“But I Married One!”
It’s pretty depressing to see Keith Gessen resort to one of the hoariest lines in the male chauvinist playbook. I mean, really, “how can I hate women — I enjoy having sex with them?” In 2013? Not in the American Spectator, but made by a nominal progressive associated with a (deservedly) prominent literary magazine?
As Amanda says, it’s possible (and, indeed, depressingly common) for great artists to have objectionable views about women. I don’t believe that this eliminates artistic accomplishment. But Gessen’s bad faith is just the aesthetic Stalinist flipside — the idea that if someone is a great artist he therefore can’t really be misogynist is really silly.
James Joyce wrote an entire book about the day he lost his virginity; he must not be a misogynist, no matter how he treated his daughter.
Is that your account of Ulysses? In any case, that book, as a piece of writing, is not misogynistic (litmus test: the women are humans and not prizes for the men). Joyce in his personal life would be another question.
The Godwin Violation version of “he can’t hate women – he thinks about (fncking) them all the time!” rather writes itself.
How can I hate black people? I own dozens of them!
And they keep me so busy-it’s like I’m *their* slave.
I wonder if Gessen has ever heard “fuck” used in anger.
“How can I hate my employees? I spend all day fucking them!”
Everyone knows that only gay men, straight women, and asexuals are misogynists.
What people do in their sex lives does matter. Bill Clinton’s escapades with Monica DID MATTER, because if a person can operate in the realm of sexuality with zero morality, shame or remorse, what do you think that implies about their business dealings, political dealings or their general psychological state?
Sexual perversion and promiscuity — such as adultery and sodomy — are directly correlated to sociopathy and psychopathy.
Sane people don’t treat other people nor themselves like pieces of meat.
Sane people don’t regard other people as objects.
Sane people have standards of decency and are repelled by sexual perversion.
That’s why marriage is holy : it’s an alliance between a man and a women. And that alliance protects both the man and the woman.
The actual misogynists are those promoting fornication, contraception, abortion and perverse practices.
Sane people don’t treat other people nor themselves like pieces of meat.
Fair point — a sack of reasonably highly-pressurized fluid is a much more realistic model.
And pancakes.
I’m a bit ashamed to be feeding a troll, and liberals strongly believe that morality plays a role in sex (they just view morality differently than you — liberal morality generally turns on consent, egalitarianism, compassion, sympathy, and love for one’s brothers and sisters).
Nonetheless, since you brought up sodomy and contraception (among other things): the American Psychological Association takes a very different view towards sex and sexuality than you do. That’s because they are professionals who spend their entire lives trying to help people achieve mental health, and their empirical research and personal experiences as psychologists show that a different approach is necessary.
You, in contrast, are a hater and a troll who wants to hurt people’s feelings. Shame on you.
Nah. Psychologists are just pancake-eating liberal “scientists” bent om promulgating their Alinskyite worldview on their unsuspecting “patients.”
Just like those evil people who tell us Jesus :::gazes heavenward::: didn’t ride a dinosaur into Jerusalem.
What people do in their sex lives does matter. Warren Harding’s escapades with a Ziegfeld girl DID MATTER!
STONES AND ALL!
Are those stones left over from Loomis’ last menu post?
you know it, sailor!
…if a person can operate in the realm of sexuality with zero morality, shame or remorse, what do you think that implies about their business dealings, political dealings or their general psychological state?
I’ve been hearing this for years (from both right and left), and it still strikes me as so much contentless hand-waving. It’s not as if we don’t have plenty of evidence of shady or worse business and political dealings from people of whose personal lives we have some knowledge. And a good many of such people were in their personal lives respectable family men. (e.g. Richard Nixon)
Yes, it’s complete nonsense. Yglesias pretty much destroyed this idea in a slightly different context in just one sentence.
You’ve got to have faith to believe that people’s sexual morality is the be-all, end-all of their character and how they’ll behave in other contexts, because evidence and life experience sure won’t do it.
Ah, yes, somehow the desire to have sex is in and of itself perverse. Of course. It’s not you with the fucked-up and unnatural sexuality.
(And just to be clear I don’t mean to imply that a lack of sexual feeling is unhealthy, just the fear and hatred of one’s own sexual desires.)
Aaahh. Yon Winchester the jonnycake lover yclept by another nym. Panacakes for all in celebration!
I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess your sex life is really, really boring.
more likely, solitary
What’s interesting, and infuriating, is that if women conducted their sexual lives in the manner that social conservatives say that they should, we’d be hearing conservative men complain about women being sexually unavailable.
I’m sure that’s not right. We’ve never seen a similar double-bind.
“But she spends too much time thinking about how she looks and ‘tramping herself up’!”
“But we can’t take her seriously, because [random GOP nitwit] doesn’t deem her f**kable.”
Oh, right….
So you must hate Newt Gingrich and Mark Sanford, right?
Maggie Gallagher discovers LGM. This should be interesting.
@Rarely
Sorry if those truths hurt you. Some truths can be ugly, but they’re beautiful nonetheless in a mysterious way.
Denial of ugly truths only leads to more and more ugliness. Denial of ugly truths is exactly what satan wants. The beast wants humanity to believe that there is no sin, there is no hell, that everything is just fine with child sacrifices (abortions), adultery (the actual form of misogyny in action) and sodomy (inversion of truth and natural law) — and there is no problem.
Take care, sir.
You should try going to an earlier mass. Then you could spend all day playing a Pharisee on the internet.
He’s also have time to stop at IHOP before going home to yell at clouds and burn incense in the bathroom.
they won’t let him out for an earlier mass,
You should try going to an earlier mass.
those nice young men in the white clothes don’t come on duty until 9am. at that, he still has to take his meds, before he’s allowed out in public.
Get the hell off my porch before I set my dog on you.
You might want to go after the Catholic Church for protecting those who preyed upon children before getting to the rest of us, St. Chesty.
Do you mean adultery as in any form of sex outside marriage? Protip: refusal to recognize the agency of women actually is misogyny.
Also, it’s true that sodomy is practiced in nature by species other than our own so it’s difficult for me to see how that is either an inversion of truth or natural law.
It is in fat practiced by every species of animal (from insects to humans) for which we have adequate information.
Those antisodomists disgust me with their perversion of natural law.
Anal sex is practiced by insects?
Look, what they do in the privacy of their own hives is their business; I just don’t want them to stick it in my face!
Sodomy, especially when a nut like Winchy says it, means anything that’s not P in V.
Setting everything else aside . . . do you not understand how to use the “reply” button?
Worst. Trolling. Ever.
The “reply” button is a perversity. God wants separate subthreads.
The desire to reply is only healthy in the context of a lifelong monogamous commitment with the original post.
And only if the intent is to spawn more replies. You cannot reply merely for pleasure.
I actually have a problem with replying to myself too frequently.
And here we are, two men locked in a spiral of shameful replies that never should see the light of day.
The reply that dares not speak its name
Sorry for that, but I don’t know how to use the reply function with the mobile version.
(Jeebus, what I wouldn’t give for an edit button.)
Missing pith: people who think like that need a slap upside the face. The real meaning of the sentence is that nothing you write is of any value at all.
Sorry you’re scared of sex, but that’s your hangup, not ours.
Why would sex be any different than everything else?
Also, see:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2013/03/02/lay-your-burden-down-god-is-not-a-jerk/
The only ugly truth here is your visage. You continue to do Satan’s work for him and he is proud of you. I will have the pancakes with blueberries and maple syrup.
Together? Ick.
mmm, yes.
I with Roth’s misogyny made his writing worse.
I wish it stuck out like a sore thumb, that it felt like an intrusion on the excellent writing around it, like the Christian “and then they stopped to thank the Lord” passages in Beowulf.
To me it does stick out like a sore thumb. It always has.
To me, the passages in which Roth’s problem with women comes through are noticeable, but they aren’t as aesthetically inferior as I would like. He still writes very well when he’s narrating Delphine LaRue’s singles-ad scene.
Not much of a Roth fan but his less than empathetic views on women, because they are so intricately woven into his novels’ development of character and plot, seem more troublesome to an evaluation of his fiction than, say, Solzhenitsyn’s on Jews which are mostly restricted to his historical non-fiction.
Sez you, a dude. It’s fine if you can forgive him his misogyny, just don’t expect other people to.
I don’t recall disparaging anyone else’s opinion, or expressing any expectations for others.
Unlike some, who (by their own insistence) shall remain nameless.
Sez Amanda Marcotte.
The sentiment doesn’t change its nature coming from a woman. It might be understandable if the Stones’ misogyny constituted an artistic exploration of one’s darker side – some of Norman Mailer’s stuff comes to mind. The Stones produced stuff like “Under My Thumb” because in that era it was permissible to do so and no one was going to hold them to account for it. And the fact is misogynistic rhetoric still doesn’t disturb good liberals of both sexes as much as, say, racist rhetoric. And as the Nell Freudenberger quote in the article suggests, women often don’t feel comfortable raising the issue.
Amanda Marcotte is not someone who is widely known for her discomfort raising such issues. Nor is she best described as “a woman,” but rather, “a prominent feminist thinking and writer, the subject of the post, and the person whose opinion on the subject is presented as the authoritative and right one.”
Clearly, Marcott is disturbed by the Stones’ misogynist rhetoric. The issue is, what do we do with art that contains ideologically-objectionable material?
Like Roth’s novels, or the Soviet propaganda posters that Loomis sometimes links to.
You’re assuming that objections to Roth stem solely from his misogyny and that his talent is both obvious and inarguable.
Assuming?
– Sez Amanda Marcotte
- Sez Scott Lemieux
I’m responding to the positions actually articulated. Even you haven’t raised any objections to Roth as a writer beyond his treatment of women characters.
We discuss it and criticize it, defend it if we are so inclined. Some may decide that Writer X’s good qualities do not outweigh Writer X’s racism, sexism, what-have-you, and they may even think that Writer X’s artistic worth is blemished by such failings. Some may go further and choose not to read Writer X and explain why. They have no right to censor or threaten Writer X.
Roth’s not that great. He’s managed to outlive a lot of others.
Well, if Amanda Marcotte says so!
Please reconcile yourself to the fact that both women and feminists do not tap into a hivemind whenever they need an opinion, and shove off.
Your estimation of “excellent writing” is another woman’s estimation of misogynist bile. Please yourself.
How sad for you that you see Amanda Marcotte’s writing on a subject and think “token,” and opposed to “Here’s someone expressing an idea worth thinking about.”
Your predictable self-congratulations aside, as it turns out, pretty much everyone is aware that there is a diversity of opinion among feminists on all sorts of issues. For example, on this issue, Amanda Marcotte and myself feel one way, and you feel another.
More accurately, Amanda and my estimation is that “excellent writing” and “misogynist bile” are not mutually-exclusive categories, and that objectionable themes and attitudes can appear within excellent writing. It’s a little sad that you can’t understand that. Wouldn’t you pretty much have to write off 90%+ of the music and literature produced before the 1970s?
Oh, btw, since you decided to play that “you don’t know that feminists have different ideas” card, let’s just remember that this began with you replying to my echo of Marcotte’s thought with “Sez you, a dude.” Please, tell me more about how bad it is to assume uniformity of thought based on group membership!
Once again, you are unable to advance your own argument without appeals to that great Feminist God’s Authority in the Sky. (I don’t blame Marcotte for this in the least, but it’s so tiresome reading men on the interwebs cite her incorrectly when they’re trying to buttress their own pitiful arguments.)
And please stop projecting your own chauvinism onto other people. Nobody said “token” but you. Marcotte is an individual; your attempt to simultaneously ride her tailcoats while obscuring her actual opinions in order to paste your own onto her name is fooling exactly nobody. That you perceive dissent as a challenge and disagreement with Marcotte as challenging her position as tokenizing her is a product of your own stupid vanity and anti-feminism.
And yes. Dudes predictably have dudely opinions, mainly about how women need to stop pissing and moaning about their own oppression, and instead focus on how great XYZ-dude is (cf: your fawning over ostensibly left-wing male politicians). Not every man is a dude, but you’ve proven your own dudely credentials over and over.
Hearty LOLs for everyone. I certainly have never contemplated this exact issue before joe told me it might be worth thinking about. As I say, your patronizing sanctimony and ruffled feathers ‘cos folks on the interwebs don’t like one of your heroes is not my concern.
Go ahead, tell me how I’ve cited her incorrectly. Take all the time you need.
We can all still read your earlier comments, you know. I cited her argument, and instead of engaging with it, you decided that quoting her was an exercise in “I have
blackfemale friends. Cranking the snotty up to eleven isn’t going to make anyone forget that.You mean by quoting her? Is that how I obscured her opinion?
Everything that isn’t your opinion is, as you passionately strive to demonstrate every day, a product of stupid vanity and anti-feminism, of course – and yet, I can’t help but notice that you didn’t challenge Marcotte’s position. This is, by my count, the third reply you’ve written, and you still haven’t produced a single word actually challenging her position, or explaining why it’s wrong. (I will grant that when you thought it was merely my position, you stuck your neck right out to denounce it as the sort of thing that only a man, lacking sufficient appreciation of gender issues, could say, but since you saw that quote, you seem to have lost all interest in challenging her position, and seem determined to limit yourself to expounding on my terrible manners for pointing it out).
This boilerplate, ritualized denunciation of my “dudeness” would be much more compelling if you hadn’t just claimed that my articulation of a position shared by Amanda Marcotte was, itself, a consequence of my “dudeness.”
It’s the quantity of your thought that’s the problem here. I’m sure you’ve given it your best.
Pro-tip: these assertions of breezy indifference aren’t all that convincing when married to prose as purple as yours.
Who? Marcotte?
Well, that says it all, right there.
JzB
Saying Philip Roth isn’t a misogynist is the ultimate Slatepitch.
I had no idea that that was a noun, but it’s a damn fine one.
Dude should read Portnoy’s Complaint, which spells out an answer in great detail.
See, I guess I had misread Portnoy. I always thought the point of the book was that Portnoy’s misogyny ultimately destroyed his sexuality.
The thing about the artists: they have to be honest, or they will not be artists.
The thing about our attitudes towards women: we get them in our formative years, and they stay with us. They reflect the state of the society at the time we were growing up. We adjust it intellectually, and that’s fine, but art is supposed to bypass all that.
Surely though one can critique problematic elements of a work even though they may be outside the author’s intended message to gain further insight into art on a variety of levels, yes?
Problematic, in the sense ‘politically incorrect’? Of course you can critique anything, but I’d be careful with that: if they start self-censoring themselves you might end up with some equivalent of socrealism shit.
Yes, awareness outside ourselves is the Zhdanovism of consciousness.
Not to mention the possibility of gaining useful insight into one’s own production of art through critique. That’s like the Ukranian famine of aesthetic thought. Or something. Seriously, socailist realism?
To hell with your lack of edit function!
Not to beat a dead horse, but in what way is voluntary self censorship like the censorship imposed by an autocratic police state?
In what way is it different? The results of it?
Well, the gulags, for one.
Also, generally speaking, metaphorical things are not the same as literal things.
I said you might end up with some equivalent of socrealism. That’s all I said on this subject.
How does gulag factor into this?
Because your metaphor is not only wildly overblown, but I don’t even buy the idea that artists might someday become too afraid to produce art that transgresses social mores because people might speak disapprovingly of them
It depends on what kind of people, and how they speak, doesn’t it. ‘Misogynism’ is a strong charge, and one may feel ostracized. It can be very unpleasant.
And heaven forbid artists have unpleasant experiences.
‘Misogynism’ is a strong charge, and one may feel ostracized. It can be very unpleasant.
‘Being targeted by the misogyny of esteemed figures who help shape the culture one lives in’ is a strong negative experience, and one may feel ostracized. It can be very unpleasant.
Seriously, in all your worry about the effect of critique on “politically incorrect” artists, you appear to forget that there are actual people affected by what they are saying and doing.
Apparently it’s not just conservatives who don’t get the idea of consent.
Consent? You get pressured into doing something, you consent and you do it. Right. And what’s the other thing?
The other thing is the different consequences of defying actual autocratic repression i.e the… wait… goo-something. Goo-balls maybe. Goo-balls for all formalists!
People who produced socrealism were not defying actual autocratic repression. They consented.
I can’t tell if you are ironically portraying a misunderstanding of consent here.
You get pressured into doing something
What a lot of work the word “pressured” can be called on to do. A bad review in The New Republic is just the same as a midnight visit from the security services.
‘Consent’ is when you force someone to do what you think is right, and they do it.
‘Coercion’ is when someone else forces someone to do what you think is not right, and they do it.
Does this sound about right?
Like I said, a campaign of accusations, accusing someone of misogynism, it might produce some serious pressure. Could be worse, arguably, than your hypothetical (wildly overblown?) secret agents.
No, consent is absent in the presence of coersion. The coersion of a police state is, to me, not comparable in any way to the “coersion” of an audience making value judgements or theoretical criticism of an artist’s work. Otherwise all artists operate under “coersion” if their work has any kind of audience.
Avoiding certain forms of expression because you will face physical punishment if you don’t—either in the form of violence, or the form of imprisonment—is “force.”
Avoiding certain forms of expression because people will think you’re an asshole if you don’t is called “being a part of civil society.” If you don’t mind people thinking you’re an asshole, then you can go ahead and express yourself.
The fact that this conversation is ongoing means you at least implicitly understand the latter.
Does anyone else see the irony in trying to define what criticism is acceptable with dire warnings of impending (metaphorical) aesthetic Stalinism? ‘Cause it seems incredibly ironic, is what I’m sayin’.
Authoritarian police state doesn’t physically punish for forms of expression.
It might, occasionally, punish for anti-government propaganda (loosely defined), but other than that you can use any form of expression, all you want.
You can write a surrealist novel, it just won’t be published. You can publish it abroad, and no one is going to arrest you, but you will be publicly criticized, and accused of being a bad person.
So, might consent (according to your definition), and write a socrealist novel next.
It’s not really that different.
Criticism of others’ speech is actually also just speech. Censorship is when you face consequences other than people’s opinions. It is very different.
If you seriously cannot see much difference between being subjected to state censorship on the one hand, and being subjected to criticism from your peers on the other, then I really can’t help you with your inability to distinguish mountains from molehills.
Why do you both engage with this troll? He has proven to live in an alternate reality where real-world consequences do not apply to actual people.
‘Sfun.
The thing about our attitudes towards women…
Who’s this “our” here? Some of us, you know, are women. We’re not some mysterious Other.
Artists have the right to be honest about their views, and I have the right to call out their misogyny when I see it.
And seriously, art is supposed to be nothing more than a reflection of your basest childhood and adolescent impulses, bypassing anything we might have learned since then? I think art is a little broader than that.
This.
Men are not the default and women aren’t the niche, shithead.
In Data’s world, participation by women in discussions such as these is unnecessary. I mean, he talks to the female security guard at his workplace and totally has just as much insight as any woman.
OK, that guy has to be trolling.
Oh, yes, he is. Definitely. Data’s a big troll.
Holy shit. I’ve never seen someone so clueless, yet so convinced of his own superiority. I don’t even think that’s trolling; this is a dude who has never once paused to consider the possibility that he might be wrong about anything.
Incidentally, women are usually just as ‘misogynistic’ (in the pious sense you use this word here) as men. That is, they feel just as uncomfortable when their childhood’s cultural norms of gender roles are crossed, and they tend to express their displeasure. Sometimes stronger than men do.
If you find yourself in a very conservative country or region wearing a mini-skirt, it’ll more likely be women spitting at you, not men.
And you know this through deep personal experience…
Pancakes, Sir, you are but pancakes.
Not true, at least in my own personal experience! Then again, I’ve never had *anyone* spit on me, so obviously YMMV.
See, this is exactly what I’m talking about, good illustration.
One can disagree and criticize and that’s all fine and good. But many of you guys for some reason feel extremely self-righteous, and you turn to bullying.
Mass-bullying is no better that authoritarian bullying. In fact, if anything, more effective. The more ideological purity you achieve, the more self-righteous you become. More self-righteous bullying.
Me, I don’t mind, but in this kind of environment an unlucky artist might, eventually, give up, or become an ideological drone you want him to be. That’s the danger.
Sanctimonious much?
Protip: When you’re defending a misogynist artist’s right to be free of criticism, you’re not the reasonable person in the room.
From what I can see, this guy is never the reasonable person in the room.
Data is shocked, shocked I tell you, to be called a troll. Where’s the fainting couch, Martha?
“but in this kind of environment an unlucky artist might, eventually, give up, or become an ideological drone you want him to be. That’s the danger”
Sorry, but that seems very unlikely at best, and is probably the worse case of pearl-clutching I’ve even seen around here.
So why is it more wrong for us to pressure Roth not to write sexist things than for you to pressure us not to criticize him?
Watching people excuse their own prejudices is always entertaining.
I love how this column was a defense of the archetypal American literary misogynist. The one that is essentially universally agreed upon to be a misogynist. What is ironic is that is a #slatepitch if I have every heard one, and Amanda is rightly deriding it in Slate. The internets are broken!
Paul McCartney was once asked what made John Lennon John Lennon. McCartney replied, “He had balls”. One example was in 1971, when John publicly admitted to hitting women as a young man (to Rolling Stone in his famous post-Beatle interview). At that time, it was shocking to hear anyone cop to such a thing, much less an artist/celebrity of his stature. I suppose it still is. But Yoko wised him up to a lot of things, and his innate courage enabled him to man up with candor. It may even have prompted a few other men to look in the mirror, and reconsider their own behavior.
What is this I don’t even
“What is this I don’t even..”.
You don’t even what? Know? Care? Have a clue?
I’ll tell you this much, and mark my words
Some artists work in oils. Other, marble.
Still others, empty skeins of intellectual artifice.
And who the hell is Keith Gessen? I’ve never heard of him, and I’m not going to look up, and maybe give a click to, someone presented as he is here.
Known mainly for work on n+1 — the miscellaneous writing of his I’ve seen tends self-important but not overwhelmingly so. This is unusually dumb for him.
I’ve been seeing a lot of reviews of the recent memoir by his n+1 colleague Marco Roth (no relation to Philip). Apparently the Roiphes are connected to Marco’s family…so maybe excessive respect for Philip Roth, Mailer, etc. is endemic in those literary circles.
I really have no idea either, beyond the linked quote. Here it is in its entirely from the linked-linked source:
“Did Roth hate women? What does that mean? If you hated women, why would you spend all your time thinking about fucking them? I do think he sometimes thought, as many men also sometimes thought, that women were a foreign country. Still, it might be said that Roth is slightly less useful in a world that is slightly more equal than the world he knew; where men and women do not stand on opposite sides of the question of sex, but arranged, together, sometimes helplessly, against it; where sex is less of a battlefield and more of a tragedy. Roth never quite got there, and now he never will.”
[bolding in original] Is this the entire context? Who added the bolding and why? Did he think he was being ironic or something? Reading the whole thing rather than the cropped bit I have to admit to confusion.
Also confusing is the link to an article in Cracked as some sort of alternative analysis. Was that meant to be serious? Reading through it there were so many grotesque generalizations, bald assertions, and errors of fact that I assumed I was reading social satire from a humor website, but I’m not sure that was the intent of linking to it.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/may/22/philip-roth-carmen-callil-booker
“It’s odd to expect novelists to mirror our own moral prejudices. One of the jobs of writing is indeed to unsettle.”
This is why everyone should listen to Slayer as a teen. I wasn’t particularly interested in hailing Satan, (residual Christianity collapsing into atheism) but I was interested in listening to those guys play metal, but I ignored all the pentagrams. Good training.
Well, and the nazi fetish.
As a pretty big fan of both Roth and the Rolling Stones, I prefer to think that their art incorporates sexism, which does not necessarily equate to misogyny. Misogyny is a pretty serious charge to level at someone, and I’m not prepared to do it as freely as many others here, who seemingly conflate sexism with misogyny. And while sexism should not be countenanced either, lets not forget that we are talking about artists of a certain age whose work is the product of their own life experiences. There are more relevant targets out there than an 80 year old novelist and a bunch of 70 years old musicians.
Roth is damn near unreadable. He’s like that clown that your friend still is still dating even though he has no redeeming qualities.
I predict that he will not be be read in English classes in twenty years. In another twenty years, people will think “Him? People thought HE was a good writer?”.