My Engagement Ring

I can't wait to get my engagement ring back from the jeweler where it's getting resized. That's right, I said my engagement ring. I'm part of the five percent of men who wear an engagement ring (and I refuse to use the ridiculous portmanteau by which that Atlantic article refers to these rings).

I got engaged a little over a month ago, and in the lead up to that event, I noticed a surprising amount of verbiage being expended on the material and symbolic meanings of this little metal circle that betrothed women wear. Amanda Marcotte believes, "It's high time to end the tradition of the engagement ring, along with other wedding rituals that are built on the assumption that a bride is dependent and virginal." And Shannon Rupp writes, "I’ve always thought giving engagement rings was a slightly unsavoury custom, given that it began in an era when women were chattel, more or less." Kay Steiger says, “Honestly, I’d rather have an iPad.”

I get their points, but to be fair, all of their arguments about the negative historical connotations of the engagement ring apply just as much to the institution of marriage itself. Just as the social and legal institution of marriage has changed in meaning from a proprietary exchange to a partnership, so too can we change the meaning of the engagement, and with it, the engagement ring. The arguments put forth in Slate, Salon, and XOJane are built on a false dichotomy--either we do away with the engagement ring, or we hold onto it as an ironic vestige of the patriarchy.

Of course, it IS an ironic vestige of the patriarchy, but that doesn't mean it can't also have a new meaning, a new meaning conferred on it in no small part by the fact that it was a mutually exchanged gift. I don't currently live with my fiancée, and while we see each other almost every day and message each other throughout the day, I like wearing the ring as a reminder of our partnership. If I'm, say, bored or stressed out at work, it's comforting to know that I can always depend on her and she can always depend on me. And it's fun to think about how a little over a year from now, we'll have all of our close friends and family together for a big party where we'll stand up and declare our intention to jointly file our tax returns for the rest of our lives. And I know that she feels the same way.

She's my constant.

Side note: Remember how great Desmond and Penny were on LOST?

I'm not the only one who feels this way, and particularly given the shift in views towards same sex marriage in recent years, the idea of keeping the engagement ring around as a gendered institution is becoming increasingly silly. (Though as my fiancée noted when she was shopping for my ring, it's hard to find a men's engagement ring that does not look like it was designed to be given to a man by a man. Many of those ones look nice, but I'm just not that flashy. Clearly, this is an untapped market for the jewelry industry.)

But the thing that I most like about mutual engagement rings is the way it changes the proposal. I don't know how the rest of the five percent of guys came by their rings, but I came by mine through a mutual exchange. We got engaged in February, but we knew it was coming for about three months before that. It was a decision we had arrived at through ongoing discussions about our goals and our plans, and once we both knew that we wanted to get engaged, we spent the next couple of months buying rings for each other and making plans. Then in February we both took three days off work, went to Traverse City, ate good food and drank good beer, sat down at a nice restaurant, told each other why we loved one another, exchanged rings, and asked each other to marry us (wow, English pronouns do not make it easy to construct that sentence in an elegant way).

By comparison, "traditional" engagements seem tremendously stressful. As I understand it, you have to arrive at a point in your relationship where you're ready to commit to one another, which might be different for each party. Then, you either don't talk about marriage or only talk about it somewhat surreptitiously. Then the guy is obligated to plan a surprise proposal on his own that accords with his girlfriend's romantic sensibilities, while she has to wait on pins and needles for this life-altering surprise, possibly for maybe many months. The whole thing sounds crazy-making for everyone. Remember Charlotte and Harry in the sixth season of Sex and the City?

Our "proposal," on the other hand, was essentially a very romantic vacation. Weddings are a public event, a communal affirmation of your commitment for friends and family to share in. Getting engaged in this way made it into a personal event--not a surprise, but an affirmation in its own right, only one that was just for us. There's no reason why any ring would have to be a part of that affirmation, but I nonetheless feel good wearing my little metal circle.

Brooding White Dudes on TV

A few weeks ago I posted this status to Facebook:

Attention TV: if your show stars a pensive-looking 40+ year old white dude in a suit and he's not fighting aliens or robots or something, I just can't bring myself to care.

The status was a response to the chatter that week about the second season of House of Cards, a show that I've tried and failed to get into several times now. I made it most of the way through the first season. It consistently struck me as a caricature of what "serious" TV is supposed to look like. It's dark and atmospheric, with a cast full of powerful characters who speak deceptively to one another, hiding agendas and double-crossing one another. I can't decide what I find more ridiculous about it--the fact that it's a show about political power that cares very little about how American politics actually works, or Kevin Spacey's self-important soliloquies. Actually, that's not true. Of course it's the soliloquies that I find more ridiculous. But the misunderstanding of politics is what bugs me. The mechanics of the characters' political machinations seem consistently off in one way or another. That's almost forgivable given that the Washington, D.C. setting seems more like an excuse for the creators to make a big existential point about...something or other. What's less forgivable is the fact that, for a show ostensibly set in the present, Frank Underwood's version of the Democratic party sure boasts a lot of white southerners.

But this isn't a post about House of Cards, nor is it a post about the politics of representation (not entirely, at least). Countless essays have been written about the overrepresentation of white men in media and the ways in which it contributes to a general cultural perception that white men's stories are more deserving to be told or occupy more space in the cultural landscape. I have little to add to that point specifically, though I consider it extremely important. I'm more interested in the question from a creative dimension. Because, politics aside, I'm genuinely bored by the "brooding white dude" model of "serious" television represented by House of Cards. And Mad Men. And Boardwalk Empire. And Justified. And Dexter. And The Sopranos. And 24. And most procedurals (House, Sherlock, all of the CSIs). And, admittedly, Breaking Bad, which I nonetheless love.

I often like to think about culture in quantitative terms. So much about humanistic analysis is subjective, and that's a good thing--culture is complex and ambiguous and deserving of multiple debatable interpretations--but I still like to start from a relatively objective place when I can. So, with that in mind, I'm going to return to my initial complaining Facebook status and do a back-of-the-envelope calculation. In that status, I identified six variables with which a TV show is constructed. Let's look at each of them in turn:

1. Affect ("pensive-looking"). This is what I mean by "brooding"--the tone of the show, as dictated by its lead's primary emotional state. When you poke at it, it's striking how often TV shows rely on their lead's brooding affect to convey the Importance of its subject matter. I don't care how many cigarettes you smoke while staring out of a window, Dick Whitman, your identity theft still isn't that big of a deal.
• There are a lot of ways to categorize emotions, but let's go with Love, Joy, Surprise, Anger, Sadness, and Fear as our basic six. It seems pretty clear that we tend to associate Anger and Sadness in our fiction with Serious and Smart storytelling, while undervaluing Love and Joy (more closely associated with comedy than drama), as well as Surprise and Fear (more closely associated with "genre fiction").
2. Age ("40+ year old"). Maybe I'm just too old for them to be on my radar anymore, but it seems like there is no equivalent to My So Called Life, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or even Friday Night Lights on TV right now. Again, Serious and Smart storytelling seems to be associated narrowly with one life stage--adult with kids who has attained some degree of professional status, but isn't yet retired. In other words, someone in their 40s or 50s.
• A "generation" is roughly 20 years, so let's break age demographics into four generations: Under 20 years old, 20-40 years old, 40-60 years old, and over 60 years old.
3. Race ("white"). Pretty straightforward.
• It's notoriously difficult to come up with a list of categories for this field. For the sake of our back-of-the envelope calculation, let's use the five categories used by the US Census Bureau--White, Black or African American, American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, and Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander--and simply add Multiracial and Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish to make seven (I know, I know, I'm grossly oversimplifying, but bear with me for just a minute).
4. Gender ("dude"). Also pretty straightforward.
• Let's go with three--male, female, and third gender/genderqueer.
5. Number of protagonists ("dude" singular). People tend not to notice this, but these serious "antihero" shows tend to feature a single protagonist, even those with strong ensembles.
• In addition to the "single protagonist" model, plenty of shows employ the "duo" model, with two leads who are either romantic or professional partners, or both. Plenty of other shows employ the "ensemble" model, where anywhere from four to a dozen main characters are sufficiently well established as to serve as the protagonist for a plot line. Remarkably, I can't think of any trios, perhaps because in any show with three leads, one is likely to stand out as the primary protagonist. So let's say there are three models.
6. Class ("in a suit"). Just as serious TV tends to be associated with a certain life stage, it's also associated with professional success, featuring a hefty dose of middle- and upper-class white collar professionals.
• Let's keep it simple and go with a white collar vs. blue collar dichotomy.

6 x 4 x 7 x 3 x 3 x 2 = 3,024

There are myriad other variables one consciously or unconsciously considers when crafting the premise for a narrative, be that a television show or anything else. I didn't even touch on the genre question implied by my "fight aliens or robots" comment. But just using these six variables, and my very rough estimates for the different categories falling under each variable, yields over three thousand possible permutations. So why the prevalence of the archetypal pensive-looking 40+ year old white dude in a suit?

But, you may say, the categories aren't evenly distributed in real life, so of course you can't expect every permutation to appear as if they were randomly distributed.

Of course not, but (a) it's still pretty obvious that the pensive-looking 40+ year old white dude in a suit is overrepresented, and (b) as I said at the start, I'm not talking about the politics of representation; I'm talking about creativity. People whose experiences are less common can be, for that very reason, more creatively interesting. The guy who goes broke paying for his cancer treatment is far more common than the guy who becomes a drug kingpin to pay for his cancer treatment, but I'm not interested in his TV show. Tell me you wouldn't be curious to watch a show about two 70-year-old underemployed genderqueer Hawaiians living in a haunted house.

Now, I don't want to fall into the "Why are there no _______?" fallacy. There are PLENTY of shows featuring more creative permutations of these variables (American Horror Story and Orange is the New Black come to mind, and of course, the reason so many people are still obsessed with The Wire is because it subverts the "pensive-looking 40+ year old white dude in a suit" model so well). But when you think about the shows that (a) get made, (b) get made well, and (c) attain enough critical and popular attention to become part of the zeitgeist, it's surprising there isn't more diversity.

One reason why I decided to write this post was to illustrate the usefulness of some simple quantitative methods. If I had the time and the resources to survey the TV landscape, it would be easy enough to pin down this lack of diversity in less impressionistic language. I wish people with more time and resources would do that.

The other reason I decided to write this post was to make a confession: A couple days after posting that status I started watching True Detective, a show about two pensive-looking 40+ year old white dudes in suits (Hey, a duo! That's a different permutation!). And I. Love. That. Show. I justify my bit of hypocrisy largely because I'm invested in pulp fiction tropes, and the show provides a very smart spin on both the detective fiction and weird fiction genres. Its use of weird fiction tropes is particularly interesting--I'm not convinced that tomorrow's finale won't end with Marty and Rust fighting aliens or robots or demons or something.

But more importantly, I don't think there's anything inherently "wrong" with True Detective simply because it's another iteration of an overly represented permutation of variables, nor do I think there is anything wrong with the other shows I listed earlier (except for House of Cards, which I still think is simply ridiculous). Approaching this issue from a more quantitative perspective helps to distinguish between a problematic trend and an individual instance of that trend. I'm disinclined to hold the former against the latter.

Circling back around to the politics of representation, this is a problem that often comes up in feminist pop culture criticism, particularly around discussions of the Bechdel test. But I tend to think that the Bechdel test is most useful for looking at a problem that exists in culture macroscopically. That so few films pass the Bechdel test (while, simultaneously, so few fail the reverse Bechdel test by focusing on female homosocial spaces) illustrates an inequality in the pop culture landscape, but I'm not necessarily going to use the Bechdel test to evaluate the feminist sensibilities of an individual film.

(Side note: One way in which I think about the usefulness of the Bechdel test in evaluating individual films is by asking, could the movie have passed the test without affecting the story? In a movie like The Shawshank Redemption, for example, the fact that the movie takes place almost entirely in the homosocial environment of a men's prison is pretty central to the story, and I'm not inclined to call its lack of women unfeminist. On the other hand, a film like Pacific Rim, Mako Mori test aside, probably could have flipped the gender of one or two characters and passed without changing the story, and that seems like a missed opportunity in an otherwise strong film. This isn't the only thing to consider, but it's a place to start.)

I have plenty of feminist friends who rail against this cultural imbalance while loving Hannibal or Supernatural or Sherlock. We all have our preferred brooding white dudes, and that's okay. So, on the one hand, I'm not going to say that anyone should watch True Detective. I firmly believe that there is no such thing as "must watch" TV, just like there are no "must read" books. And if your only reason for not watching it is you can't bring yourself to care about pensive-looking 40+ year old white dudes in suits, more power to you. But I still can't wait to find out who the Yellow King is.

I hope it's an alien or robot or something.

Etiquette Guidelines for Instructors Interacting with Other Instructors

A few months ago, I wrote up a list titled “Etiquette Guidelines for Students Interacting with Instructors.” A friend of mine at the Duck of Minerva blog asked to post it, and after the post enjoyed some popularity, I decided to start my own blog and repost that list, with a few modifications and additions. With the better part of another semester under my belt, I figured it was time for a follow up, this time directed at my fellow instructors.

This might come as a surprise to some of you, but the academic job market is a bit rough (“rough” is a synonym for Mad Max-style post-apocalyptic hellscape, right?). One consequence of this is a general diminishing of collegiality among young instructors. In times of scarcity, collaboration can give way to competition without people even noticing it, and as I’ve reflected on interactions with my fellow graduate students and lecturers, I’ve come to be more sensitive to the various unconscious slights that characterize those interactions. I’ve been on both sides of these slights, sometimes at the same time, and I’ve seen firsthand how they undermine a collaborative learning environment.

An image from last year's MLA convention in Boston.

So, with a view to eliminating these slights, I’ve come up with a list of four simple tips:

Don’t assume there is only one successful teaching style.

When I teach Freshman writing, I use a thin volume titled They Say, I Say. I like it for a number of reasons. It’s a very basic introduction to the idea of dialectical analysis, and for students coming out of a high school curriculum emphasizing the five paragraph essay, that can be useful; its short chapters provide a nice scaffolding for a class that can be augmented with other readings; and it provides templates that make sophisticated rhetorical moves rather concrete. That said, it’s not for everyone. It works better for some genres of academic writing than others, and its templates can lead to stilted and logically flawed writing if you don’t make sure to correct for that in lessons. Now, say you aren’t a fan of the book, and I just told you I am. Taking a cue from the book, which of the following templates would you use to express your dislike?

The problem with They Say, I Say is ___________.
They Say, I Say doesn’t work for me because ___________.

The first assertion implicitly impugns me as a teacher by suggesting that there is an objective “problem” with the textbook, while the second assertion acknowledges that the difference is one of taste and style.

When a department is run well, it’s a wonderfully diverse place filled with people who are different kinds of thinkers from different backgrounds, and what fits one instructor’s personality might be a disaster for another instructor. I believe that fostering a successful classroom environment comes down to three rules: (1) be obviously smart, (2) teach the course students expect (corollary: write a very clear course description and syllabus), and (3) be yourself. If you're tough, don't try to be relaxed; if you're relaxed, don't try to be tough. If you’re a concrete thinker, don’t try to be abstract; if you’re abstract, don’t try to be concrete. Play to your strengths, and when talking to other instructors, don’t assume that you and they share the same strengths and weaknesses.

Ask questions freely.

We all suffer from impostor syndrome, but nobody wants to admit it. Because we don’t want to admit it, we are all gun-shy about asking for help. But one consequence of the intellectual diversity I mentioned above is we all have a font of knowledge about teaching techniques at our disposal at all times. This semester, I’m teaching two courses I’ve never taught before, and I’ve been a glutton for lesson ideas. I toss out a call for recommendations on Facebook on an almost weekly basis, and I stalk the halls of my department looking for people to chat with about how to approach a topic almost every day. I’m surprised others don’t do this as frequently. I am positive that having gotten into the habit of seeking out colleagues’ advice has made me a better teacher. Our fellow instructors are an available resource that we should all utilize often.

Answer questions readily.

And when colleagues do seek us out as resources, we should share ideas without hesitation. Great teaching isn’t a zero-sum game, but I’ve known instructors who were hesitant to share when asked about their teaching techniques. This isn’t the right attitude. That said…

Don’t volunteer unsolicited advice.

In the classic film, White Men Can’t Jump, Gloria (Rosie Perez) is lying in bed with Billy (Woody Harrelson), and the two have the following exchange (the scene is at 37:45):

Gloria: Honey? My mouth is dry. Honey. I’m thirsty.
Billy: Umm… [ Water Runs ] There you go. honey.
Gloria: When I said I was thirsty, it doesn’t mean I want a glass of water.
Billy: It doesn’t?
Gloria: You’re missing the whole point of me saying I’m thirsty. If I have a problem, you’re not supposed to solve it. Men always make the mistake of thinking they can solve a woman’s problem. It makes them feel omnipotent.
Billy: Omnipotent? Did you have a bad dream?
Gloria: It’s a way of controlling a woman.
Billy: Bringing them a glass of water?
Gloria: Yes. I read it in a magazine. See… if I’m thirsty…..I don’t want a glass of water. I want you to sympathize. I want you to say. “Gloria. I. TOO. Know what it feels like to be thirsty. I. TOO. Have had a dry mouth.” I want you to connect with me through the sharing and understanding the concept of dry mouthedness.
Billy:….This is all in the same magazine?

When I say, “Don’t volunteer unsolicited advice,” what I mean is, sometimes we’re Billy, but sometimes we’re Gloria, and all we want is sympathy, not problem-solving.

We’ve all tried out experimental lesson plans that failed. We’ve all taught while sleep deprived or sick with a bad head cold. We’ve all taught after a big football game where half our class is absent or hung over. We’ve all had simple bad luck. Long story short, we’ve all bombed, and most of the time, when we bomb, we know exactly why we bombed. We don't need to be told. And most of the time, when we bomb, we need to engage in some post-game bitching.

When we hear someone bitching, we want to problem-solve, but this can be counter-productive. If you hear someone complaining about how a class failed, here’s what you might be thinking: “Oh, my colleague’s class didn’t go well. I’ll tell them what I would have done, so they’ll have a better idea what do in the future.” If you then tell what you would have done, here’s what your colleague is most likely thinking: “My colleague thinks I’m an idiot.”

Language matters. How we use it and the contexts in which we use it tell people more than we often intend. Our language around our pedagogy has been shaped by the same culture of competitiveness that characterizes much of the academe these days. These sorts of unconscious slights are one consequence of this culture, but they aren’t an inevitable consequence. All we need to do to avoid them is to apply the same mindfulness and empathy to our interactions with each other that we apply to our teaching and scholarship.

Why are there no _______?

Alice Walker once said, “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.” As a corollary to this, you could say that the easiest way to take away people’s power is by pretending that they have none. I call this the The Last of the Mohicans problem. For the better part of the past two centuries, it’s been fairly common to see popular culture depict Native Americans in a way that emphasized how much of the population had been lost and how much of the culture had disappeared. James Fennimore Cooper’s novel exemplifies this mentality right in its title. For European Americans, the notion serves two purposes: it provides a language with which to process guilt over the various historical injustices that have been done to Native Americans, and it situates those injustices firmly in the past, rendering contemporary Native Americans invisible. The The Last of the Mohicans problem is a way of affecting a multicultural ethos without ever having to confront the realities of the less privileged groups with which you coexist.

Lately, I’ve been noticing instances of a close cousin to the The Last of the Mohicans problem--the Why are there no _______? problem. Like LotM, Watn_? is typically expressed by well-intentioned, progressively inclined folks, and like LotM, Watn_? renders invisible the real people for whom the assertion purports to advocate. But unlike LotM, Watn_? doesn’t assume that those people are extinct, only underrepresented.* The great irony of Watn_? is that those problems of underrepresentation are typically very real, but Watn_? not only fails to address those problems, it actually contributes to them.

Buggin' Out got so angry, he moved to Albuquerque and built a drug empire.

Three examples of Watn_? have been on my mind lately. Two of them are recent, and one is from a few years ago, but still relevant.

1. Why are there no black people in science fiction? 

Or, as David Barnett put it in The Guardian, “Why are most SF authors straight, white western men?” Josh Finney quite persuasively rebuts this criticism by, among other things, pointing to the way in which assumptions of whiteness undermine the work being done by creators of color. Discussing how Klingons and Ferengi are perceived as racial stereotypes, Finney writes:

[L]et me tell you, Jimmy Diggs was personally responsible for some of that aggressive Klingon behavior. And to hear him tell it, he was highly influential in some of the best remembered Ferengi episodes. You know what else? Jimmy is black. And fuck, if Jimmy can to be slammed for these portrayals, what chance do I have?

It’s certainly possible to still argue that the Klingons and Ferengi are racial stereotypes (let’s be real here: they totally are). But an awareness of Jimmy Diggs’s race and his contribution makes it harder to see Star Trek’s handling of race as simply stereotyping. Greater awareness of the existence of creators of color leads (or at least ought to lead) to a more sophisticated understanding of the works. That awareness isn’t there right now, and Finney places responsibility for that fact not on the science fiction community, but on consumers, especially white liberal consumers like David Barnett:

It’s not their cry for diversity that’s the problem. I agree. More diversity would be great. But throwing stones at aging white guys isn’t going to fix anything (especially when they’re quantifiably less racist than the average American). Nor is lobbying publishers a solution. The best that’ll result in is a slew of bland, safe, token characters gratuitously crammed into stories for the sole purpose of shutting people up. 

You want sci-fi stories with more color, women, gays, transgendered, and “non-white” settings? Easy. START BUYING THEM.

2. Why are there no Christian LGBT allies?

Dan Savage has a term for pro-gay rights Christians, NALTs, which stands for Not All Like That. Savage came up with the term to refer to Christians who would come up to him and “whisper” that they are not all like that--”that” being Pat-Robertson-style hate mongerers. Savage has frequently expressed resentment that these NALTs do not do more to publicly denounce anti-gay Christian conservatives, and recently several pro-gay rights Christians have taken up the NALT label and transformed it into an “It Gets Better”-style project, with Savage’s support.

I’m a fan of Savage, but NALT always rubbed me the wrong way, for reasons this blog post nicely articulates:

I get where Savage is coming from, but the idea that the people Savage called NALTs were somehow only privately so, in a “just-between-me-and-Dan-Savage” kind of way, always seemed a frustrating sleight of hand that belied the relative power imbalance between traditional and non-traditional Christian communities. I’m just not sure if I can in good conscience support popularizing a term that I think is dismissive of non-traditionalist Christianities.

Going a step further, not only does Savage’s use of NALT undervalue the efforts of pro-LGBT Christians, it also rhetorically treats “Christian” and “queer” as if they are mutually exclusive terms. I’m neither Christian nor LGBT, but I know people that are both and I know that it is possible to be both at the same time. I don’t think it helps anyone to pretend like you can’t be.

3. Why are there no women on The Daily Show?

This one’s old, but it came up again recently in a discussion I was having about Jessica Williams, the newest (though not so new anymore) reporter on the Comedy Central series. Williams replaced Olivia Munn, whose short time at The Daily Show was noteworthy mostly because it provided an occasion for Irin Carmen to call the show a boy's club. Now, I don’t know why Munn left, and I think Jessica Williams is hilarious, but to this day, Carmen's article bothers me for a couple of reasons.

First, it insinuated that Munn was unqualified for the job, suggesting that she had been hired because she is conventionally attractive, despite the fact that she had been the cohost of a comedic talk show (Attack of the Show) for four years. Second, the article alludes to the systemic issues having to do with the exclusion of women in comedy, but maintains a narrow focus on the question as to whether or not Jon Stewart/The Daily Show is sexist. Madeleine Smithberg points to the bigger picture, but rather than analyze the implications of the show's place in a larger industry, the article turns the focus on Munn. Third, it reduced the creative conflicts between Smithberg and Stewart to Stewart throwing a newspaper, an irrelevant detail that equates being a jerk with being a misogynist and that, implicitly, suggests that women can’t handle the adversarial environment that characterizes the late night talk show. All of these details suggest an analytical approach that is more invested in affirming the existence of inequality than it is in challenging inequality in any meaningful way.

I’m not saying that underrepresentation isn't a real problem or that questioning underrepresentation has no value. Sometimes, versions of the Why are there no _______? question can lead to interesting counterfactual thinking. When Dustin Rowles asks “Where’s the female Walter White?” for example, the question touches on the intersections of gender, genre, and audience expectations in interesting and generative ways (even if Rowles’s focus on parenting seems like a partial answer at best). But asking the question doesn’t automatically challenge the injustice that it points to. In fact, it might do the opposite.

*Okay, I suppose I could call it the Why are there so few _______? problem, but Why are there no _______? better captures the question's tendency towards hyperbole.

How the Humanities Gave Me Thick Skin and Taught Me Humility

Reflections on being unfriended by a Facebook acquaintance

A few days ago I posted to Facebook Anna Gunn’s essay about her experience being hated and even receiving death threats for her portrayal of Skyler White on Breaking Bad. The post prompted an excellent debate about Skyler White with a couple of acquaintances, one of whom was a former grad school colleague and one of whom was someone I vaguely knew in high school. It was the kind of debate you occasionally get in grad school seminars or in Facebook comment threads, especially between academics—passionate yet dispassionate, heated but not personal, a genuine debate over how to interpret the character that managed not to descend into a flame war. At least not in my opinion.

This fall I’m teaching a writing course titled “Arguing about Interpretations,” the entire goal of which is to replicate these sorts of debates in essay form. I wanted to use this comment thread in my class as an example, so I went to ask my two acquaintances permission, only to discover that my high school acquaintance, who is not an academic, had unfriended me. In our discussion, this individual had made some valid points but his comments contained problematic implications regarding the role of women on popular TV shows, and I pushed back against those implications. I can’t know for certain, but I have to assume that that pushback is what got me unfriended.

Out of respect for his wishes to unfriend me, I haven’t contacted him, and I won’t share further details of my exchange, except to say that I followed Jay Smooth’s classic advice on how to tell people they sound racist (applied to sexism), keeping the focus on the words (as well as on Breaking Bad as a text and the cultural context surrounding the show) while avoiding any claims about him as a person. I’m used to vigorous debates of this sort, so it was easy for me to see it as impersonal, but seeing that this acquaintance had unfriended me caused a moment of reflection on how I might’ve come off as an jerk.

Thing is, I don’t feel bad about coming off as an jerk, and not because I’m a raging lefty feminist academic who believes that unconsciously sexist attitudes must be challenged at every turn, but rather because I sincerely believe that anyone ought to be able to take criticisms lodged against their interpretations, their assumptions, their ideology or worldview as long as those criticisms are not vulgar or packaged with ad hominem attacks.

I take Avenue Q’s message to heart: Everyone’s a little bit racist. And sexist. And classist, homophobic, transphobic, fatphobic, ableist, xenophobic, etc. It’s impossible to live in a society where structures of privilege exist without internalizing these attitudes somehow. Acknowledging this reality means that when someone calls you out on the problematic implications of something that you’ve said or written, it doesn’t have to be crippling. It doesn’t have to produce feelings of guilt and subsequent feelings of defensiveness.

This is something that I might never have learned had I not gone to grad school. I come from a position of tremendous privilege, and consequently over the years I’ve given other people plenty of opportunities to point out the limitations of my perspective. Hell, even in my dissertation defense, the most pointed criticism had to do with my handling of race (in a series of texts where handling race well is really damn important). With these criticisms I’ve learned to listen, reflect, and further engage. I don’t always agree with those criticisms—“check your privilege” is not a trump card—but I take them seriously and they don’t derail the conversation for me.

A humanities education taught me how having thick skin and having humility can go hand-in-hand, but this shouldn’t be exclusive to grad students and professors. Instilling this attitude towards receiving criticism is one of my primary goals as a teacher, because I genuinely believe that it’s something every college student can and should learn. It’s also one of the most valuable skills a humanities education can instill that a science education can’t (or at least, they can’t do it as well). My biologist girlfriend reserves the last day of her class to give a lesson on why evolution isn’t an excuse to be an asshole. Basically, it’s a one-day refutation of Social Darwinism. It’s good that she does that, but that can’t exactly be the focus of a biology class. They have to spend most of their time just learning biology. Generally speaking, a scientific education can feel tremendously empowering, in the sense that Francis Bacon conveys when he says, “Knowledge is power.” A humanities education can feel tremendously disempowering, in the sense that Socrates conveys when he says, “I know that I know nothing.”

But more importantly, a humanities education can make you feel comfortable acknowledging how little you know, because that is the beginning of inquisitiveness. If more non-academics took that attitude, it would be easier to have a lively Facebook debate.

Ygritte gets it

The Social Construction of Clarity

Verlyn Klinkenborg wrote an essay in The New York Times on “The Decline and Fall of the English Major.” There are many things that could be said about this essay, but I’ll be brief. I came to the essay by way of a blog post from Erik Voeten on The Monkey Cage, and it is Voeten, not Kilnkenborg, to whom I’d like to respond. Voeten quotes a simile that Kinkenborg uses:

Studying the humanities should be like standing among colleagues and students on the open deck of a ship moving along the endless coastline of human experience. Instead, now it feels as though people have retreated to tiny cabins in the bowels of the ship, from which they peep out on a small fragment of what may be a coastline or a fog bank or the back of a spouting whale.

Voeten responds:

Sentences like this usually lead me to liberally spread red ink. What do you mean? Why should studying be like observing a coastline rather than interacting with human experience? Why the clichés? And what’s that whale all about?  You can sort of figure out what the author means with all the vague metaphors but “sort of being able to figure out” an argument is hardly an advertisement for clear and simple nonfiction writing.

I will note in passing the irony of Voeten making this argument on a blog that takes its title from an H.L. Mencken quotation featuring a metaphor that, in my opinion, is far more vague and “flowery” than Kinkenborg’s simile. I would also be remiss not to observe that Voeten manages to be deeply invested in clear writing instruction while seeming not to know or care about the difference between a metaphor and a simile.

What’s interesting to me is, Klingenborg’s simile has a much clearer point to it than Voeten’s criticism does. A good simile or metaphor—and I would say that Klingeborg’s simile is pretty good—can take an abstract idea and make it more concrete through analogy. The boat simile illustrates Klingenborg’s point that disciplinary specialization in the English major has led English departments to feel like a hermetic environment that is cut off from the reality that it purports to study, leading to warped perspectives. The simile might be somewhat imprecise, but I wouldn’t call it vague, and indeed, a greater degree of precision might not be appropriate for an essay commenting at this level of generality.

Voeten’s response, meanwhile, is a set of directionless and open-ended questions that would, ironically, lead me to “liberally spread red ink” (or they would if I actually graded in red ink—I find that students are more likely to read comments if they are in blue). The rhetorical questions reveal more about Voeten’s reading protocols than they do about anything inherently “vague” or “muddled” in Klingenborg’s writing.

I like similes/metaphors and I detest rhetorical questions. Voeten appears to like rhetorical questions and to detest similes/metaphors. Both of us would likely justify these matters of taste in terms of “clarity,” and a preference for “clear” writing. But really, these preferences are matters of taste, and both Voeten and I have acquired our tastes through years of reading and writing and interacting with other readers and writers.

It’s easy to forget that “clarity” is a social construct that differs across institutions, disciplines, and parts of the world. Contra Klingenborg, I don’t actually think that the humanities have become too technically narrow. If anything, they’ve become too broad, with growing interests in world literatures, cultural studies, and interdisciplinarity making it nearly impossible to develop a consensus with regard to what constitutes a “good” or “clear” writing style.

At the end of the day, I think that this broadening is a good thing, but it might mean giving up on any totalizing ideas about “teaching how to write well.” Instead, I think that writing instructors should focus on providing students with a set of rhetorical techniques that they might or might not want to employ in given circumstances (in my writing classes, I use a “toolbox” metaphor: over the course of the semester, we fill their toolbox with tools that they might or might not use later, but that they should always have at their disposal). And, given the plethora of “good” writing styles out there, I think that the humanities as a whole should be less focused on producing good writers and more focused on producing good readers who can consume different kinds of texts and understand them clearly.

You Keep Using That Word...

So Lou Dobbs, Juan Williams, Doug Schoen, and Erick Erickson all recently freaked out on Dobbs’s Fox News program over the trend of more women becoming the primary breadwinner in their homes. I sense that so much has already been said about this clip, I don’t have a lot to add, so I’ll keep this one brief.

I want specifically to address Erickson’s quote:

I am so used to liberals telling conservatives that they are anti-science. But I mean this is -- liberals who defend this and say it's not a bad thing are very anti-science. When you look at biology, look at the natural world, the roles of a male and female in society; in other animals the male typically is the dominant role.

He doubled down on this assertion on his blog:

Pro-science liberals seem to think basic nature and biology do not apply to Homo sapiens.

This is a favorite rhetorical trope among conservatives—taking the accusations that liberals often lodge at them and turning them around. No, you’re the sexists! No, you’re the racists! No you’re anti-science! It might be sophomoric, but it makes sense that conservatives would look for opportunities to put liberals on the defensive in this way. And many liberals do have a bad habit of throwing around rather inflammatory allegations of racism and sexism in often glib and unsophisticated ways.

But often, these attempts to turn the tables belie a fundamental misunderstanding of the terms. Now, I’m not going to address what science actually has to teach us about gender roles (boy, I do NOT have that kind of time) or specific scientific findings about males and females (except to say, “in other animals the male typically is the dominant role” -- whoa nelly does that seem like an oversimplification). Instead I want to address a more basic assumption that Erickson is making about what science is and what role it plays in public policy.

Science is descriptive, not prescriptive. It tells us how things are, not how they ought to be. Certainly, many scientists will comment on how things ought to be, and as citizens, it’s their right to do so, but in those contexts, they’re speaking as citizens; they’re not speaking for science. “Should” isn’t really a part of science’s vocabulary. Science tells us that climate change will cause sea levels to rise and myriad other ecological changes. Science doesn’t tell us that we should do anything about this—our values tell us that. When we pro-science folks accuse a segment of political discourse of being anti-science, what we mean is that we want policy discussions to begin with a common base of knowledge that is built on sound scientific research. We’re not saying we should do what science tells us to do, because science isn’t telling us to do anything.

Using science in the way that Erickson uses it—trying to derive an “ought” from an “is”—is one version of a logical fallacy called an appeal to nature. You can make an appeal to nature without citing “science” explicitly, though science tends to float in the background whenever anyone talks about nature, and appeals to nature are all over our political discourse, not just on the right. Mainstream public discourse on gay rights is particularly interesting in this regard, because both sides of the debate have largely accepted the premise that an appeal to nature is appropriate, with homophobes decrying homosexuality as “unnatural” while gay rights activists assert that they were “born this way,” as if being born that way were relevant (I often wish that Lady Gaga had written a song titled “My Sexual Freedom is Not Contingent on How I Was Born,” but I guess it’d be harder to put that to a dance beat).

Appeals to nature in political discourse go all the way back to the beginnings of modern democracy and Enlightenment philosophers’ construction of “natural rights.” But just because something is natural doesn’t mean that it’s better. There is nothing natural about indoor plumbing, but I imagine that Erick Erickson still uses a toilet. Even if science taught us that every other animal species on earth had dominant males and subservient females, that would say nothing about what gender roles should be for humans.

So, Erick Erickson, if you’ve been accused of being anti-science, it’s not just because you don’t make informed decisions about matters where scientific findings are relevant. It’s because it seems like you don’t understand what science is.