memoir: short version

reviewed or discussed visual art, as Pat Steir at the Barnes Foundation, arte povera at the Philly Museum, art and capitalism in Bentonville (Crystal Bridges), the art of suiseki landscape stones

i began a series of resoundings or recoveries of somewhat-forgotten recording artists, or lost-and-found musical loves: The Bellamy Brothers, Augustus Pablo, the Kendalls, Blue Angel (Cyndi Lauper), and Ann Peebles. There will be more of these as time unfolds.

i covered country music from time to time (and see above): steel blossoms, the highwomen, self-dramatization in cody jinks and miranda lambert, 2019 top ten

wrote about race, gender, identity politics, pc, free speech: break the glass floor; sexual abuse and political power, apologizing for whiteness; white guys: collectable, electable; his pronouns are 'they' and 'them'; trump, tropes, and the jews, 

masculinity, psychology, and servility

higher ed, which is struggling these days: hunting humans on campus, mandate campus free speech with a new title IX;  the ridiculous state of campus journalism

i covered some of the debates and impeachment developments and, in general, politics: joe biden rattletrap, intel will pick the next pres, the wrong word, whatever you do, don't elect the unelectable, there's no such thing as electability, 2020 will make 2016 look like a more innocent time, how elizabeth warren started her slide, (maybe this wasn't so prescient): biden and sanders are fading, trumpism after trump

media and such: against copyright, the wrong word is the least of our problems, yo, opinion editors, stop this practice immediately, the conspiracy theory is fake news

 

some piecey blog entries: how thoreau became a radical, ragging mr. rogers, 'ok boomer' and the fiction of generations, mao meets macklemore, quotations from chairman joe, masculinity, psychology, and servility, i just can't get no reception, the washington post opinion page and the cia: no distance, nicholas sandmann and nathan phillips (remember them?) both did well, homo economicus replaced by saints

On Sophia/bloggingheads I argued with Dan Kaufman about wittgenstein, the western phil as white supremacism essay, realism anti-realism and g.e. moore, the analytic/continental split, TRUTH

I think early in the New Year I'll have long pieces in Reason and Quillette, among others. I'm working through Robert Brandom's unbelievable book A Spirit of Trust (750 pages on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, but also about everything else; it is itself a philosophical system) for the TLS right now.

2018 sartwelliana

sartwelliana, 2018

Some of my writing this year, especially for splicetoday:

Music: on my stereo and in  my head, a lot of the year was occupied by classic gospel, say 1940-80; gospel music as women's liberation, 80th birthday tribute to the great Shirley Caesar, country enters its postmodern era (2018 top ten),  hippie goddesses of the 1970s (Bonnie Raitt, Maria Muldaur, Linda Ronstadt, Tracy Nelson), stoner country (Commander Cody, Asleep at the Wheel, NRPS), Chrissie Hynde, best pop artist of the last 40 years, happy birthday, 'stand by your man'.

For whatever reason I didn't do a shitload of humor this year, but I did pen a stirring tribute to Philip Roth's obituarists. I tried to rehabilitate my tarnished brand with an apology to America.

I tried to sketch out my basic politics in a triptych: why i am not a leftist, why I'm not on the right, why i am an anti-authoritarian. 

Attacks on pc, identity politics, representation etc.: the dead end of demographic politics (wsj), dna and politics, kanye west and susan collins: shredded by intersectionality, "looks like me", 'researcher' announces stunning result: we're all the same, King meets Zuckerberg, pc entertainment as medieval allegory, bad words, the punditry of personal destruction, self-esteem and bauxite, Anna Deavere Smith and the ridiculous reception of Black Panther

Gender: conversion therapy isn't the cure for toxic masculinity (wsj), boys, we will survive, we old dudes should mistrust ourselves, holidays and gender

'Why They Suck" is winding down, but I got to michelangelo, harry potter, bill gates, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Richard Serra.

Religion and spirituality: (see gospel music stuff, above), beckoning god from his fastness, i advocate the doctrine of original sin (nytimes), priestly abuse is central to catholicism .

Personal/philosophical excursions: fall in the south mountain fruit belt, weekend dad, a very short memoir, how to be original, how much distance?, review of james c. scott 'against the grain', george lakoff and the pseudo-science of neuropropaganda (wsj)

Politics, Trump, and so on: perjury factory, fuck me, i'm going to vote democrat tomorrow, apocalypse in the theatrocracy, re-narrating american history is an old persuasive tactic, american institutions have earned our distrust (wsj), two (or three) kinds of dishonesty, slavery, immigration, and civil disobedience, grooving on the world order in danger, america's intelligence coup, the domestic threat to american elections, american politics is filthy, polarization and the counter-factual crisis, how to argue with a young socialist (wsj), i want donald trump to hold me while i cry, politics and geography, children: our treasures our targets, trump and brexit as repudiations of technocracy

How Would You Draw History?

Hillary and Tammy: Soul Sisters in the Het Era

If you've read this blog over the years, you know of my love of Tammy Wynette. Here's a tribute in SpliceToday, on the occasion of the 50th birthday of "Stand By Your Man." It's anything but an anthem of female submission, actually, and she had even wilder and more problematic genderish lyrics, like this astounding thing: 

However you're reading the gender politics, her early recordings are the best in the history of country music.

true, true, i'm in the wall street journal today, writing about donald trump and styles of presidential mannishness. the wsj has been infiltrated by judith-butler-style gender theory, for one thing.

we've really had some busters.

it's been great to write about gender and politics over the last year. hillary too.

really, however, the manliest pres was william howard taft, who practiced manspreading as a sort of science.

 

admittedly, there was little of girlishness in the mien of zachary taylor.

 

micro-solutions

as you know, i've come up with a simple solution for cultural appropriation: just avoid the words or aesthetic products of minority and oppressed groups. (or it would be simple, if figuring who belongs to what groups were simple). now i propose to address the scourge of micro-aggressions. the hard part of dealing with micro-aggressions from the point of view of straight white guy is that they're unconscious; we don't even know we're doing it. that certainly is going to make it hard to stop. we can start stopping by becoming self-conscious and stilted in all conversations with gay people, black people, latino people, women and otherwise gendered people - in short almost everyone. but it's not enough. the obvious solution is simply not to address such people at all unless absolutely necessary, and then in a few clipped words. with other people who identify as straight white men, i will be my bold, free-wheeling self; i say what i think, and laugh heartily and make mistakes, etc. i will greet everyone else with completely emotionally neutral silence. if absolutely necessary, a few extremely polite words at most, with an extremely curtailed repertoire of gestures. this of course will prevent me from knowing them at all, or they me, or from participating in any sort of community that is not a community of white straight men. ah, but who cares, you know? i'm more comfortable with white guys anyway. i just want to stop oppressing people. 

The Democratic Party is where Social Movements Go to Die

My column this week for splicetoday urges the amazing funky protest movement that just emerged not to get co-opted by the Democratic party. Help me spread it around? I think people who protested Saturday, among others, should think about this!  My view is that getting annexed by establishment political powers ended the peace and civil rights movements in the early seventies. And yes, I am saying that the civil rights movement has been over for a long time, and has only re-emerged with Black Lives Matter. True, I knock John Lewis.

The real disaster was what happened to the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King was not a Democratic strategist. LBJ tried to control him: to cajole, blackmail, absorb and short-circuit his movement. King was not the sort of person you could do that to, but in the next generation the civil rights movement failed, petering out into people trying to rise in the American political hierarchy. Jesse Jackson ran for President. John Lewis… well, John Lewis sold his soul to the devil, and spent most of his life bashing Republicans and functioning as an emblem or mascot of the goodness of Democratic politicians as they did massive housing projects and mass incarceration, for example.

That’s how the civil rights movement died. It’s an important reason why the racial situation in the country has improved so little since King’s day. Various black politicians rose through the hierarchy, providing the superficial appearance of equality that permitted the racist power structure to engage in continual self-congratulation as it pursued directly repressive and destructive policies.

 One thing I want to point out: when King's movement and more militant people drove the passage of the Civil Rights Act, etc, they were pressuring the political system from without. When they got co-opted, the movement died. We have made little progress on race since, I believe. With regard to civil rights, I argued this more elaborately in a series of blog posts last year:

racial monoculture

monoculture 2

monoculture 3

 

welcoming and bracing for the gynocracy

i do think this thing where straight guys run the world is over, and thank god, for we have been grotesque oppressors with a stunted capacity for self-examination. the way trump or bill clinton think about and behave toward women seemed sort of normal for powerful dudes a couple of decades ago - think about that for a second. the swaggering mecentric fuckwad has just got to go. now, i also do have some concerns about the coming era of rule by straight women. it's worth it, no doubt, just to ameliorate rape culture. what i think is coming, though, is what we might call a verbal world: the basic mode of oppression won't be pushing you into a closet and groping you, but hedging your every utterance around with an incredibly elaborate network of taboos, which you may find yourself violating at any given time because they are too many to know. straight women operate with a metaphysics we might term rortyan: yapping produces the world, especially if we do it in unison. this will be in the service of the production of a giant ersatz collective consciousness, in which we all apparently say and believe the same thing as we transition from the yoga studio to the pet grooming place. anyway, that's really going to suck, and i myself am having a hard time shutting up in the prescribed dimensions. but at least it ain't patriarchy. anyway, perhaps donnie will be the last person to 'talk like a man' in public. 

it seems like the mode of sexual assault today involves rendering the victim unconscious first? i don't know how men think about sex, i just know it displays a demented power hunger.

my stuff on hillary clinton and gender is a piece on splice today.

how you inhabit your gender

but i will say this: as the first, as the gender-breakthrough, hillary is incredibly problematic, much moreso than obama with regard to race, or like jackie robinson or someone. that it's the wife of a president is problematic; that it's the wife of bill clinton is extremely problematic; that she has been his wife in the way she has is a big old problem from this angle too. it's definitely not maggie thatcher or golda meir.  there are a number of other people already who could be the first female pres, and no doubt there will be many more. i want and expect it to happen. but she is in some ways an unfortunate choice, precisely in the way she's lived gender.

or perhaps she's emblematic of a certain sort of bourgeois white woman in a certain era, sort of just post-friedan, pill etc. she's got the notion that women must be strong and independent and equal, etc., but perhaps she's also got a set of desires that are in conflict with that. she's struggled with the expectation of wifely subordination, both rejecting and enacting it. she's caught between generating an independent power as a person and...manipulating men or the patriarchy to get what she wants or living through, contributing to, and using her husband as he rises, a kind of old-time form of women's power. but then, she still has to legitimize herself as a nurturer; we got a portrait of remarkably traditional mom, with mixed plausibility, and that extends into the presentation of the policy.

chelsea presented her as full-time homemaker, which just can't be right, even if she made efforts. there were attempts, if i remember rightly, to 'humanize' gore, but what it meant for hillary at the convention to 'show the personal side,' the 'human' hillary, was always to feminize her, to show her with the normative female activities, relationships, and values as they stood in 1960. like all the symbology is locked into a transitional and wickedly conflicted moment in gender history. if a younger woman was looking at her self-presentation at the convention, it was extreme 'super-woman': full-time mom and world-bestriding career woman! you can have it all! ! i think a lot of younger woman must have looked at that and rolled their eyes.

i'm imagining that gender in hillary clinton's head is a puzzle, a mess, a difficulty all the time, though who knows? but the public enactment is extremely complex and conflicted. of course, this thing has been pretty much a minefield for everybody, one way or another. i hope bill is deeply confused about it too, but i doubt it. more nostalgic, perhaps, like roger ailes.

it's often been remarked over the decades that the sort of feminism hillary embodies doesn't do very well at representing the experiences of black women, poor women, third world women, and so on. i think it doesn't do that well representing the experiences of younger women right now either, and i actually think that even women a decade or two younger than hillary but otherwise similar had somewhat different internal struggles, or perhaps just somewhat less internal struggle, though there were continuities in the probs too. but it also had a role in moving everybody some way and opening up possibilities.

so there are excruciating tensions. she's not alone; i think it's transitional, characteristic of a certain class-race-gender-age cohort. and i think that even if she were elected, we would await the real breakthrough, something that or someone who shows what women are really becoming outside the gender hierarchy, someone less confused and also less intent on being something general or a symbol; someone who is herself. hillary symbolizes the struggle against that hierarchy, but just as conspicuously she embodies it; she is herself a lot of what she's fighting against.

in every cohort, there have been many sorts of ways of being female, of course. but some in this situation were pretty buttoned-up; like you didn't necessarily see what was really going on with the junior leaguer etc unless there was a crisis. a lot of people were pretty focused on making it seem ok from the outside; sometimes people are more focused on what other people think about them than on what they think about themselves, or those two have merged (with tensions). i feel that hillary clinton has concealed herself, or is extremely focused on not letting her self leak into public space (the disaster of what's in those 30k emails; why she suddenly goes very strange right there); maybe that is characteristic too in a way, a sort of bourgeois respectability of which mom the homemaker is the preserver while dad gets to misbehave a bit unless it slides badly off the rails (note to my 12-steppers; she seems a bit al-anon? kind of 'chapter to the wives'? just sayin). she's the maintainer-in-chief of appearances, but you know boys will be b's etc. so that makes the later career pretty fraught.

gender separatism

the gender gap this year is going to be amazing. i think perhaps gender and political ideology are merging, and we're going to move toward some kind of apartheid or partition. we need a wall; we have no choice, folks. perhaps there can be a hole in it for mating purposes. #gloryholeinthewall. if you build it, they will come.

ps it's me, bill! hillary is the best little change-maker i know. she's so loyal: most people couldn't bear for a moment the humiliation and victimization i have inflicted on her over the years. man i have told her some whoppers! hillary's been rolling with it since the summer of '71, when i met a lot of girls. why? i have no idea. maybe it's my unbelievable 'charisma,' or my fund-raising acuity. she's such a fighter! she never stops fighting. she can be sort of passive-aggressive, though. but putin hates that.

i am so happy and proud that, thanks to her efforts, our emails haven't been published so far, or at least they hadn't been as of when i came out here to talk to y'all. it's like a blast-furnace in there, bro. a fighter, i tell you. but then it goes all lovey-dovey and sexy. desperate, even. women are so hard to figure out, like they're from mars and we're from venus, or whatever. anyway, they're like change-agents all the time; dude, it's a roller-coaster. but hillary knows they are humans.

hillary has had a lot of experiences, a lot of common-sense experiences, just like a real human being. let me be very, very personal. let me tell you some things you don't know about hillary clinton. she is a very human being; few beings seem humanner. hillary has scanned the statistics, and she knows how hard-working american families are struggling. hillary has processed a lot of information qua human, and no one knows better than she what it's like to be a black guy getting shot by the police. she's a lot like disabled immigrants who dream pathetically of a better life in america and end up getting redeported. like prince and michael jackson, she knows exactly what it's like to be addicted to opiates, america's new scourge. and like so many americans whose communities and hard-working families have been ripped apart, her life has been deeply affected by my idea of mass incarceration, a couple of points in the polls, maybe. she's virtually lived a deeply human life, and no one is more intimately acquainted with the patriarchy and how to work it to get what she wants. she's like a little raisin in the sun. still, she rises!

could i talk to my homeboys for a second? girls, fingers in ears. listen, hillary helped me a lot, i guess. but we all know who got her here. where would a person with her political skills be without your boy? she'd be wherever tipper is. so chill, it's going to be alright. ok girls, you can tune back in.

god bless america, and god bless america's women and girls!

defiant women

acts of feminist rebellion, 1637-1900.

 

 

oppressed wealthy rulers

typepad doesn't seem to be letting me edit previous entries, so instead of adding at the end i'm writing new ones. i am not saying that hillary clinton, for example, has not faced sexism in a variety of ways. but the first thing to point out is that membership in any group is never univocal. hillary is not only a woman. she is a white heterosexual woman. perhaps you should look at her residences or itinerary or income. or perhaps you should consider that she will raise about $1.5 billion dollars, in large measure from her mega-rich patrons, clients, and friends. she is one of the most privileged human beings in the world, alright? and i would feel sorry for billions of the earth's peoples and take their claims to have been treated with prejudice and oppression much, much more seriously. or seriously.

thrash

hillary clinton was born to get destroyed by trump, much like jeb bush. she has already focus-grouped her phraseology: right now it's 'risk' and 'loose cannon,' over and over again infinitely. someone on morning joe this morning said that her whole campaign will be based on fear, because 'women are more risk-averse.' then they'll get pissed when don says she's playing the 'woman card', when every single person in the universe knows that that's her basic strategy: above all, no one in politics should be permitted to say anything true.

meanwhile, donald just rolls through the improvisations, as in wv last night: (more or less) 'the bill clinton administration was a disaster. and she was involved in all of it. well, maybe not in absolutely everything. i hope not, anyway.' much laughter. man you don't even have to say anything; all you have to say is 'bill' and images of interns and cigars swim into the minds of americans. 

while she mechanically parrots her strategic bullshit, he will roll her up and lob her casually into perdition. i don't think she can survive two weeks of trump, much less six months. it will be 100% woman card by the end, and she'll fuck that up too somehow, like that gloria steinem stuff. 

hillary, the most privileged person in the world, will be whining all fall about being the victim of bullying...because women respond to that, according to her internal polling. if the way women are being portrayed now by everyone, and particularly the clinton campaign, is anything like true - fear and spoiled whining being the two major factors in their vision of the future - it really is a devastating indictment of the gender. i have a funny feeling that trump is going to do much better than expected with women, however, because actually i think most american women outside the highest classes of white women aren't really like that.

another expression of

american defiance:

I ask no favors for my sex. I surrender not our claim to equality. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks and permit us to stand upright on that ground which God designed us to occupy.

--Sarah Grimke, 1837

department of defiance

 

american defiance is out in paper, with kindle coming soon. it is a collection of anti-authoritarian texts stretching from anne hutchinson's defense against and attack on the puritan theocracy to voltairine de cleyre's "anarchism and american traditions."

there are some celebrated slices, especially emerson and thoreau, but there is so much that is so little known. i've tried to give whole texts or very substantial parts. john woolman's 'plea for the poor' from the 1760s anticipates the arguments of peter singer. sarah grimke's letters on the equality of the sexes is probably the first feminist book published in the us, and she's better than fuller, i think. william lloyd garrison argues for total anti-statism in 1838. sitting bull lures a reporter into the new york herald's last stand. there is a really stunning and ground-breaking essay on race by frederick douglass that is almost never read (better than dubois 50 years later), along with a big chunk of david walker's unbelievable appeal. angela heywood throws down some surrealist political sex poetry. anti-federalists, abolitionists, anarchists, and antinomians are all represented. 

this is our most radical and most american heritage: a fierce anti-hierarchical tradition, the texts themselves sometimes unimaginable acts of defiance. we need remindin.

in editing this book, i am appointing myself secretary of defiance. these texts constitute our artillery battery, our canon.

american acts of defiance

my next self-publishing project will be an anthology of american anti-authoritarian writings from the 17th through the 19th century. a number of fundamental texts here are far-too-little known and not widely enough available. many of them are quite unimaginably defiant. here is the toc, still subject to alteration:

 

Contents

Trial and Interrogation of Anne Hutchinson (1637)

Roger Williams, "A Plea for Religious Liberty" (1644)

John Woolman, "A Plea for the Poor, or a Word of Remembrance and Caution to the Rich" (1764)

Anti-Federalist Papers (1787)

Samuel Bryan, Centinel 1

Robert Yates, Brutus 3

Robert Yates, Brutus 6

James Madison, "The Virginia Resolutions" (1798)

Tecumseh

Letter to Governor Harrison (1810)

Speech to the Osages (1812)

John Taylor of Caroline, "Authority" (1814)

David Walker, "Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World" (Preamble and Article 1, 1830)

Sarah Grimke, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes (selections, 1838)

William Lloyd Garrison, "Declaration of Sentiments Adopted by the Peace Convention" (1838)

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Self-Reliance" (1841)

"Politics" (1844)

Nathaniel Peabody Rogers

"Speech" (1842)

"Authority" (1844)

"Reply to a Correspondent" (1846)

Josiah Warren, Equitable Commerce (1846)

Henry David Thoreau

"Civil Disobedience" (1849)

"Life Without Principle (1863)

Lucretia Mott, "The Laws in Relation to Women" (1853)

Frederick Douglass, "The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered" (1854)

Angela Heywood, "Human Sex Power - Fleshed Realism"

Lysander Spooner, "Vices Are Not Crimes" (1875)

Interview With Sitting Bull (1877)

Voltairine de Cleyre,

"In Defense of Emma Goldman" (1894)

"Anarchism and American Traditions" (1909)

 

fight to rock

here's an example of something that a certain kind of feminist says that i think is really terribly wrong. 'the expectations' on women (in public life, but many argue everywhere all the time) are different than on men. so, for example, hillary clinton is, by universal consensus, globally inauthentic. bernie, being a dude, can appear in a rumpled suit and sincerely profess his beliefs. but no woman can do that in public life, because the expectations are so different. 

i'm sorry, but you're going to have to do something other than merely capitulate, appealing to your total involuntary passivity. each of us, i think, has an obligation to fight for some sort of authentic self-presentation in public; we all face great pressure not to. hillary clinton can dress however she pleases and say whatever she likes. really. seriously. her servitude is voluntary. she is one of the most privileged people in the world; if she changed her fashion sense or scrubbed off her makeup mask...whatever. maybe she would have to pay some kind of price; well, i think human beings have to be willing to do that. maybe 'the public' would actually respond well to that. but even if they didn't, at least she wouldn't be nothing anymore.

i remember obama said that hillary had to do what he had to do, but backwards and in heels. then he said that the experience was harder for her, because for one thing, she had to spend an hour and half every morning on her hair and makeup. define 'had to.' i hope i heard the condescension in his voice. maybe that was the advantage that propelled barack to victory, if it really did make it hard for her. chalk one up for the patriarchy. it might have also been harder for her because she had to discipline herself at every moment not to say what she meant and not to say what she thought. if women have to do that, i propose to ignore whatever any woman says from now on. fortunately i haven't noticed that women are any more like this than men, on average. hillary is doing exactly what john kerry did.

not all women who appear in public space have sprayed their hair into total discipline or whatever, whereas the ways men look presidential in their identical suits and ties is also pretty damn prescribed. if women face more pressure than men to create a false appearance, then they're going to have to insist even harder than men on manifesting themselves for real. stop whining and start fighting, y'all, or this whole feminist thing is the merest bullshit.

look, are you really going to just lay there, producing whatever appearance you suppose we demand, until we change our minds or something? if you don't like 'the regime of appearances' you need to tweak it, tease it, move it slightly, parody it, ridicule it, or simply defy it in our faces. ok? plenty of women have been doing that for a very long time. in particular, actual feminists have been doing it in a million ways since wollstonecraft. if you still 'can't', centuries later, that's on you.

i am your oppressor, i suppose. well, i'm not going to be able to free you if you won't make any effort whatever to free yourself, or if you are bent on regarding yourself as conceptually unfreeable, always questing for a set of expectations to fulfill. maybe you need to stop waiting for me to free you. y'all are going to have to teach us who you are and how you actually do want to appear, alright? many of you have, heroically or routinely. resistances, even little resistances, are educational. capitulation conveys no information, just mechanical repetition. we're going to need more, and we're going to need to understand some of the things it might mean to be a woman, or what it is like to be a woman, now. to do that, you're going to need show us who you are now, bring what's inside to the surface in whatever way you deem honest. what that takes: the minimum effective dose of human courage.

'expectations' have formed up into a pretty odd dimension; they seem to float free; they are everyone's, or all men's (?), expectations in general, no one's in particular. if we are talking about heterosexual men's expectations for the appearance of people like hillary clinton, i don't think our expectations are nearly as detailed as you seem to think they are. certainly, we could never have designed hillary's outfits or imposed on her her particular coiffure. as you may know, you're lucky if we really even notice stuff like that. in my view, these are your expectations for yourself, the expectations you are imposing on yourself. or put it like this: to some extent at least it is the us in your head, and not the us in the world, that is imposing all these disciplines of appearance on you. just taking a gander, it seems to me more like you're trying to fulfill the expectations of gay men: the sort of people who, let me speculate, might actually have helped hillary with her makeup, designed her outfit and imposed on her her particular coiffure.

we're apparently in a period of what might be termed morbid sociality, in which what people worry about most or exclusively is what they suppose other people are thinking about them and seem to regard themselves as having no choice but to behave continuously as they suppose those people expect them to. there's a whole wing of 'feminism' - oh, try jessica valenti in the guardian - and also of the social sciences as a whole, which appears to believe that this is the universal human condition, before which each of us is entirely helpless. it's just the way homo sapiens thinks. i propose to prove that false all day every day with my own body and blog.

women had to fight to rock.

 

 

they still do.

[actually i wanted this vid; 'embedding disabled on request.'] how do i expect a woman politician to appear? the more like da brat da better. 

 

yin country

true, i'm going to do a 'round-up of country, 2015.' maybe not a top ten this year but just some artists, albums, reflections. bizarrely, country is still cisgendered. so let's break it down like that.

two of my very favorite female artists, ashley monroe and kacey musgraves, released albums this year. i was bitterly disappointed with both, even more so in retrospect than at the moment of their release. on the other hand, there was cluster of extremely promising debuts toward the end of the year. one of my favorite slices of music this year was maren morris's eponymous debut, and perhaps "drunk girls don't cry" was my favorite song this year.

 

also i particularly loved the hailey whitters ep "black sheep"; download 'city girl,' 'long come to jesus,' and 'one more hell.' a fine new voice is country is named 'cam' (also touched on in the last linked entry). really, in terms of a distinctive yet trad new female country voice, she is wonderful. i think probably her whole team was caught a little by surprise when 'burning house' - a really beautiful and tough tradtional song - went to #1, and the album, 'untamed,' might have been rushed into production with some boilerplate, including the miserable title cut. but check 'mayday' or even 'i want it all": bad self-esteen lyrics, maybe, but very very catchy.

 

i still want more from caroline ('kissin ain't the same as talkin') spence. and i await the heartbreak, cheating-bastard, d-i-v-o-r-c-e album from miranda lambert. you can whine if you like, but i say this: miranda is the best artist working now, the queen of country music, a worthy inheritor of tammy, dolly, and patty loveless.

 

race migration

the rachel dolezal reverse-passing case is pretty interesting. i see why it's a problem, especially in a situation where one might benefit from affirmative action, or have a job that is partly race-based. but...there just isn't any such thing as race either, right? a fungible social fact. so, why isn't rachel dolezal, for example, trans? maybe she can be the caitlin jenner of race. maybe people's surface doesn't always represent "who they feel like deep inside" etc. now, both in caitlin's and rachel's case, the idea of being something deep inside presupposes the duality. but keep migrating about through genders and races and pretty soon you've thrown the existence and nature of such identites into fundamental chaos, or even made yourself impossible, or problematized the notion of being male or female, black or white, at the surface or deep inside. 

if your gender is a matter of how you self-identify, for example, then why not your race? if we should use the pronouns for someone that they declare or prefer (and i think we should), then why not treat people racially on the same sort of grounds? is your problem that people might reap advantages from being black? boy i don't even know where to start on the ironies.

now the sudden explosion of trans identity seems progressive, etc. but then again, many forms and moments of feminism presuppose the essentiality of gender identities. that includes affirmative action, or for example the sheer assertion that women make less money than men, and a million other things. and likewise with race: all the affirmative action and attempts to uplift the black community and black pride and so on presuppose that there is such a thing as race and that it is fundamental to identity. but what happens when - potentially in an apparently progressive way - these categories liquify completely, and all of that becomes impossible? i'd say the political reconfigurations that this entails are completely wild and unpredictable. progressive politics, no less than reactionary politics, presupposes the identities as fundamental realities. watcha gonna do?

one thing i'd predict: people are going to be more comfortable with gender-trans identities than race-trans identities. this is ironic because i'd say race is even more problematic than gender as an objective or biological fact, even more obviously 'socially constructed'. it has been liquid from the get-go, with a million variations, complications, and every possible mix. people have been passing one way or another or enacting the other, or defining themselves or one another as octaroons or whatever since they invented the concepts. but maybe for that very reason, the boundaries require extreme policing.  

of course, if racial identities were to dissolve, that could be a terrible problem and a terrible loss. for example - and this would be typical of the history in various ways - it could just sort of mean that everyone gets to be a white person. you can't have black culture in a society with no or thousands of races, and that would be an astonishing cultural loss (i'd not mourn the death of white culture the same way at all, e.g.). on the other hand it might be a wild multiplicitous love-in, an opening up of a milllion now-inconceivable possibilities. race has been a nightmare too, hasn't it?

what about the collective?

i am incredibly tired of all the attempts to create and enforce collective consciousnesses. races, classes, nations are supposed to be historical agents. for example, generations are just ridiculous fictions (as i have often said, across any given population, people reproduce continuously, not all at once every twenty years), but all of these have, let's say, fictional elements: they are ontologically problematic at best. i am even weary of genders and sexual orientations conceived in terms that give them personalities: women think this; men want that; men are from michigan; women are from yonkers, and so on. right and left in politics are becoming collective agents. now, you might think that individualism is tearing us apart, and you might yearn to be as one with somebody or even everybody. but think for just one second about whether thinking of ourselves in terms of races, nations, generations, classes, political parties has united or divided us, whether collective consciousnesses and agencies have created unity or conflict.

i can hardly read dubois and his descendants anymore, for example, because races start doing things and deciding things and have talents and failings and personalities and so on. someone made that shit up, i'm telling you. (in fact, pale people made it up in an ecstasy of self-congratulation.) collective agencies are real to the extent that they are enforced: black people, let's say in 1900, are poor, lazy, ignorant: you might be too if you were enslaved, prohibited from various kinds of employment, excluded from literacy by law, etc. the fiction of the collective agent is made quasi-real by itself; it creates the agencies it then purports to describe. the structures by which genders, etc are enforced or made actual might be a little more subtle, but these are all artifacts of exclusion in one way or another. the french are busy enforcing frenchness, in language, dress, and so on, and then confirming empirically what they invented. it all has the same structure as, say, anti-semitism: 'the jew does this and that; the jew wants money; the jew has no nation. the jew the jew the jew. well, the american thinks that; women need x, y, and z; millennials believe this; the greatest generation was courageous, etc. solidarity and exclusion are the very same thing.

maybe we can't just ditch out of this kind of thinking instantly and entirely. but we can think about it critically every single time it comes up, or try to work our way out of it slowly. because it's liable to be fatal to our species. our species doesn't want that; or actually, our species is pretty murder/suicide-oriented.

aeon gender

the really very rollicking aeon magazine is launching a sub-site at ideas.aeon.co. i quite like the free flow of texts on various provocative or odd or classic questions. i'm up there right now with a brief version of my sex-and-gender-as-aesthetic-expressions thing, in response to the question 'how flexible is gender?'

transiting through the binary

we're in a trans moment, what with the amazon series transparent and a lot of other developments. i have some misgivings about the ways transitioning people often talk about gender. so, it's often framed like this: finally, i can be who i really am; i always felt like deep down i was someone else than who i was in public. but the way this is formulated often makes gender and identity the very same thing. who are you deep inside? 'a woman' is an odd answer to that question: awfully generic, for one thing. i guess i'm pretty identified with my gender, but i think it's probably good that i would not answer the question of who i really am with 'a man', any more than i'd start by saying 'i'm white' or something. of course those things are in my identity, and central to the way i'm moving through my culture, but i want to think of myself not as a generic white man deep inside (or a black person trapped in a white body, say), but something a bit more specific and more interesting and less completely socially defined - less a blank demographic slot and more an actual set of experiences. it's true that testicles dangle between my legs, but that might not be the most interesting fact about me, or even the very center of my human identity. you know?

i think often the rhetoric around trans gives way too much power to gender, or 'naturalizes' it in an excruciatingly problematic context, or just where it should be breaking down. and we might want to reduce rather than increase the power of the binary to shape identities. i guess i've felt that some of the trans people i've known and read are under the spell of the gender binary, which is a bit ironic because from another point of view their experience might be used to break this binary down or throw it into question or complexify it. often the trans conceptuality seems entirely caught in gender dualism and essentialism: you fundamentally are one thing or the other as a kind of essence: you realized when you were 7 that you were 'really' female. i don't know, what if we all stopped worrying quite so much about whether we are male or female, outwardly or deep inside, or affirm other central aspeects or possibilities of human identity? it's easy for me to say, but maybe you're worrying too much about whether you're a man or a woman, or what clothes you're wearing, etc. 

one common trope, also pulled out in transparent: wait are you going to dress up in women's clothes from now on? oh for heaven's sake, i've been dressing up my whole life! finally i'm appearing in public as who i really am. but we're all dressing up in a our little performances of gender. it's odd to think that the right outfit has to carry the weight of who you really are, since fashion transforms pretty quickly. look maybe i'm less aware than a drag queen about how my clothes are a gender performance, but they surely are. maybe a cross-dresser would find it easier to lose track of the fact that he or she is performing their gender in the crossed outfit. but they're still performing gender, becuase for one thing what it means to 'dress like a woman' in 2014 is completely different than it was in 1850 or 1950. 'now my ensemble reflects my natural essence' just isn't plausible. 

for everyone's sake, it is important to de-naturalize gender, or show the ways it is socially articulated, the ways it is volatile over time. the kind of gender theory i like long ago tried to de-essentialize male and female, multiply categories and options, historicize the roles, and so on. but the way trans experience is presented right now often just effortlessly presupposes the categories through which the person is transitioning, even as the transition itself enacts the liquidity of the categories.

to go biological: every human body has its limitations, its frustrations, and its capacities for pleasure too. notoriously, one can't really know what the sexual experience of people of the other gender is like, for example. but you know what? one thing i've concluded from cuddling up with women is that our sexual experience, and our experience in general of being human bodies in a world, is actually very massively similar. men and women, whether we're biologically or socially distinguished, are basically the same sort of thing. sometimes we're in pretty close communication, and we tell and show each other about our own experience all the time; perhaps we can know a lot about each others' experience after all, or even share these experiences, to some extent have experiences across various lines or various aspects of gender.  gender can have its little mars/venus communication frustrations, etc, but i also feel that we routinely communicate almost everything across the gender line one way or another.

again, we are all human bodies sharing the very same world. it might adjust you in one way or another to cross the line, but it won't help you solve or transcend the basic situation; it won't necessarily cure your sense of being displaced or not quite in the right body or not quite comfortable in the world as who you are now, or not quite having the right name, you know? it won't perfectly square your inner self with your outer enactment; that's a struggle for all of us all the time. i guess i'd advise people overall to try to enjoy the body they have at a given moment and put it into interesting communication with other bodies. but that does sound potentially prejudicial and if you are moving toward surgery, that's your call, and i don't, i acknowledge, have excellent access to every aspect of your experience. 

there will be chardonnay

ah, women. wait, can you still say 'ah, women'? or is that discriminatory harassment? if so, let me just say that mistakes were made. from a review of samantha ellis's how to be a heroine (tls sept 26): "Ellis re-reads Wuthering Heights once a year, in the run-up to her birthday, often in a hot bath with a glass of wine." then she writes a book about that. perhaps the whole thing is a devastating parody of bourgeois white het femaleness? like maybe 'samantha ellis' is a fiction created by angela davis or dorothy allison? yoga is likely, and scented candles. but two things i do know for sure: novels made ellis who she is, and there will be chardonnay.

shut up with the shutting up, already

every newsworthy event these days seems to be a reason to hang people for saying the wrong thing.

"How does she marry him after that? How does she go in front of (NFL Commissioner Roger) Goodell? That's pathetic to me," Robinson said during the radio segment, according to CBS Sports.

he was suspended. or how about the atlanta hawks owner talking about the economic implications of the racial makeup of the crowds at hawks games, in a way almost anyone might in that position? he had to sell out the day it was reported. just make up your mind to this: speech is not assault. and for god's sake, stop becoming outraged at people for saying even things that you are yourself, or that very many people, are thinking. there's no percentage in that. people do not want there to be any public actual discussion of anything, in particular race and gender. they want everyone chanting the same pc cliches in unison.

the baseline is that anyone gets to say whatever they like, and what you are doing is forcing dishonesty on everyone, even yourself. after that, you're going to wonder why no one appears to be a racist or sexist in a society that is structurally racist and sexist. my basic explanation of this always-apparently-mysterious fact is that it's one of the effects of of the overwhelming social sanctions against using certain words or expressing certain thoughts in public space. i think people really are or were confused between racism and the vocabulary of racism, sexism and the vocabulary of sexism: people seriously held the view that it would be a substantive improvement in the condition of women if no one ever used 'chick' or even 'girl', ever again. 

pretty soon, not only is everyone policing every word out of their own mouths, they are editing their own thoughts, or trying to, because they themselves believe that the basic thing that makes you a racist is that the word 'nigger' crosses your mind. that is, the general theory that drives the policing of speech - the idea that reality is the result of our simultaneous incantations - itself becomes widely accepted and applied. then if you do kind of edit that stuff out of your own internal monologue, you believe of yourself that you cannot be a racist. that would actually be true if the 'words-have-power' magick theory of reality were true. the ever-more thorough and effective censorship regimes around racism and sexism combined with the mysterious persistence of the hierarchies themselves actually show that words are shit. or proverbially: talk is cheap. surely anyone who has lived among humans has learned this lesson, and no one can have better data on that than members of oppressed groups.

which gender is more annoying?

it's a near thing. this cloud comparing word choices by men and women on facebook, is very hilarious. the atlantic piece is about the femaleness of 'um' and maleness of 'uh', which is not necessarily as good as this bit.

holy war

i'm hoping that the forces conducting the war on women and the forces conducting the war on whites can transcend their partisan bickering, find their common ground, and join together in a war on white women. jihad jihad jihad!

welcome to dickfest 2014! bonzai bonzai bonzai!

the government of japan has arrested an artist for distributing a template of her vagina for 3-d printing purposes. that really improves the art, i want to say, or makes megumi igarashi's point for her. and i'll say this about government officials: it's not their fault that they are uncomprehending idiots, imaginationless dolts, idiot fuckwads who think for no reason at all that they should tell you what to do with your vagina. it's neurological, or would be if they had a neurology. the best part about government officials is that they all die eventually, and we can all comfort ourselves with the knowledge that they all die meaningless. also, this will make igarashi an international art star, though i have to say that, as big a fan as i am of the vagina, i think it has been, as it were, thoroughly explored in the art of the last few decades, which often bears an uncanny resemblance to gynecology.

 

the last graph of the guardian piece is priceless:

Igarashi has said she is on a mission to “demystify” female genitalia in Japan, a country where thousands flock to an officially sanctioned annual penis festival in Kawasaki every April.

sex wars

the shootings in isla vista do kind of raise the specter of a shooting war between the genders (also thematized by maggie rose, below). boys against girls: that was always going to be our species' evolutionary destiny. we've been enacting it since we were cave-toddlers on the darwinian playground. obviously, at most one gender can survive. it's all going to turn on who can recruit the trannies. my advice to both genders and everyone in between: nuke up immediately and think in terms of devastating pre-emptive strikes. otherwise, you appear weak and vacillating on the world stage, which no gender super-power can afford.

specular liberation front

remember the era of unrepentant scopophilia? it was a golden if somewhat problematic epoch for my gender!

 

the tune is "i saw the light". seriously.

 

wake up; it's a chelsea manning

in the gender declaration as in the leak itself, chelsea manning is a courageous person, and the least we can do is refer to her using the name and pronouns she specifies.

 

i think it's fair to say that i've got some reservations about this style of music, but i'm working on freeing my mind of prejudice. it's a process, sweetie.