Wanna Be A Victim: A Discussion on Sluts

So, 16 Yale students and alumni have filed a Title IX lawsuit against the university for their lack of disciplinary action against the people responsible for the following: DKE pledges publicly chanting “No means yes! Yes means anal!”, ZTE pledges surrounding the Women’s Center with “We Love Yale Sluts” signs, more frat members stealing shirts decorated with personal stories of sexual assault from a Clothesline Project anti-violence demonstration (better to crush someone’s spirit than drink a bunch of soy sauce and die), and the general bureaucratic hushing-up and shaming involved during the small percentage of sexual assaults that women on campus actually reported.

A reminder: 1 in 4 college women is sexually assaulted during her time in school and 80% of those assaults are committed by acquaintances. But of course, 2 in 5 college women dress like sluts when they go out (3 in 5 on Halloween or any sort of theme party, 5 in 5 at the good frats) so what are we even talking about here?

On the word “slut,” I have mixed feelings. One cop in Toronto gave some safety tips to women on how to avoid sexual assault; although the only valid nugget of advice on this issue is “don’t be a woman,” he suggested to the public that they don’t dress like sluts. And while that’s clearly ridiculous, there’s a massive undercurrent of thought about sexual assault that it’s connected in some way to how the girl looked and how she was dressed. Think about the Times gang rape piece, blaming the 11-year-old for wearing makeup, or the thousands of times you’ve heard someone say “She was asking for it.” Or the way people react to a man raping 200 elderly women primarily with surprise that he could get it up!

I don’t agree with the way that “slut” gets thrown around, and I don’t like the nasty hint of approval in both that word and the “she was asking for it” line, although it does get straight to Jezebel‘s point: that women are somehow supposed to be sexy from the moment they put on an Abercrombie padded bikini top at the age of 8 until the day that Botox and Pilates are finally not enough–but they’re not supposed to be sluts. Or, as Coop says in Wet Hot American Summer, they’ve gotta be the right kind of slut.

But I love that movie, and, more to the point, I think that there’s something to be gained by not dismissing the word “slut” as meaningless just because it’s mostly deployed by idiots. As it stands, “slut” is used for females of all kinds: girls who like sex, girls who don’t want to have sex but have the audacity to show off their bodies anyway, ugly or fat women who presumably do slutty things to make up for their less desirable qualities, pretty women who go just over the line in performing all the self-beautification acts that the beauty-industrial complex asks them to do, pretty much anyone who’s giving too much access or not enough access to their God-given T&A, which is pretty much everyone.

But I’m going to take a stand on this word. A slut is someone who bases the entirety of her (or his) self-worth on being as sexually attractive as possible and then acts accordingly: in other words, someone who’s been fooled by the machine!

Now of course, sluts are made, not born, and they’re not to be faulted. The gamut of consumer choices available to little girls runs from the apparently innocuous (princess gear, the consumption of which is a preview to the absurd $161 billion American wedding industry) to the obviously disgusting (nipple tassel baby T-shirts, or ones that say Future MILF and Future Trophy Wife). Snooki made a video for AOL giving an 11-year-old a Jersey-style makeover, with the tag line “You’re never too young to look bangin’.” Girls are socialized from birth to base their self-worth on men and looks and sex and slutty attributes.  The winning-est women in America are those who appear on (as the 30 Rock joke goes) the Maxim “I’d Rape That” 100: women who are idolized for the very qualities that make them, according to police officers and male college students, worthy targets.

Take Katy Perry. She’s awesome, she shows her tits all the time, her tits are awesome, her music is catchy, she rocks! Sluts rock! That song she made with Kanye about aliens came on the radio today and I stayed on the station for long enough to hear the line “Take–me–t-t-take me, wanna be a victim”–and then I just got so sad. Not because of the line itself, but rather, because it isn’t shocking in the least. Even when taken out of its very insightful alien-metaphor context, “wanna be a victim” is so unremarkable, so run-of-the-mill as far as today’s aggressive, porny brand of objectification goes. Sometimes it seems to me that loosened standards for female sexual freedom are resulting in a blunt, dangerous creep factor on all other sides: that women said “I’m going to own this” and men replied, “Oh bitch I’ll show you who owns this.”

Back to Snooki for a second. Rutgers paid her $32,000 for a speaking engagement. They paid Toni Morrison $30,000. So, economically speaking, being a Snooki when you grow up is just as good if not better than being a genius and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist.

How to navigate this system? College girls will be called sluts anyway, so they’ll continue go out every Wednesday through Sunday aiming to look just as hot and rape-able as the girls at the very top of the either unspoken or brutally public list of frat’s most wanted–and then they’ll be blamed for it when assaulted, which (never forget) 1 in 4 of them will be. If I was a Yale student drawn to wealthy misogynists the same way that I’m drawn to jean shorts and cinnamon-sugar doughnuts, I’d have played the game too–maybe I’d have believed that my assets were all external and in existence primarily for male consumption, which is the primary tenet of sluthood.

I’m not arguing for the use of the word “slut” or for the right to put people in categories. You can’t judge a slut by her cover, either; a girl certainly has the right to throw her tits out there, get hammered and go home with a stranger just for the fun of it. And, you know, there are a lot of ways to be a terrible human being! It’s just that this one is just so obviously remediable. It can’t be that hard to refuse to buy into the mindset that the best a woman can be is a trophy at the top of the list.

Believing this, or acting like you do, is equivalent to becoming part of the Slut Creation Machine: an awful assembly line turning out young women who neglect to cultivate their personalities because of an accurate assessment that personalities don’t matter to the poon-seeking future leaders of America. We don’t need any more forces contributing to the sizable portion of girls who won’t report their sexual assaults because they believe that blacking out and getting anonymously plowed is the best they can do for a weeknight in college anyway.

So let’s all do our part by recognizing that this is a real problem. Next time you hear someone say “slut” or “slam piece”, suggest that they acquire a husky dog and train it to say “I love you” instead. Happy Friday everyone!

Little Earthquakes, by Jennifer Weiner

First of all, I couldn’t possibly overstate the importance of Little Earthquakes (not this book, the Tori Amos album) in my fifth-grade emotional development. I wrote out the lyrics in glitter pen and stared at them while pondering my heart as an impossible cyclone of bittersweet, abstract longing. You too can experience this feeling by watching this YouTube video of the PS22 kids doing “1000 Oceans.” I’m not even embarrassed to admit this, because that album was good.

Anyway, I’m steadily chipping away at my credibility as a person whose blog you should read–but in pursuit of absolutely nothing, I’ll press on. Jennifer Weiner sells a lot of books and In Her Shoes was made into a Cameron Diaz movie so I figured she was worth checking out–and, well, this book is fine. It’s nowhere near as superficial as Lauren Weisberger’s mind-polluting social climber oeuvre, and it details the lives of normal, intelligent working women (with a basketball player’s wife and an ex-celebrity actress thrown in for the always necessary glam-factor). The book is about pregnancy and money and babies and whatever–a bunch of “women things” that will eventually be important to me but will hopefully never be important enough to make me think that every little detail related to said “women things” is automatically interesting.

Jennifer Weiner has vehemently defended the idea of chick lit before–”Female protagonist, urban setting, smart, sarcastic voice. I don’t see why it matters if you’re thrown into this category,” she says in one interview. I realized after reading this book that that’s not my problem with chick lit (and really, that definition is missing a crucial “who thinks about only herself” clause after the female protagonist part). What bothers me about chick lit is the way it makes women–occasionally including myself–glom onto the minutae of someone’s feminine exploits in the vague hope that the accumulation of details will eventually provide some sort of key to understanding (and perhaps also magically transforming) their own lives. I get a feeling that this is a big reason why, for women, every single relationship story seems individual and fascinating; why else would people continue to watch the Bachelor, which is the same every season as well as every episode? Sure, it’s entertaining to watch girls put on tiny dresses and act sincere for some man who probably not only shaves but also airbrush-tans his chest–but there’s a more than a little of “If I see enough love stories, I’ll figure out my own” in the viewership. And, since we assume that the love story is complete once everyone’s partaken of tiny truffle mac-and-cheese bowls at the wedding, this phenomenon can be assumed to go even farther–to a world where stretch marks replace high heels, but the need for shared attention is the same. There are 3.9 million mommy bloggers out there.

When I brought this up with my boyfriend, he said that the energy that women put into this sort of endless, life-normalizing support group behavior is the energy that men put into sports and misogyny. This strikes me as a good assessment, and I don’t mean to imply that either gender has a lock on narrow, superficial fixations. He also said that most people of both genders don’t even see the attraction of not being superficial, which is a chilling (but probably decently accurate) thought. And women may be the primary audience for anodyne, internal-affairs chicky business, but they also make up 80% of the fiction market–so there’s that. Don’t get me wrong with all of this! I think women comprise the better half of the world by a long shot. I just think they (we) are getting fooled by chick lit and everything like it.

The fact is: these stories about women in whatever form have a legitimate veneer of insight on the female experience, but in reality are creating a false idea that a woman’s life has to revolve around an anti-intellectual beehive of relationships, shoes and status; that a woman’s emotional state is something akin to how I conceived it in fifth grade while listening to the other Little Earthquakes–something important, absorptive, and worth hours of daily maintenance and attention. Jennifer Weiner’s Little Earthquakes, despite being very well-written for its genre, was about as insightful as a cocktail napkin with a saying on it.

Note: I will refer to females as “targets”

So today, Jezebel posted this email written by some guy in Kappa Sig at USC–a treatise so desperately aggressive towards women that its publishing will hopefully render its loser author unable to snag any “cock-pocket” (as he puts it) for quite some time. But maybe not, because there’s always the “Loop n’ Doop: A target that is very easy to take down. All she takes is a good amount of liquor (loop) and she will be good to go for you to fuck her (doop).” The email is long and far from ground-breaking, but here are some highlights on this guy’s treatise on how to be a “Cocksman”: “Note: I will refer to females as ‘targets’. They aren’t actual people like us men. Consequently, giving them a certain name or distinction is pointless.“

Another: “Don’t fuck middle-eastern targets. Exhibit some patriotism and have some pride. You want your cock smelling like falafel? Filth.“

And my personal favorite: “1.) Non-consent and rape are two different things. There is a fine line, so make sure not to cross it.”

Now, I was in a sorority at the University of Virginia, and I’m dating someone who was in a frat there as well. Generally I stayed away from the Greek scene in college because I preferred my sexual marketplace to be a little less… structured; however, I don’t think that this this email is an occasion to bemoan frat culture, which is not universally terrifying and often really fun. More importantly, it’s something in which girls participate by choice. While it genuinely disturbs me that men like this often end up as millionaire CEOs, it’s a girl’s responsibility to have enough self-respect–and better things, or people, to do–than to have to resort to making slutty eyes across the beer pong table at a guy who’s wondering only about your ability to “gobble cock.”

But set this email up against the New York Times and Houston Chronicle coverage of an incident in Texas in which at least seventeen men gang-raped an 11-year-old. The articles are already being lambasted by bloggers for their total victim-blaming and focus on the “plight” of the guys in trouble. From the Times article: “Among [the community's questions] is, if the allegations are proved, how could their young men have been drawn into such an act? ‘It’s just destroyed our community,’ said Sheila Harrison, 48, a hospital worker who says she knows several of the defendants. ‘These boys have to live with this the rest of their lives.‘”

From the Chronicle: “Local officials say the attack has devastated this close-knit community, leaving many to wonder who will be charged next. There’s talk that a star athlete at Cleveland High School was seen sexually assaulting the girl on the video.” Oh no, a star athlete? He had such a bright future ahead of him. He was probably going to go to college, join a frat, and be able to safely walk that “fine line” between non-consent and rape in a place where the alcohol is flowing and none of the girls are 11.

“Carter Williams, 64, seated at a small card table playing dominoes inside a local grocery, does not think laying blame is the right response to the sex assault. ‘This is a praying time for the young men and the young girl,’ Williams said. ‘Seems like everyone in this whole town needs some God in their life.’“

The 11-year-old girl is repeatedly described in a way that would suggest that she “asked for it.” She wore makeup and dressed like she was older. She “made flamboyant statements about drinking, smoking and sex.” While the implication of these details is appalling, I’ll go as far as I can and imagine that the girl did indeed want to sexually experiment at the age of 11 (despite the fact that she was driven to the site of the rape and told she would be beaten if she didn’t take off her clothes and do what the guys wanted her to–a small detail that these news stories seem to be completely ignoring in their tone). To use common parlance, let’s say she was a budding slut.

What, and who, do you think would be responsible for such a thing? The reporters (male and female) who choose to think like the Kappa Sig frat boy and treat obviously victimized girls as targets even after the fact. The culture that created both the frat email and these news stories, which are absolutely two branches of the same tree. The men and women who would read “R.D.A (Raw Dog Assassin): A man that refuses to wear condoms because no feeling on earth can compare to a warm piece of pie coming in contact with your cock” and laugh rather than hold back their vomit. And most of all, the idea that a girl isn’t anything but a target–the sum of her face (maybe), tits, and “spunk-pot”–a piece of objectification whose only path to interaction with the opposite sex is through marketing herself in a misguided and alarming campaign for attention. The child did not grow up in a vacuum. If she was ever indeed acting out sexually, even if she were to have stood in the park and screamed, “I’d love to have violent sex with seventeen adult men in the next hour,” she’s still eleven. The most “blamable” possible eleven-year-old would still be nothing more than a product of all our heinous cultural practices.

I don’t usually break the book review format to write about other things, but this is just too ridiculous. I don’t think that our new acquaintance at Kappa Sig makes it a pastime to gang-rape preteens. But I also don’t think it’s a stretch to imagine that he’s had sex at least once with a girl who didn’t want to have sex with him but was too drunk to fight him off, which is, let’s say it: rape. And I doubt that he would find that too much of an issue.  The attitude that his email reflects is the same attitude that makes reporters at top publications portray this poor 11-year-old as someone who deserved it, and the men who raped her as solid all-American men whose upcoming legal ordeal will rip apart the town. Everyone needs to get some goddamn self-respect here. Girls shouldn’t reduce themselves to “Loop ‘n Doops.” Guys shouldn’t be borderline rapists posing as normal people. Reporters shouldn’t be idiots. It’s not difficult to start being a reasonable person who does not contribute to the acceptability of sexual assault. So here’s to these reporters getting a big slap at the next editorial meeting, and to this Kappa Sig cocksman having only “filth, fatties and uglies” on all forthcoming Gullet Reports.

Readers by Author: 2010 Edition

Well, the snow is falling, I’ve been Christmas caroling all around my Muslim village, and it’s beginning to look a lot like the season for a re-posted new edition of Readers by Author, my rudest and most popular post to date. This, an idea copied from Lauren Leto’s blog, is a short list of what you might (and should) extrapolate about a person once you hear them mention how they “love So-and-So.”

There are four categories. 1: Favorite Authors That Only Make Me Sad. 2: Authors that Suggest the Reader Doesn’t Actually Read, subdivided into A) At least you read your required reading and B) At least you give it a stab now and then. 3: Okay I Get that You Read but You Have to Stop Talking About that One Book and finally, 4: Favorite Authors that Make Me Think HEYO

A caveat, I’m not so much serious about any of this… as I am extremely serious. But really, don’t be offended, because what do I know?

Category 1: Favorite Authors that Only Make Me Sad

(Let me say, while most of the books on this list are girly books, here’s the thing. At least stupid girls read! )

Stephenie Meyer: Horny Christian housewives (or future ones) who get French pedicures.

Jodi Picoult: Ladies who scrapbook and/or find the high school party scenes in Law & Order: SVU mildly titillating.

Lauren Weisberger: Girls who either secretly or openly like the idea of marrying for money (which corroborates Leto’s statement, “Girls who can’t read. Or think.”)

Ayn Rand: People who spend a lot of time thinking about themselves.

Nicholas Sparks: Land’s End-wearing ladies who peaked in high school, or never peaked at all.

James Patterson: Tired people with unsatisfying jobs.

Mitch Albom (author of Tuesdays with Morrie): People who are prone to bursting into tears.

John Grisham: People who decided to read something and John Grisham was kind of the first thing handy.

God (there are quite a few people on Facebook whose favorite book is the Bible, and I’m sure that they all think God sat down and penned it directly): People who, rather than read something non-Christian, would far prefer to pop out seven babies and sit down in front of a good Veggie Tales.

The Bitches that Wrote Skinny Bitch: Girls who “forget to eat” but always end up downing quarts of ice cream at 3 AM.

Whoever Wrote Redeeming Love: Girls who would throw away their birth control if their boyfriend wasn’t making enough progress, nahmean?

J.R.R. Tolkien: People who, during the early AOL era, were not unfamiliar with erotic chat rooms.

Dr. Seuss: Those of simple emotions and feeble minds.

Category 2: Authors that Suggest the Reader Doesn’t Actually Read.

At least you read your required reading:

Edgar Allen Poe: Middle-schoolers who are about to graduate to reading erotic bondage fiction online.

Mark Twain/Ralph Waldo Emerson: Men who harbor elaborate woodsman fantasies but never consider career options outside of business.

Harper Lee: You could’ve been a reader, why did you lose steam?

George Orwell: People who stay up late watching creepy things on A&E.

F. Scott Fitzgerald: People who are either really rich or really want to be.

J.D. Salinger: Boys who wish they went to boarding school so they’d have more space for their angst.

Emily Dickinson: Girls who would go to Canada just for the Anne of Green Gables museum.

Allen Ginsberg: People who in actuality never made it through all of “Howl” but really liked that part about “angelheaded hipsters.”

Lewis Carroll: People who will take any drug you offer them, no explanation necessary.

Joseph Heller: Guys who sometimes have idle visions of intense physical violence.

Oscar Wilde: People who sit around thinking about what they’d look like in various outfits.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery: Dreamy-eyed victims of the fact that everything sounds better in a foreign language.

D.H. Lawrence: People who would rather talk about something than do it.

Sylvia Plath: Girls who are a lot like Sylvia Plath, minus the genius part.

At least you give it a stab now and then:

Dan Brown: People underexposed to books.

Chuck Klosterman: People underexposed to thought.

Chuck Palahniuk: People who can’t control their rage and/or rape fantasies (which corroborates Leto’s statement, “Boys who can’t read.”)

Philip Pullman: Not sure, but they’re all frustrated.

C.S. Lewis: Christcore hipsters who would be atheists if they hadn’t been born in the South.

Philippa Gregory: Sexually unsatisfied pale girls who secretly want to put on a wench costume and finally get those tits out there.

Emily Giffin: Women who work really hard but would switch lives with Betty Draper in a second if they could.

James Frey: People who try to read the news and then get bored and start texting.

Sophie Kinsella: Women who will call themselves “girls” well until their forties.

Khaled Hosseini: Either people who are somehow personally involved with Middle Eastern politics or white-bread Americans who can’t stop thinking about that butt sex scene.

Daniel Quinn, author of Ishmael: Well-meaning people with greasy, greasy hair.

Category 3: Okay I Get that You Read But You Have to Stop Talking About that One Book

Jack Kerouac: People who like the idea of camping… but not camping.

Jonathan Safran Foer: Impressionable people who take all the outlets at coffee shops.

Raymond Chandler: Men who feel like the twenty-first century is not giving them a good enough forum to enact their manhood.

Agatha Christie or any other mystery writer: Grandmas.

Paulo Coelho: People who sometimes contemplate one idea for an entire afternoon and then wake up and are like, “Wait, is Chipotle still open?”

Nicole Krauss: Nice mousy people who lack gaydar.

Dave Eggers: People who at one point thought about joining the Peace Corps but then went to see a jam band and forgot.

Robert M. Pirsig: Semi-lame guys who frequently try to impress girls with the fact that they’ve read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Jane Austen: Girls who would rather cuddle than have sex.

Virginia Woolf: Girls with other, more complicated sexual issues.

Jon Krakauer: Guys who get huge boners when they walk into REI.

Kurt Vonnegut: People who look on Wikiquote a lot in search of something that really really defines them.

Michael Pollan: Self-righteous anorexic vegetarians, or rich people who like doing things halfway.

T.S. Eliot: People who believe that The Wasteland is actually incomprehensible but bought that giant folio edition anyway.

Elizabeth Gilbert: Ladies who don’t understand their tax forms and just want to find love.

Malcolm Gladwell: People who will be extremely hilarious when they finally discover TED Talks.

John Kennedy Toole: People who are not not frat boys at heart.

Jared Diamond: Men who read in their studies and own the John Adams miniseries on DVD.

Howard Zinn: People who can’t let a Thanksgiving go by without being like “You know, what we’re really celebrating is smallpox and genocide…”

Richard Dawkins: God-haters who should be stuffed with Xanax once they start arguing.

Neil Gaiman: Freaks! Just kidding. Still, people who really like Emily the Strange and probably roleplay in the bedroom.

Bret Easton Ellis: People who have had a higher-than-average amount of experiences with whiskey dick.

Category 4: Favorite Authors That Make Me Think HEYO

(This category is Janus-faced, if you will. I do not appreciate it when people start Anna Karenina or Finnegan’s Wake, instantly collapse from exhaustion, and then claim Tolstoy or Joyce as their favorite author all the livelong day. With certain exceptions—the first three—people who truly love these authors usually have little to prove in terms of their intellect, so these aren’t common points of conversation.)

J.K. Rowling: Mostly Gryffindors. Some Ravenclaws, the occasional Slytherin. No Hufflepuffs.

Roald Dahl: People who don’t seem sentimental but are.

Madeleine L’Engle: Weird girls who are actually totally awesome.

Cormac McCarthy: Guys who have been clinically depressed and girls who have orgasmed on accident.

Margaret Atwood: Girls who date guys with delicate bones.

Leo Tolstoy: Awesome people who don’t get out enough but feel like they do because they think so much.

Donald Barthelme: The lovable insane.

Philip Roth: Men who could successfully maintain a string of extramarital affairs.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez: People who are only really happy at weird, random moments.

Ernest Hemingway: People who don’t feel particularly attached to their romantic relationships but end up in a lot of them anyway.

Fyodor Dostoevsky: People who are born ethical and don’t really know what to do about it.

James Joyce: People who have lots of vaguely ecstatic, sublime moments while they’re traveling but end up overly fond of alone time.

Jorge Luis Borges: Smart people with good spatial reasoning that wouldn’t feel bad about jacking off while a family member was in the room.

Henry James: Distant, perceptive people.

John Cheever: Alcoholics.

Raymond Carver: Alcoholic stoners.

Any other writer famous mostly for his or her short stories: People who took creative writing a lot in college and want to be writers, but whose own stories are mostly full of mediocre artificial realism. People… like me…

Thomas Pynchon: People with big ambitions and even bigger egos.

Haruki Murakami: People who are good at keeping secrets.

Sherwood Anderson: I’ve never met any of these people. If you exist, I’m ready to become best friends.

Eat Pray Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert

From the book jacket: “In her early thirties, Elizabeth Gilbert had everything a modern American woman was supposed to want, but instead of feeling happy and fulfilled, she felt consumed by panic and confusion. This wise and rapturous book is the story of how she left behind all these outward marks of success, and what she found in their place… pleasure in Italy, devotion in India, and on the Indonesian island of Bali, a balance between worldly enjoyment and divine transcendence.”

Obviously I hate this book. Obviously. Aside from the fact that it has reached such a wide audience by dint of the author’s extreme self-involvement and confessional, silly-best-friend-at-Starbucks tone–and the fact that, because the ideas of Other Countries and Spirituality and Pleasure are central, most of these readers are deceived into thinking the book is indeed “wise and rapturous”–AND the fact that apparently there’s a Florence and the Machine song in the trailer for the movie, which my boyfriend told me just because he knew I would be enraged–bottom line is that this book is just so fucking lame. It kills me.

Let me say, I have never had any patience for problems of privilege. To read about “the fallout of a postfeminist American career girl trying to find balance in an increasingly stressful and alienating urban world,” and to try to muster sympathy for the fact that she tried everything from vegetarianism to therapy to special underwear to balance her chakras and oh, the horror, nothing worked–I just couldn’t possibly give a shit. I know that sadness is sadness, and I’m sure Elizabeth Gilbert’s divorce was very hard for her, but she’s a lucky motherfucker and rather than take this year-long pleasure cruise through making herself a better person, she should’ve just taken up residence in an American homeless shelter or perhaps joined the Peace Corps. Boom: an attitude adjustment requiring no sentences as irritating as “Here’s what’s strange, though. I haven’t seemed to be able to do any Yoga since getting to Rome.” She’s so dramatic about her day-to-day thought process throughout the entire book that she seems for the most part completely oblivious to the fact that any kind of (healthy) treatment for depression is off-limits to the vast majority of the world.

But of course, she could have just medicated herself extensively and become a wobbly, dependent, and even more superficial person, so Elizabeth Gilbert’s hunt for happiness/self-esteem/God isn’t so bad. It is a completely entertaining book to read. I appreciate that she put antidepressants in their place, stating that they worked for her only because she worked just as hard as they did to help herself recover. I appreciate that she traveled at all and I appreciate that she genuinely tried to follow the ritual meditation practices at her Indian ashram–despite the fact that in this attempt to find perspective, she never left it. I don’t doubt that Elizabeth Gilbert is a good and thoughtful person, and I suppose she couldn’t have gotten a best-selling book and a movie out of a jaunt into the slums of Mumbai.

As usual, there is a certain element of thoughtlessness in my reaction to this book. I have never found it difficult to locate the practical in the ideas of happiness and God, and maybe it’s out of pure conceitedness that I think self-esteem problems–no matter how real–are a waste of time. But I’m sick of extravagant solutions for problems that grow out of too much money and not enough purpose. My usual treatment for sadness and confusion–do some work, roll a joint, and imagine for a second that I have cystic acne and no legs–is cheaper, less public, and it’s working just fine for me.

Gone With the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell: part 2

I have the urge to buy all remaining copies of this hilarious-looking cookbook and give them as gifts for the rest of my life. Anyway, as I wrote in a previous post, I hadn’t read Gone With the Wind since fourth grade. My long-standing impression was that it was a fun, ridiculous book–filled with absurd slave dialect, shamelessly romantic images, and a heroine who thinks things like “…must remember to toss her head frequently when with Rhett. Dancing earrings always attracted a man and gave a girl such a spirited air.”

 However. After two days of staying in bed because it was raining and I couldn’t stop rereading, I’d like to stand up for Gone With the Wind as a great fucking read. It is indeed kitsch Tolstoy, like the ten best episodes of Gossip Girl strung together against the epic historical background of war. The main characters are as complex and interestingly flawed as any venerated characters in literature, and reading slowly–it is becoming the task of my year to teach myself to read slower–I found that the writing is as restrained in some ways as it is overindulgent in others. But mostly in terms of sex, which pervades the book but is barely mentioned.

I kept thinking, rereading it, how impossible a story like this would be about people nowadays. Scarlett a century and a half later, not being so sheltered as to wonder “with impersonal curiosity, exactly what was expected of a mistress,” would simply have had sex with Rhett early on in the story. Why? Because he’s hot and wants to have sex with her and she’s a massive slut already (just minus the sex part, which is fascinating). She would have then fallen in love with him, because he clearly loved her and had very few clear ways of expressing it–”If you had only let me, I could have loved you as gently and tenderly as a man has ever loved a woman”–and of course he’s rude and unpredictable and all the other things that girls find attractive–and then their theatrics would have calmed down considerably. Also, if this story were written today, there would probably be fewer words like “tenderly,” which would be a plus.

 But it’s just absurd. Scarlett starves on her plantation for years without it ever occurring to her that the only man who had ever made her feel sexual attraction in her life was also a millionaire, and had also said that he’d do anything for her. He’s pretty aggressive about wanting her, too: “I want to make you faint. I will make you faint. You’ve had this coming to you for years. None of the fools you’ve known have kissed you like this–have they?” Ridiculous. The man is dying to give you all his money, Scarlett, and probably some other stuff too. Hungry? Why wait?

 Other things that were amusingly anachronistic upon my reread include the moment when Scarlett looks in the mirror and thinks, “I’m not pretty enough to get him! I’m thin–oh, I’m terribly thin!” It was again, just ridiculous to imagine that sentence being written in a chick-lit book these days. Also p. 557: “Dressing unaided was difficult but she finally accomplished it.” Dressing unaided was difficult? I would kill myself if I had to wear clothes I couldn’t put on by myself. Or if “no woman could really feel like a lady without gloves.” Oh no. Oh NO.

 But, funny as it was, that last line reminded me of a night last year when I had been sitting around talking with some of my friends in Texas, boys who had graduated from A&M. One of them was making fun of a girl who had hit on him at a bar, and he actually said this sentence: “And I could tell she hadn’t gotten her nails done in awhile.”

 At the time, that just made me idly ponder how glad I was to not have ever wanted to date someone of his tribe, because God knows I’d be shit out of luck. But of course it’s pretty silly to hear a Civil War-era thought articulated in the twenty-first century, and a lot of times while rereading Gone With the Wind, I found myself thinking that so many things that Margaret Mitchell wrote about the peculiarities of Southern culture still applied.

 ”So, from the cradle to the grave, women strove to make men pleased with themselves, and the satisfied men repaid lavishly with gallantry and adoration. In fact, men willingly gave the ladies everything in the world except credit for having intelligence.” I can’t tell you how many times I sat getting cross-eyed in Houston bars listening to oxford-clad, recently graduated econ majors tell me about the dumbest stuff in the world–and watched the scene repeated bar stool by bar stool, all around me, except for the fact that the other girls looked interested. If they were together enough to not swoon over somebody’s daddy’s energy business, they didn’t show it. I also cannot tell you how many times I wondered why it seemed so rare for girls I knew from the South to maintain equal, reciprocal, respectful friendships with guys. Or why flattery and money seemed so often on the brain.

 I don’t mean this as a generalization, because the South produces some truly fine individuals who combine courteous heritage with progressive common sense. Communities still care about each other there more than anywhere else in the States. I went to UVA because at the very last minute in my college search, I realized that New England was not quite as fun as the fratty, unapologetic South. I have gone to enormous lengths in search of a meal at Cracker Barrel. I spent two hours today introducing my Kyrgyz family to the comforting glories of biscuits with honey butter. What I’m trying to say is, I am glad I’m from where I’m from.

 But, but, but. The South, deep-down, is not like the rest of America, and it never will be. As my friend with a Confederate flag hanging in his room said, “My family is proud of our history.” And I’m sure they are. And as God is my witness, I will never not let that disgust me again.

I leave you with a gem of a sentence from the middle of the book: “‘Ah is gwine ter he’p you pleasure Mist’ Frank eve’y way Ah knows how,’ said Mammy, tucking the covers about Scarlett’s neck.”

Readers by Author, Jia’s Version

Lauren Leto stereotyped readers by their favorite author in a lovely list on her blog, and it’s about as snarky and judgmental as such a list should be, but I still found myself thinking: too nice. So I am ripping it off for my 100th post. The four categories are: “Eww,” “You Don’t Really Read,” “Okay I Get That You Read But You Have To Stop Talking About That One Book,” and “Hey, Come Here Often?”

Eww.

(Let me say, while most of the books on this list are girly books, here’s the thing. At least stupid girls read! )

Stephenie Meyer: Horny Christian housewives (or future ones) who get French pedicures.

Jodi Picoult: Ladies who scrapbook and/or find the high school party scenes in Law & Order: SVU mildly titillating.

Lauren Weisberger: Girls who either secretly or openly like the idea of marrying for money (which corroborates Leto’s statement, “Girls who can’t read. Or think.”)

Ayn Rand: Selfish people.

Nicholas Sparks: Ladies who peaked in high school, or never peaked at all.

James Patterson: Tired people with unsatisfying jobs.

John Grisham: People who are confused and John Grisham was kind of the first thing handy.

The Bitches that Wrote Skinny Bitch: Girls who try to “forget to eat” but always end up downing quarts of ice cream at 3 AM.

Whoever Wrote Redeeming Love: Girls who would throw away their birth control if their boyfriend wasn’t making enough progress, nahmean?

J.R.R. Tolkien: People who have at least contemplated cybersex if not initiated it–nightly.

You Don’t Really Read.

(Divided into the “At Least You Read Your Required Reading,” and “At Least You Tried” categories.)

At Least You Read Your Required Reading:

Edgar Allen Poe: Middle-schoolers who are about to graduate to reading erotic bondage fiction online.

Mark Twain/Ralph Waldo Emerson: Men who harbor elaborate woodsman fantasies but never consider career options outside of business.

Harper Lee: Yeah, To Kill A Mockingbird is a great book, isn’t it. You could’ve been a reader, why did you lose steam?

George Orwell: People who stay up late watching creepy things on A&E.

F. Scott Fitzgerald: People who are either really rich or really really want to be.

J.D. Salinger: Boys who wish they went to boarding school so they’d have more space for their angst.

Emily Dickinson: Girls who use decade-old makeup and wish consumption was still a viable disease.

Allen Ginsberg: People who actually never even made it through all of “Howl.”

At Least You Tried:

Dan Brown: People underexposed to books.

Chuck Klosterman: People underexposed to thought.

Chuck Palahniuk: People with rape fantasies (which corroborates Leto’s statement, “Boys who can’t read.”)

C.S. Lewis: Christcore hipsters who would be atheists if they hadn’t been born in the South.

Philippa Gregory: Sexually unsatisfied pale girls who secretly want to put on a wench costume.

Emily Giffin: Women who work really hard but wish it was still the fifties.

James Frey: People who try to read the news and then get bored and start texting.

Daniel Quinn, author of Ishmael: Well-meaning people with greasy, greasy hair.

Okay I Get That You Read But You Have To Stop Talking About That One Book

Jack Kerouac: People who like the idea of camping but not camping.

Jonathan Safran Foer: The people who take all the outlets at coffee shops.

Paulo Coelho: People who sometimes contemplate one idea for an entire afternoon and then wake up and are like, “Wait, is Chipotle still open?”

Nicole Krauss: Nice mousy people who lack gaydar.

Dave Eggers: People who at one point thought about joining the Peace Corps but then went to see a jam band and forgot.

Jane Austen: Girls who would always rather cuddle than have sex.

Kurt Vonnegut: People who look on Wikiquote a lot in search of something that really really defines them.

Michael Pollan: Self-righteous anorexic vegetarians, or rich people who like doing things halfway.

Elizabeth Gilbert: Ladies who don’t understand their tax forms and want to marry older, kind of dirty men.

Bret Easton Ellis: People who have had a higher-than-average amount of experiences with whiskey dick.

Hey, Come Here Often?

(This category is Janus-faced, if you will. I do not appreciate it when people start Anna Karenina or Finnegan’s Wake, instantly collapse from exhaustion, and then claim Tolstoy or Joyce as their favorite author all the livelong day. People who truly love these authors often can’t stand to talk about it because they love them so much. And I like that.)

J.K. Rowling: Mostly Gryffindors. Some Ravenclaws, the occasional Slytherin. No Hufflepuffs.

Cormac McCarthy: Guys who have been clinically depressed and girls who have orgasmed on accident.

Margaret Atwood: Girls who date guys with delicate bones.

Leo Tolstoy: Awesome people who don’t get out enough but feel like they do because they think so much.

Philip Roth: Men who could successfully maintain a string of extramarital affairs.

Ernest Hemingway: Non-needy people that date super-needy people.

Fyodor Dostoevsky: People who are born ethical and don’t really know what to do about it.

James Joyce: People who have lots of vaguely ecstatic, sublime moments while they’re traveling but end up overly fond of alone time.

Jorge Luis Borges: Smart people with good spatial reasoning that wouldn’t feel bad about jacking off while a family member was in the room.

John Cheever: Alcoholics.

Raymond Carver: Alcoholic stoners.

Haruki Murakami: People who are good at keeping secrets.

Sherwood Anderson: Want to get married? I’m serious.

The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand

I absolutely hate Ayn Rand. I abhor her. And if you like her–and I understand that many intelligent people go through or have gone through a die-hard Ayn phase, in much the same way that in fourth grade I couldn’t stop listening to “C’est La Vie” by B*Witched–either stop reading or please forgive me for this forthcoming stream of bile.

From the horse’s mouth: “My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.” That sounds fine, right? Definitely fine if you live in an imaginary capitalist snowglobe, where everyone is Patrick Bateman, injustice and hegemony have never existed, and sanitation and social work are done by robots, thus leaving the real people free to build skyscrapers and have lofty (heterosexual) sex. And to be honest, that kind of sounds like an awesome world, I’ll admit it. Perhaps the reason why I hate Ayn Rand so much is that she, like the best kind of devil, tells enticing half-truths. I too can be delusional and selfish, just like Ayn and her followers, and of course I would love to live in this hallucinated Gotham of flawless individuals. But I am not as delusional as Ayn. I know when my jeans won’t button, unlike Ayn, who would have loved to forget that she was really a short Russian Jew named Alisa Rosenbaum, bearing little resemblance to patrician, ideal Dominique Francon in The Fountainhead. And certainly, she was selfish.

But of course, to her, “selfish” is a positive word, meaning staying true to yourself despite the views of others. This is a crucial tenet of her philosophy, although it also sounds like a priggish excuse best usable by a spouse caught in an affair–”It has nothing to do with you! I was just staying true to myself!” etc. The fact that this comparison (between central philosophy and doghouse blather) is so easily made is just one of the reasons why objectivism is a morally bankrupt, dilettantish, and fucking stupid way of thinking. People like it because it is the philosophical equivalent of college: a potentially meaningful but incredibly misused scaffolding that enables people to think, “Bitch, I do what I want.” 

But the gender stuff is the worst. “The essence of femininity is hero worship—the desire to look up to man,” she says. “An ideal woman is a man-worshiper, and an ideal man is the highest symbol of mankind.” And I understand that she’s saying that the man has to be worthy or ideal before any of this is true, and, being straight, I can even get down with the idea that a woman “experiences the essence of her femininity” while surrendering (sexually) to a man “worthy” of dominating her. But no ma’am. She taps into a well of dangerous, complicated cultural undercurrents with this thought, which is anything but objective.

Ayn Rand undermines awareness and good sense just as much as all those evangelical Christian books that tell boys to hunt and girls to think they’re princesses. I am upset now. I need a cookie.