The Way We Read Now: It's Earlier Than We Think

This is my final blog post, because I have to hurry up and create a substantial literary oeuvre in the next two decades (I've decided now that I have some ideas for it, which was my main reason for moving to a big city three years ago, and bizarrely, it worked), and more specifically and immediately, start writing a novel and maybe some short stories right away after my 40^th birthday happens on the final day of the month.

I actually have already created several substantial literary oeuvres, including several plays, an abundance of fan fiction, and several blogs, of which this is my third. But I gave up on the playwriting career as a rash youth, the fan fiction isn't especially marketable, and the search engines haven't brought me fame, either. I'm nevertheless astonished at the consistency of my traffic, which seems to be primarily generated by people (usually people: I have a good idea of when it's internet chicanery) with high-traffic blogs linking to my posts. So thank you, unknown people who have, here and there, found one of my posts noteworthy. Although I probably would have kept talking anyway – I mean, my traffic is negligible as it is – I do prefer to get in front of more eyeballs, as long, it seems, as I don't have to find the eyeballs.

I don't foresee a future where I'll be blogging, although some day, in another incarnation, I might be forced to have a self-promotional website. In the meantime I can be found on the interwaves on Another Kind of Distance, my podcast on time travel movies (and sometimes tangentially related movies we like, and sometimes TV episodes), co-hosted by David Fiore.

When I started this blog, it was supposed to be a literary blog, but it so happens that I can neither read fast enough, nor process what I read and produce elegant thoughts about it fast enough, for even a monthly post. So then it became my “everything that crosses my mind” blog. For the final post – coincidentally, but still – I'm returning to the topic of literature to muse about the place it holds in our present culture through the lens of the digital “reading delivery systems” that I've explored in the past year or so.

But first, some stats.

Disappearance of Reading?

It only makes sense that the more options we have for entertainment, the less time we have to devote to reading. Does that make us a less literate culture? Clearly not: the basic literacy rate in England and North American has risen to near-universality since the 19th century, which is now looked upon as the golden age of novel-reading. What's kind of surprising is that reading for entertainment has survived at all, but the YA boom proved that despite the proliferation of television choices, ordinary people still want books, as long as the books don't demand too much time or mental energy and have some kind of direct archetypal appeal.

Still, reading is certainly quickly crowded out by other activities as soon as you're out of school. For myself, I work for 7 or 7.5 hours Monday through Friday, write for an hour or two, try to fit in a TV episode so that I know what everybody else is talking about, read articles on the web for an hour or so – and that leaves me with an hour or two to read a book, which on weeknights, because I'm tired, most often ends up being one. One weeknight every week I spend with my boyfriend, or, since he has a similar schedule, we'd never see each other. We also try to have a date day on the weekend, although sometimes I spend part of it seeing my best friend; and one of my days off I have to devote to serious writing, although that gets messed with, too, because I also have to do errands on that day, like groceries and laundry. And since everyone's life is like this, unless you're a literature professor, retired (and no one of my generation is going to get to retire until they're 65 at least), a speed reader, or preferably all three, where is the time to read supposed to come from?

So there's really no need to admonish the general public for not finding a lot of time to read – unless your motivation is to shame all of us into making the time. But if we're going to make the time, we have to make it for good books. The only reason to encourage any reading is that it might lead to good reading. (I realize that I don't get to define what good reading is, but I do believe that there is good reading and bad reading.) Since nowadays you can encounter educated people who watch so much TV they can't possibly ever pick up a book, I presume that once you're educated – at the BA level, say – you will remain an articulate person and analytical thinker without ever picking up a book again (although it probably helps to sometimes read an article).

I remember when, having decided that I would not to the prestigious theatre school that had suspended me for insubordination (apparently, I wasn't given an official reason) since I'd run out of money and already had a lot of student debt anyway, I figured that my BA and an almost-MA were enough and it was time, at 32, to enter the real world, so I got a call centre job with a bank. During the training, which took place over the course of about six weeks, our supervisor not only showed us a slideshow of his home renos but also gave us such lifestyle advice as, “I read for 15 minutes every day.” Which struck me, an ex-English major, as ludicrous – as though reading were like doing the StairMaster, and not even with dedication, but as a kind of token gesture. (As you can imagine, my new career didn't work out.)

According to these Pew Research Center survey stats, the median number of books read by American adults in 2013 was 5. (I'm going by US stats because the most recent stats for Canada that I could find are from 2007.) For the college-educated, the median number was 8; by income, the number climbed higher according to income level and ranged between 3 (for under $30, 000) and 8 (for $75, 000 and over). I am college-educated and make well under $30, 000 per year, which makes me quite the anomaly (which I largely attribute to having set out on a path to become an English professor and then belatedly changed my mind), and I finished 8 books in the past 12 months. That's very slightly more than what I've been averaging since I graduated with my MA at the end of 2009, which, from memory, I'd say is about 6. 

I don't remember completing more books per year at earlier points in my life – I remember struggling with my attention span since I was in my late teens, and spending any extra reading time I had in university researching and writing essays and fooling around on the internet – but according to my Goodreads account, I must have: I found 447 books that I've read, or (for short story, essay, and poetry collections) partially read, between the ages of 12 and 39, for an average of 16.5 books per year. And that doesn't include the commercial and genre fiction (Anne Rice, V.C. Andrews, etc.) that I was still reading until my late teens, or the innumerable book chapters and academic articles I read as a university student – sometimes even (I shudder to admit it) for pleasure. 

Experimenting with Formats and Apps: Audible and LibriVox

The Pew Research Center stats are for print and e-books plus audio books. I also listened to a lot of audio books this year – about 8 again. So if you include audio books, that gets my number up to 16, which was the mean for people in the top household income tier (although someone in the second-highest income tier skewed the mean up to 18). It hardly seems fair to do that, though, because the reason I was able to listen to so many audio books is that I have a job, and bosses, that allow me to listen to my phone all day at work. This initially led to my discovery of podcasts, but since I'm picky, I'm only really interested in half a dozen or so podcasts at a time, so once I'm caught up with the show's archived episodes, I need more things to listen to for an average of 35 hours per week. That's what led me to discover Audible.

Audible, which is the only for-pay online audiobooks service I can find with a cursory search, is owned by Amazon, those internet monopolists. I guess you can also get audiobooks from iTunes, although I just learned that. Anyway, Audible hooked me in by offering a credit for any book every month for a monthly fee of around 20 Canadian dollars (it was slightly below before our present recession, and is now slightly above). Since online audiobooks are often considerably more expensive than ebooks (as their physical counterparts are than print books), this is a good deal, and definitely convenient. In the same search that uncovered Audible I also found LibriVox, which appears to be the most widely-used free audiobooks site, with the reading being done by volunteers.

How you use audiobooks, if you even have the time to use them, will depend on your personality. There's shame attached to “reading” in this way, although apparently science shows that comprehension is not affected by getting the book through the ear rather than the eye. I guess the shame stems from the stigma on illiteracy, and also “laziness”: although it takes as much effort to listen as to read, you can keep playing an audio book all the way to the end while listening to it intermittently, whereas you have to read each sentence to get through a book.

It almost seemed as though internet-savvy intellectuals were all discovering these delivery systems at the same time, because soon after I signed up for the Audible deal I started hearing ads for the service on podcasts like Partially Examined Life and Best of the Left, which was a real pisser, because I could have got a discount on my first book if I'd signed up using a promo code from one of the shows. Or I guess really it was Audible contacting these podcasters. (Or they applied to have a sponsor? No idea how it works – my podcast is not Next Level.) Anyway though, I also noticed the PEL guys talking about using LibriVox after I'd discovered it on my own.

I decided to use audiobooks for two main purposes: to familiarize myself with classics that I know I'm never going to get around to reading, with lets me feel “cultured” while freeing up time to read books that actually interest me, and to familiarize myself with massive non-fiction tomes that I'd find too boring to finish in print. This year (i.e., 12-month period from birthday to birthday), for example, the most noteworthy books I obtained through Audible were The Canterbury Tales, Don Quixote (in Edith Grossman's recent translation), and Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century (which is not one of my 8 audiobooks, since I have 8 hours left). Because it's even easier for your mind (or at least my mind) to wander when listening than when reading, and because I'm actually doing tasks while listening, I don't expect to catch more than the gist of the books. Thanks to the internet, however, I can then fill in the gaps by with the use of SparkNotes (that's right, I have no shame – I'm not in university anymore), Wikipedia, and, in the case of new non-fiction books, in-depth articles.

There are serious flaws with Audible, however, that prevent its audiobooks from being adequate substitutes for physical books, whether audio or print, and I sincerely hope that Amazon and the makers of personal electronic devices give enough of a shit to improve these books and apps as more people get their culture this way. First: it's just about impossible to “rewind” with any accuracy to relisten to an important point, at least on my puny iPhone, which turns the most infinitesimal nudge of my big, clumsy index finger into 20 minutes of book. I'm sure it would be more precise if I were doing it with a cursor on a computer – but if your device is supposed to be able to support these books, it should do a better job of it. Second: the audio chapter divisions do not come with information from the print version. They're simply labelled “Chapter 1,” “Chapter 2,” and so on – and the numbers don't even necessarily correspond to the print book's chapter numbers, because they don't even distinguish between a chapter and a prologue or foreword. If, therefore, I want to go back to a specific chapter and listen to it again, because I was especially distracted during that part, or because Wikipedia assures me that it's an important one, Audible makes that extremely inconvenient. Considering that they're pricing these things at top dollar (unlike low-priced ebooks), it's disappointing to say the least. The Canterbury Tales audiobook, for example, heftily priced at nearly $30 US (Blackstone edition), doesn't even tell you what tale you're hearing.

I make a further distinction between Audible and LibriVox, only being willing to use LibriVox for certain books. For example: public domain non-fiction classics, like On Liberty and On the Duty of Civil Disobedience. Books that I should have read long ago and probably wouldn't get around to reading for a long time. Ironically, although it's free to listen to the books, LibriVox users actually enter chapter information accurately, taking it from the print edition. There are sometimes sound quality problems, and sometimes you'll get someone who reads too fast, or has a thick accent that's hard for a person from your area of the globe to understand. But just as often, you'll get a reading dramatic and gripping enough to be professional. (I loved Bob Neufeld's colourful reading of Civil Disobedience.)

Nevertheless, with however little warrant, I prefer to leave my major works of literature, which require dramatic talent to read properly, to paid readers, and therefore to Audible – especially since I don't need to buy too many books this way, only the ones that I feel a duty but not much desire to read (or revisit).

The Digital Public Library: OverDrive

Contrary to popular belief, readers seem to be extremely slow to adopt new reading methods. I'm a cutting-edge experimentalist by the conservative standards of the readers in the Pew survey: I'm almost off print books altogether. Having moved a lot in my adult life, I've gradually shed my physical library, which, I reasoned, consisted of books that I had either already read or was probably never going to read. I have no sentimental attachment to physical books whatsoever, and I've even come to almost dread reading them, since I at least have the illusion that I'm reading ebooks faster and more easily. I've definitely noticed gradations of stimulation, wherein if I'm tired (which at this age, working full time, when am I not), my laptop screen is highly stimulating (I can read on it all night), my phone screen is fairly stimulating, and a print page is not stimulating at all (I'll start falling asleep after a few sentences). I can understand bemoaning the endangerment of book cover art (like record cover art), but that's a separate issue from how one wants to read; so is the endangerment of physical spaces for lovers of reading, both bookstores and libraries.

The only limitation on my switch to ebooks is what's been converted to that format. Although almost all new books and editions since the ebook revolution (2000ish?) come in e-editions now, I have no idea who decides what from the back catalogue or public domain gets an e-edition, in what order, or how fast. The major canonical authors are represented, of course, and the major cult figures, but many omissions remain, so we're all going to be relying on physical books in libraries for some time.

However, this year I also discovered how to take ebooks out of the library, using the library app OverDrive. (Which, I just googled-learned, has a deal with Amazon. Of course. Amazon owns my electronic reading experience.) You have to be a member of the library, and then you have access to its ebook and digital audiobook collection – which is pretty desultory, if the Toronto Public Library is anything to go by. Maybe I can blame it on Rob Ford – although if you do a quick google on this issue, you'll find that there are apparently untold difficulties involved, from the practical to the philosophical, with the acquisition and lending of ebooks by libraries. For now, borrowing ebooks from libraries can only serve as a supplement to buying them. My habitual process now is: check TPL's digital collection through OverDrive; if it's not there, check Kobo (formerly iBooks, but with Canada's dollar screwed again, I'm relying more on Kobo); if it's not there, see how much the print edition costs; if it's too much, check TPL's print collection.

Really, though, the limitations on ereading aren't so much sending me back to print books as helping me make decisions about what to read next. But only when I have a choice: if it's a matter of doing research for something I'm writing, I will of course avail myself of TPL's print collection. Very occasionally I still get a craving for a book that's either not available as an ebook or out of print, but that's in the number of less than half a dozen per year. (As for ebooks, I probably purchase around half a dozen in a year.) And if I'm in an airport, I really want a print book, preferably a somewhat junky one, which is how I ended up reading Gone Girl, after seeing the movie – and the print book came in handy when my return flight was delayed and I ended up stranded in the airport for six hours with no way to charge my cell phone.

The Future of Reading?

I was surprised to learn that I'm such an early adopter of these new ways of reading, and also surprised at the correlation in the Pew survey between higher education, on the one hand, and use of non-print books on the other. It seems counter-intuitive, for example, that the same percentage of people who have completed some college and college graduates would have read at least one print book, but far fewer non-graduates would have read an ebook or used an audiobook. If audiobooks are for the “lazy” or “illiterate,” why would their use go up with education level? Does comfort with technology increase with education level? Are college graduates, like me, trying to cram extra books into their craniums by reading on portable digital devices on the fly and listening to audio books on their commute? Are only the most avid readers apt to get excited about format innovations, and curious about what they can do to enhance one's reading life?

I'm not always an early adopter. Although I've been addicted to the internet for the entirety of this century, I only got a mobile phone when I moved to Toronto in the summer of 2012, only got a smartphone when I got a job selling mobile phones in the spring of 2013, only got a good smartphone that Xmas, and only started discovering the different options for reading since around last spring. So although I probably represent the vanguard of the shift to ebooks, it's also probably the case that despite all of the alarm over that shift – especially if you've worked in the book industry, as I did for several years – it's actually happening very slowly, and only starting to pick up now. Still, in my almost complete abandonment of print, I'm in a tiny minority: only 5% of readers in the Pew survey read an ebook without also reading a print book, and I only avoided that category by my airport purchase. 

All in all, my reasons for preferring ebooks to print books are: they're usually cheaper (although going up); despite many missing titles, I'm still more likely to find the title I'm looking for than if I go to even a huge bookstore in a major city, and don't have to wait for a special order; if it's a library book, I don't have to pick it up and I can't forget to return it; I don't have to move them; my whole library travels with me wherever I go, accessible from my phone; and screens stimulate me, while the print page puts me to sleep. I hope we'll always have print books as well, and public spaces for book-lovers and knowledge-seekers, and physical picture books will always be important for children who are learning to read, but personally, I'd be just as happy if I never had to read a print book again.

As to whether we're going to “stop reading” altogether in the future – there is of course a certain artificiality in judging how much a person reads in a year by the number of books they've read. We of course now all read and write text all day long, with varying levels of literacy, in order to communicate through social media or our mobile phones. Even sticking to discursive prose (not recipes or IMDb entries, then), I read for far more than 15 minutes per day, every day, but a lot of that reading consists of: short articles, long articles, blog posts, Wikipedia entries, movie reviews, and on and on, all of it online and most of it encountered through Facebook shares and Google searches, although I'll also go straight to certain authors, publications, and sites. Goodreads, too, artificially divides your units of reading into books, because its database collects editions of published books – even though the actual works may be poems, plays, essays, or short stories, or collections of poems, plays, essays, or short stories.

Even if there's a decline in book reading, that may not mean that there's a decline in reading. A lot of internet reading may be frivolous, but a lot of book reading is frivolous too, so counting the number of books read can only give you the roughest measure of a person's annual reading – if “reading” means “serious reading,” and I'm not sure why we'd be trying to measure annual reading, or using books as the measure, if that's not what we were trying to measure. Books – as distinct from anthologies – do remain central to intellectual culture, with their sustained arguments, their narrative ambition and complexity, their inducement (in reader and writer) of reflection. And if internet reading is one of the things pushing out book reading, as it may well be, that's something that should be fought. But before waving our arms around about cultural decay, we should still distinguish a decline in book reading from a decline in reading (and knowledge, and thoughtfulness), as well as being aware that all books aren't created equal.

One definite limitation on ebooks: lending the book. For example, today I read an eerie time travel story, "Real Estate," in Rivka Galchen's collection American Innovations, and I wanted to lend the book to David Fiore so he could read it. However, I can't just lend him my phone (or tablet if I had one, and some would be pissed to have to lend their ereader). That would be fine if he was going to read the story right now, but maybe he just wants me to lend him the book so that he'll remember to read it when he gets around to it, and that I can't do. I checked and it's available through OverDrive, but he'd have to download the app – to his Kobo, since he doesn't like reading on his phone. So I guess it won't be a big deal once everyone is used to getting ebooks from libraries and libraries have better ebook collections. Still, recommending that someone read something, even if they can download it for free, isn't the same thing as just lending them the damn book. I've bought the book, I should be able to lend it. It seems that Amazon actually has a way to do this, although it's like a library loan, which means the borrower only has a certain window within which to read it, which is kind of annoying, but at the same time does solve the problem of friends or exes never returning your book. Which is another thing – you can't gift an ebook that you own. Unless Amazon has, or develops, a way to do that, too.

The future of reading, it seems, will be much like the past, but with different annoyances. For now, though, I find exploring the new reading delivery systems a thrill. It's like when I was a kid, and there was nothing more thrilling to me than the novelization of a favourite movie, because it meant taking a favourite thing and making it even better by making it into a book. In this case, the two favourite things being combined are digital technology and books. Ultimately I'm still trying to track down some words written in a particular order by someone that some people have thought were invaluable, get access to them affordably, and find a way to squeeze them into my brain, like a diner ketchup package.

Feminist, All Too Feminist

On a recent Best of the Left podcast episode, “What are women complaining about?,” I found out about action being taken to address Hollywood's gender bias, which has received a lot of media attention in the past year. What really caught my ear was the stat that the percentage of speaking roles for women in Hollywood movies has only increased by 5% since the 1940s and 50s. And what interested me about that stat was that, as a fan of classical Hollywood movies, I was under the impression that there were now far fewer major roles for women – not a few more. Fans of classical Hollywood movies just think that there were more and better roles for women then because so many of the movies from that era that film buffs still care about have terrific roles for women: canons are not necessarily representative of the norm.

So far, so awesome for women that the ACLU has taken political action to have the industry investigated for gender inequity. In fact I think that every industry where there's perceived discrimination should be subjected to thorough governmental investigation, especially if that industry is as powerful as Hollywood (or Silicon Valley). How else is the public going to know, and how is discrimination by the powerful going to combated except by transparency, public pressure, and public accountability?

However, the segment lost me when an indie director who was asked why it matters that there are so few women in the industry gave a standard leftist response: that we won't see more “authentic portrayals of women" in movies in television until we have more female directors. In the first place, surely what matters about women not being able to make careers in an industry is... women not being able to make careers in an industry.

Second, as a writer and English major I'm disturbed by the implication that only female creators can produce good female characters. Because there are so many more canonical male authors than female ones, almost all of the female characters who mean the most to me were authored by men. The exceptions are the heroines of Jane Austen and George Eliot, but they don't mean more to me than the heroines of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Flaubert, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Ibsen, or Tennessee Williams. Nor are they noticeably more “authentic”: they are all distinctly literary characters, and as such resemble (and are, no doubt, influenced by) each other more than actual people.

The question of authorship is more complicated in the case of film directors, but assuming the fiction that the director is the “auteur,” all of my favourite female film characters were authored by men. I don't tend to think of it that way, though, because many classical Hollywood actresses have more-or-less-unofficially attained the status of auteurs in their own right, so that I think of a Bette Davis or Barbara Stanwyck or Jennifer Jones character as being authored by her; or, if she's paired with a remarkable director (or, occasionally, producer) in a remarkable film, co-authored. Sometimes directors and actresses develop ongoing creative relationships in which the collaborative aspect is emphasized: Sternberg and Dietrich, Fellini and Masina, Godard and Karina, Cassavetes and Rowlands, Lynch and Dern. The other part of this is that I've hardly seen any movies by female directors, a fault I hope to remedy some year soon (I have a lot of faults, though, so I can't promise when it will happen), and it so happens that my favourite movie by a female director, Elaine May's Mikey and Nicky, contains a couple of my favourite male characters.

Which leads to my objection as a writer to this use of “authenticity”: of course both male and female authors have to be free to create characters of both genders. I don't want to be told what I can write about, and I don't want any other writer to be told that, either – although if they create a representation that's offensive in some way, they should be criticized. If you want to hear me criticize sexist representations, please enjoy my podcast about time travel movies, co-hosted by David Fiore. (Criticizing sexism isn't the purpose of the podcast, but we do spend a lot of time doing it in each episode, especially me, really loudly, with swearing.)

Moreover, if you tell men that they can't write female protagonists, you reinforce the notion that women are utterly alien, which isn't exactly conducive to the feminist project. At its best, imaginative literature and filmmaking about women by men has been about the fluid movement between desire and cross-gender identification; about the affirmation of heteronormativity through desire and its undermining through identification; about sympathy and sadism. To remove cross-gender identification from literature and film would be to remove at least 50% of what interests me about them.

So, based on my responses to this segment, what do you think: am I a feminist, or not a feminist? Please answer in 3-5 paragraphs, giving the reasoning for your position.

I think the answer is that I'm all too feminist, but it will take more than five paragraphs to flesh it out.

Penultimate Post

Although I first promised this post on feminism a long time ago, I've gone back and forth about whether to write it. As I finally sit down to compose it as the penultimate post of this blog, I wonder if I can finally do it without getting too angry or sarcastic – the reason I've abandoned my many previous attempts.

A couple of things have happened to make me less angry. First, my political perspective has vastly broadened this year, which has had the effect of taking my focus off of feminism. When I'm not focused on it, I'm less upset about it. I also realized, quite a long time ago, that a tone of anger is never going to persuade anyone to listen to your criticisms. It didn't work when Camille Paglia did it in the 90s, and it doesn't work when Cathy Young does it now.

In fact, my first criticism of feminism is its resistance to criticism. And that's the final reason my anger about feminism has subsided a little. When I was listening to the Best of the Left episode yesterday, hoping to get myself riled up to write this post, because now the problem was that I was too calm about feminism to write it, I noticed that one of the clips, a collage of reasons to be a feminist, featured a couple of MRA talking points, I realized that feminism has, in fact, been absorbing criticisms from all corners, and not just from other communities that feminists recognize as oppressed, such as Women of Color and the trans community. Does that make me any more hopeful about feminism? We'll see.

Definitions 

First, let's get the context out of the way. What is feminism, and am I a feminist? If feminism is the belief in the equality of women and men, then why yes, I am. I think the majority of people in most countries nowadays would define themselves that way, in fact. (If you want stats, don't look to this post, because I'm not going to provide them for every point. Many critics of feminism have written many stats-laden articles that can be easily found on the internet. I decided it's not worth my time to produce one of those articles, because I'm not getting paid for this and because mountains of stats alone won't persuade anyone of anything. If you find yourself concerned or intrigued by anything in this post, I'd suggest that you do your own internet research, like I did, and, like I did, draw your own conclusions.)

The very fact that this is a popular sentiment – few would define themselves as racist, either – means I have to further define what I mean by “feminist.” So let me be clear that not only do I think men and women are equal, but I also reject traditional gender roles. I have never wanted children and my life is centred around my artistic and intellectual pursuits.

On the other hand, if being a feminist means adopting certain political stances (e.g., on reproductive rights) and/or adhering to at least a few of the theories propagated by the feminist movement (e.g. those theories evoked by terms like “patriarchy,” “objectification,” “rape culture,” and “consent”), you're starting to lose me. If it means feeling righteous anger about street harassment or male “spreading” on public transit, among other popular talking points and memes, you've lost me. If it means believing that women as a global group today are oppressed, I'm not going to agree without heavy qualifications. I'm not even sure that “oppression” is the best lens through which to look at the traditional position of women (it's a lens, and an informative one), and increasingly I think that each instance of oppression, or disenfranchisement, needs to be looked at in its own particular cultural, historical, and political context.

Finally, if being a feminist means thinking that there's a place for a women's movement even in supposedly modern, democratic countries today – then again, yes, I do. But I have given up thinking that feminism will ever be “reformed”: that is, that it will ever purge the elements that I find objectionable and become a collection of ideas and set of priorities that I largely agree with and find positive. Nevertheless, there are of course many people, from lawyers working to improve the legal process for rape victims and ensure access to safe abortions for economically deprived women, to members of civil rights watchdog groups committed to social justice, who do good feminist work with real, important consequences every day.

In summary, then, as soon as you move outside of a definition of “feminist” that means “person who believes in the equality of women and men and rejects traditional gender roles,” feminism, for me, is just another set of ideas to be considered independently and objectively. Some of them are interesting and useful, many of them (even the same ones) are misguided and infuriating; all of them have been carefully considered by me, and none of them are accepted by me without many qualifications. Sometimes, as in the case of reproductive rights, I agree with the feminist position, but not for the reasons most often given by feminists: I don't think that being able to control one's reproductive capacity is in itself essential to equality, because I don't think that opposition to abortion is solely a conspiracy by the patriarchy to keep “control of women's bodies” in their hands. That, like so much feminist poststructuralism, is a melodramatic cartoon that obfuscates more than it illuminates. I do, however, think (in keeping with older trends in feminism) that control of one's reproductive capacity is necessary for economic independence, which is necessary for equality.

I'm not here today to talk about the hard (in the sense of both “difficult” and “concrete”) issues, though. I'm here to talk about the stuff that a person of my demographic (highly educated, raised middle class) is going to most often encounter on the internet: the theory, on the one hand, and the memes, on the other. In fact, it's unavoidable. Along with geeks, feminists may be the highest-profile colonizers of the internet – no doubt because they're pouring out of college and university campuses.

Keeping this in mind, here are my Top 5 Criticisms of Feminism:

Imperviousness to Criticism

If you start to criticize a trend in feminism to or in front of a feminist – say, for example, the way that feminism treats the topic of rape – the first thing you will hear is some variant of “feminism is not a monolith.” The response neatly serves to shut down the conversation because it's irrefutable but fails to address the point. It doesn't matter to me, or my criticism, if some feminist in a cave somewhere agrees with me. What matters is the general tenor of the conversation, and that is the source of my frustration.

Many critics of feminism have pondered why such criticism engenders such defensiveness. Believe it or not, I can also be the feminist responding defensively to attacks on it – all it takes to trigger that response is for the attacks to be made to me. The best explanation I can give is that, whether or not the mainstream media is “liberal” (that's an argument for another day), people of leftist sympathies have picked up the liberal message from the media that “feminism=equality for women=good for women=good” and identified with it to such a degree that any criticism of feminism is equated with being anti-woman and, as such, next door to evil. So that when, as a teenager, I heard about Camille Paglia the “anti-feminist,” I genuinely believed that she must be some kind of Antichrist. Until I saw her on a talk show, risked listening to her, and found what she had to say fascinating and challenging, even when I disagreed with her.

To me it seems like a no-brainer that no political movement can be at its strongest unless it's open to having its most fundamental philosophical positions questioned. I don't mean negated: if we take as the basis of feminism the assumption that women and men are equal, feminism doesn't have to entertain the idea that they are not equal. But any positions formed on the basis of the assumption of equality should be open to criticism, with the idea that proponents and critics have the same goal of advancing the idea and reality of equality. So if your ideas suck, or if they may in fact be harmful to the cause of equality, you ought to know about that, think hard about it, and abandon or refine them.

Since, however, the left is no better than the right at having open, objective, rational discussion about its pet ideas, but instead wants to find reasons to cast out traitors, the bullshit of feminism goes unchecked, and reform is impossible. Because if “feminism is not a monolith” or its variants doesn't succeed in shutting down the conversation, the next move is to discredit your critic by branding her an “anti-feminist.”

Now, there are people who are actually anti-feminists, and not always from a conservative perspective. There are many reasons for a person to be an anti-feminist: you can actually think that women and men are not equal, or you can think that men and women are equal but different and traditional gender roles honour that difference, or you can think that feminism is opposed to “family values,” or you can think that feminism promotes political divisiveness and does not actually serve the cause of gender egalitarianism. In my experience, people who are anti-feminists are quite happy to identify themselves as such. For my part, I think I still identify as a feminist despite a hugely fraught relationship with feminism from my teen years on because I don't want to be confused with traditionalists. As much explaining as I have to do in order to identify as a feminist, I feel like I'd have to do even more explaining in order to not identify as a feminist, and my time is limited.

One day maybe we'll get to the point where we can all call ourselves “humanists” or “egalitarians” and it won't seem like a complacent move, but we're not there yet. In the meantime, what I've learned to do is to continue to identify as a feminist but to broaden my egalitarian focus. What you are actually thinking, saying, and doing is probably more important than how you label yourself.

Failure to Model Enfranchisement

My second criticism of feminism is its failure to provide a model of what an enfranchised woman would look like. There were two roads feminism could have gone down: the road of emphasizing victimization, and the road of emphasizing enfranchisement. Guess which one it took. I was never happier as a feminist than when, as a teenager and in my early 20s, I was reading Molly Haskell on the types of independent womanhood represented by the great stars of classical Hollywood (Garbo and Dietrich, Davis and Crawford, Hepburn and Stanwyck), or Camille Paglia celebrating feminist role models (mostly those same women plus heroines of Spenser and Shakespeare); or marveling at forceful famous women of arts and letters from Colette to Courtney Love – or for that matter, Paglia herself.

Part of the reason for feminism's emphasis on victimization is, presumably, that the idea of “personal responsibility” was so tainted by conservative rhetoric that the left surrendered it to the other side long ago. (Which is exactly why Paglia's use of it was so electric.) The left seems to consider the rhetoric of liberation and independence to be in conflict with the recognition of systemic victimization. The result is that feminism can look awfully fucking depressing, and attracts on the basis of feelings of anger and victimization rather than feelings of possibility and aspiration. 

Not that the idea of agency has been entirely banished from feminism. Here, feminism is definitely not a monolith, but rather a mishmash. Recently, for example, Charlize Theron's action hero character in Mad Max: Fury Road was widely celebrated as a victory for pop culture representations of female agency. This is something that seems to happen periodically in the era of the action blockbuster – I can remember the excitement and controversy over Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2: Judgement Day when I was a kid. Women are, obviously, never going to get equal representation in the action genre, so that every time, at long intervals, a movie of this kind with a good, ass-kicking role for a woman does come out, it will feel like something revolutionary and “feminist” all over again.

Personally, I'm not that inspired by depictions of women kicking ass. (Linda Hamilton in T2 is more interesting to me because she's a complex character who's a bit of a psycho, not an idealized mother, and not at all a sex object – while still being very badass.) But a feminism that envisions its end goal as a woman who is free from male oppression and victimization is going to look very different from a feminism that envisions its end goal as a woman who is intellectually, emotionally, and economically independent – which is not, notice, necessarily the same thing as a woman who is unequivocally triumphing in a late capitalist society. The first has its emphasis on (a negative view of) men, and what they do; the second on (a positive vision of) women, and what they can be.

Linda Hamilton in T2: a bit of a psycho, but check out those buff arms

And lest you think that the personal responsibility “piece” (to use late capitalist businesspeak out of a business context, like a real asshole) is just about celebrating female capability and strength, the other side of it is the recognition, which some iterations of feminism consider essential to considering women as full human beings, that women can be just as deeply shitty as men can. That is, I think, what Lionel Trilling meant when he said that Jane Austen's Emma Woodhouse is one of the few female characters in literature who have “a moral life” just like a man. People who are just victims, who have no agency, can be pitied, but they can't make true decisions and choices, and therefore can't be held responsible for their actions.

Perpetuation of Gender War

It's bizarre how some feminist arguments seem to be stuck in a time warp: they keep appearing, decade after decade, as though no progress, or attempt at progress, has been made. For example: the catcalling issue, which emerged again when that woman posted that video on YouTube. What did the video add to the discussion, other than bringing the argument to a new medium? Have we made any progress toward stopping catcalling? Or have we made any progress toward understanding and addressing the cultural and economic reasons why it happens? Or are we still chanting the mantras “patriarchy” and “misogyny”?

A whole lot of feminism, especially the kind that occurs on the internet, is just the perpetuation of gender war. One of the feminist memes I've heard endlessly repeated is that people who say that feminism is about male-bashing “just don't understand” what feminism is. Obviously, the ideological basis of feminism is not hating men, nor does it logically entail hating men, but not everyone who thinks that feminism has a man problem is simply confusing the idea of being equal with men with the idea of hating men.

Men and women have been accusing each other of terrible things throughout history. That is, apparently, what human beings who are necessarily (for the propagation of the race and transmission of property) intimate with each other, and who are on more-or-less of an equal social footing (compared to, say, property-owning men and slaves) with each other, do. Since men, for most of this time, by and large wrote the books, this argument has survived as anti-feminist literature and its refutation, the latter of which could be put in the mouths of female characters (Chaucer's Wife of Bath, for example, or Cervantes's Marcela), and which could involve criticisms of men as well as defenses of women. Now that women not only write more books but also have access to Twitter, they can write their own attacks on men, which can go viral, because there's nothing that either men or women like better than a bitter stereotype characterizing the “opposite sex.” Since feminism is predicated on the idea that “men oppress women through patriarchy,” a notion that's broad enough to include every complaint any woman might think to make about men, feminism legitimates this demonization of men, which in fact often proudly announces itself as feminism.

If you try to point this out, you will be told that “reverse sexism” isn't a thing because “reverse racism” isn't a thing. Feminists don't, can't, hate men; they can only react against misogyny. The fact that the racism analogy is always brought out to avoid addressing criticisms only goes to show that, unconsciously, feminists know that people consider race a more serious problem than gender, and in fact share that bias. It's true that men don't suffer from systemic sexism, which is not to say that the traditional male gender role doesn't involve plenty of hardships and disadvantages. (Feminism has got this covered under “patriarchy is bad for everyone,” although that phrase, too, is often used to deflect rather than to engage with criticism.) However, the fact that demonizing men doesn't contribute to systemic sexism doesn't make it more pleasant. All it does is add fuel to the neverending gender war.

Sexual Parochialism

I could write a book about the sexual parochialism of (most) feminism. Camille Paglia did write one, and it's called Sexual Personae. Credit where it's due, a lot of feminists did come around after the 90s debates: BDSM feminists emerged; it seems to be largely acceptable among feminists for women to direct pornographic films as an expression of their sexuality; and feminists seem to be recognizing sex worker's rights as a legitimate women's issue.

But alongside sex-positive feminism there arose rape culture feminism, which as far as I can tell is an excuse for the left to police any language or behavior that it doesn't like by associating it with rape; and campus rape hysteria, which appears to be a volatile mixture of sheltered middle-class women at their hormonal peak who are being fed a steady diet of victimization feminism, men at their hormonal peak who are being fed a steady diet of misogynous sports culture, controlling parents paying exorbitant tuition fees and expecting that their children will be protected from dangerous reality in return, and a culture of binge-drinking. Sounds like the makings of an American tragedy to me.

Meanwhile, feminist hostility toward the concept of personal responsibility has become a self-caricature wherein, by tortuous logic, no one – women included – is allowed to discuss strategies for rape prevention other than “telling men to stop raping,” or they risk being accused of “victim blaming” or even being a “rape apologist.”

Rape is to the left as terrorism is the right. Rape is, no doubt, a bigger actual threat to American women than terrorism is to Americans, though the numbers that float around and have even reached the White House are bizarrely inflated: more soberly, in a 2014 Bureau of Justice Statistics survey about 6 per 1000 female college students age 18-24 reported being raped or sexually assaulted. Both left and right trade in fear-mongering, as the dwindling middle class invents bogeymen in its entitled pursuit of a vacuum-sealed reality of perfect safety.

Back in the 90s, when I first became aware of problems with feminism, I was willing to entertain the possibility that feminist studies were inflating rape statistics. But I could not buy Paglia's claim that date rape “hysteria” consisted of sheltered young women, unprepared for the fact that adult life and sexual freedom can sometimes be physically and emotionally unpleasant, having “bad sex” and then retroactively – perhaps due to the intervention of feminists – interpreting it as rape. Until, two decades later, I read Lena Dunham's account in her memoir, Not That Kind of Girl, of what she labelled on the book tour, though not in the book, as her “sexual assault,” which is an absolute textbook case of the process I've just described. There are sometimes good reasons to expand the legal definition of rape, as feminism has been doing and attempting to do for some time now, and there are also good reasons to be concerned about its expansion. All we've got to go on are our intuitions, which are themselves culturally determined, but all I know is that there's not an intuition in my body that can account for why Dunham (who I think is a fine comedic writer and performer) thinks that she was sexually assaulted, unless she thinks that a traumatic sexual experience is, ipso facto, a sexual assault. There's one occurrence early on that one could make a case for as a sexual assault, but Dunham specifically doesn't describe it in a way that would make it unambiguous.

If Dunham had refrained from labeling the incident in life as on the page, the account could have stood as an example of some of the shit young women experience in their sex lives, although even as such it casts a sort of Gothic shadow over female sexuality, as if, here as elsewhere in the book Dunham is conveying the message that the sexual freedom for women that one version of feminism fought for is a cul-de-sac that ends in male violence and callousness. If I say that my own experience, although sometimes weird and awkward, hasn't been that bad at all, I know I'll get the response that offering a different example is insensitive to people who aren't as fortunate. But the very fact that these dark experiences are apparently widespread makes me think that Paglia called it when she said that middle-class feminism was producing generations of depressive young women who were not equipped to philosophically or emotionally handle the turbulent reality of their sexual imaginations and experiences.

Hence – the ongoing problem of the sexual parochialism of feminism.

Failure of Cultural Perspective

Feminism's difficulty with philosophically dealing with sex is part of its broader failure to look at the issues it raises in a wider cultural perspective. To use the example of rape culture: the tortuous logic of rape culture theory is that our culture, rather than condemning sexual violence against women, actually condones it. Of course, there's a certain striking, paradoxical truth to this. You can make the same argument about violence in general: on the one hand, we strongly condemn it; on the other hand, we glamourize it; make it the constant focus of movies, TV, the news, even popular music; celebrate it in sports; institutionalize it in the police, military, prisons; make it the cornerstone of masculinity.

Given this similarity, I don't see why we're not making the leap that the problem we should be doing something about is not violence against women, but violence. MRAs, whatever their problems, have made the points that although women are at far greater risk of being murdered by an intimate partner than men are, men are at far greater risk of being murdered in general, and also at far greater risk of death by suicide. Why should we so focused on rape? Because we're invested in female virtue? Not as feminists we're not. Because feminists are only interested in problems that affect women? Because that would be a problem. It was one thing when we thought that violence disproportionately affected women; as we apply the arguments of feminism to men, we become increasingly aware that that is not the case.

Likewise, one of the more interesting feminist articles I've stumbled upon on the internet have to do with looking at the problem of the wage gap from the perspective of worker's rights and women's unpaid labour as mothers. In other words, for me, as soon as you look at the problems that affect women alongside problems affecting other groups, they become a lot more interesting, but maybe that's because we're no longer simply repeating the words “patriarchy” and “misogyny,” or, more recently, “privilege” and “entitlement,” and thinking we're done.

Trust me, I've been an angry young woman in my lifetime, and at the age of 40 (as of the end of next month), I still get pissed off at sexism as often as I get pissed off at feminism. Female anger, as a symbolic, lightning-in-a-bottle substitute for female agency in a world that stifles the latter, is a glorious thing (as long as you're not dealing with it in person), and it's still a delight to see it disrupt expectations of soothing, submissive feminine niceness. But I've never been especially interested in being angry at men. Insofar as men do terrible things to women and other men, is it because they're inherently evil, or because that's how masculinity is constructed? If it's the latter, why are we wasting our energy ranting about “toxic male entitlement,” as happened in the wake of the Isla Vista Killings? Couldn't we, instead, be talking about toxic gender roles and their relation to violence?

It seems to me that the majority of feminism happening on university campuses and the internet is a lot more invested in staying angry at men than in doing something about the issues it has raised. That's a shame for many reasons, and not least because once upon a time some people thought that one of the great boons of feminism would be the transformation of heterosexual love into a relationship based on equality; that changing the meaning and improving the nature of love would be feminism's contribution to a new and better world. 

Failing that, nevertheless, at this point in history, I don't think there's any point to trying to adjust the current social and economic system to make it better accommodate women, with their same old biological disadvantages (slightly curtailed by birth control) – not that the white men at the top of the global power structure are interested in sharing their power anyway. We should all be focused, women and men, on creating a better, more egalitarian, social and economic system. All of the ideas of feminism are valuable to think about; the best ones, by their own logic, ought to be extended beyond feminism and take feminism beyond identity politics; the worst ones should be unequivocally rejected.

English Lit and Its Discontents: Some Thoughts After Re-Reading Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Why is literature central to the humanities? And why is it so difficult to study it?

The answers are related. The first thing to note is that among the humanities, literature is the odd man out because it is an art. Students and scholars of literature do not use specific, more-or-less scientific methods to study a specific component of human life; they study an art that takes human beings as its subject. Literature is the only art that inevitably takes human beings as its subject, which is one reason, presumably, that's it's grouped with the humanities rather than the fine arts. The other reason is that literature does not, like music, involve learning a new language, or, like music and the visual arts, isolatable and teachable techniques (the exception is poetry, which traditionally was grouped with the fine arts).

Literature was originally included in a liberal arts education, alongside the human sciences, because it was considered that a familiarity with the classics of literature was a necessary part of being a cultivated person. In order to become familiar with the classics of literature, however, all one has to do is read them. It has never been clear how one teaches these texts. After all, you don't “teach literature” the way you teach music, or teach painting, or teach dance. Art is represented in the humanities as Art History, but as such, like Religious Studies, it's taught as a special branch of history, looking at a cultural phenomenon on which great importance has traditionally been placed. Literature, on the other hand, is supposed to stand alongside History, as its own liberal art and area of the humanities.

The reason that literature, as an academic subject, has lagged behind the other humanities in becoming a type of (soft) science, is not that English students are especially backward or fuzzy-headed, but that at bottom, students and professors know that what they are there to do is read books. Literature students are not engaged in a practice, as historians are when they study history or philosophers when they practice philosophy. (Philosophy, the other non-scientific humanities field, asks many of the same broad questions about human beings and human life as science, but uses abstract reason rather than empirical analysis and testing to develop answers.) Literature students are reading books. Moreover, because of the status that canonical literature acquires, the humanists within Humanities departments often want to interfere as little as possible in the student's experience of the books, from which students are supposed to get everything they need.

Naturally this has led to a lot of confusion about what English, as an academic subject, is, and what its students and scholars are or should be doing. The confusion that what students are doing is studying literature as a cultural product leads to Cultural Studies and to attracting students to English with courses about popular new books (which can of course be made interesting through postmodern theory: everything can). We have already seen that students cannot be engaged in the study of literary history if English is, as it is taken to be, its own subject; although there is a large component of literary history to what English students do.

Another way in which English students become confused about their subject is that a large component of any university subject is reading books. In other subjects, however, the books present information or arguments about the subject (say, American history, or epistemology, or biology). In English, the books are the subject. Confusion about this difference leads to the idea that what one is studying is the author's ideas, making English into a less rigorous form of philosophy.

There are a couple of reasons why so much radical theory found a home in English departments, from Freud and Marx to feminism, queer theory, and postcolonialism. First, the literary canon has the peculiar feature of coming to stand for cultural authority, quite regardless of whatever ideas the authors represented in it may have had. We often view this as an ex post facto sacralization of literature, but although the phenomenon is most familiar from sacred texts (e.g. The Bible, The Koran), it occurs just as often with secular texts (The Confucian Four Books and Five Classics, The Iliad, Shakespeare). Although any art will acquire a canon, none of the others have anything like the cultural authority of the literary canon: no matter how visual the culture becomes, writing continues to bear authority. At the same time, humanists, understanding that literature is central to the humanities, mistakenly took this to mean that the literary canon exemplifies humanist values. Accordingly, those who are critical of or disappointed in humanism found a logical target in the literary canon, which is also a useful target because of its embodiment of authority.

As Frye recounts in the “Polemical Introduction” to the Anatomy: since neither English students nor English professors are exactly sure what they're supposed to be doing, professors have had to look outside of the subject area for ideas that are teachable, and have found no shortage of them. Since the nature of textual interpretation is such that you can make almost any text into an allegory for almost anything, literature turns out to be a fantastic way of teaching the ideas of the professor's favourite thinker; and as a bonus, you can also symbolically attack authority.

This is how English has gone, or always already went, from being about gaining familiarity with canonical literature as part of becoming a cultivated individual, to being about attacking canonical literature in order to prove you're duly sceptical of bourgeois Western values.

For Frye, rectifying this situation begins with understanding that what the literature student or scholar is doing (as the philosopher does philosophy or the physicist does physics) is not “literature”; literature is what writers do. What literature students and scholars are doing is criticism. It would therefore go a long way toward clarifying things to rename English, English Criticism.

This both is and is not a solution. Students who are avid readers will show up to gain a familiarity with literature; students who are pissed off (with good reason) about Western values or who just like symbolically attacking authority will show up for the other stuff. But I'm not sure who would show up to study English Criticism. We certainly believe that literature is as important as philosophy or history; but do we believe that criticism is?

And yet is makes sense. The philosophy student or professor who reads the work of a canonical or contemporary philosopher, as they will do in their studies, is reading the work of a person engaged in the same activity as they are. When an English student or professor reads the work that they are supposed to be studying, they are obviously not reading the work of a person engaged in the same activity as they are. Yet the literary works, and not criticism, are made central to the study of literature (which is exactly why humanists are always shrieking that they're losing centrality); and, moreover, justify it as a field of study.

For Frye, the real reason that literature is central to the humanities and the liberal arts is that it bridges history and philosophy, with the specificity, the ties to reality and necessity, of the former and the power of generalization and speculation of the latter. In doing so, it creates a hypothetical construct that liberates the reader by freeing her from having to recognize the mere contingency of the natural world (let alone the social world) as necessity. The impulse of imaginative literature is to always propose an alternative; and literature is most important to us of all when that alternative can't be realized, but can only be imagined. Behind these descriptions is presumably some kind of Kantian notion of art as the mental faculties of human beings in free play, liberated from instrumentalism and delighting in themselves.

Frye is all thunder and brimstone in his “Polemical Introduction”; curiously, in his “Tentative Conclusion,” as the title suggests, he has lost his fire, and states more than once that he's not suggesting that literary critics should change what they're doing. Supposing, however, that the study of literature were to become Frye's criticism, and were accordingly to become more scientific. This would doubtless be useful, since if nothing else, the magisterial, densely argued, wildly erudite, elegantly written, and occasionally mad-as-a-hatter Anatomy succeeds in showing what fascinating things can result if we stop reading literature as humanists, for the characters, author, and meaning (or their replacement, the oppressed and the means of oppression), and start studying it methodically and analytically.

This would be a great discipline that would definitely advance human knowledge more than the way we currently study literature does; but would studying literature in this way still do the humanist job that produces some of Frye's greatest flights of rhetoric in the Anatomy? For a man who wants literary criticism to be a science, he sure gets excited about the benefits of the liberal arts.

As an illustration (and only a minor one) of what Frye's kind of criticism can do, the portion of the Anatomy with most relevance to subjects I've written about on this blog is where he distinguishes between the different types of prose fiction (in the Fourth Essay): the novel (by which he means the social novel), the romance, the confession, and Menippean satire or anatomy. In other words, while public criticism currently consists of babbling about whether or not Sheila Heti or Karl Ove Knausgaard is really making art, Frye just throws confession (i.e., literary autobiography) in with “prose fiction,” which makes sense considering that particularly since Modernism, novelists have been blurring the line between fiction and autobiography, and, as Frye points out, the novel and the confession develop together and mutually influence each other. And yet we still can't get over this blurring, because in speaking of book-length prose fiction we have no vocabulary other than “novel” (by which we mean the European social novel) and “experimental novel,” which is every extended work of prose fiction that is not like “the novel,” although it may in fact be trying to be something else, and therefore be neither a novel nor experimental (even though the author himself or herself may make this same mistake).

We pay a huge price for reading literature the humanist way: not only a deeply confused academic discipline, but also an impoverished, ahistorical public criticism. No one took heed of Frye in 1957 and no one is going to do so now, but reading the Anatomy helps to clarify why English is the strange, fraught subject it is, as well as being extraordinarily, if fitfully, illuminating on the subject of literature. Frye manages the seemingly impossible feat of producing a methodical and theoretical work of literary criticism that is nevertheless consistently personal in tone, full of aperҫus and insights; which makes it, after all, the rarest and most valuable form of criticism, not scientific but humanist, a work of literature in itself, though not a work of (in the familiar meaning of the word) fiction – in a word, an anatomy.

The Mad Men Finale, Montage of Heck, and American Endings

I was not a fan of Mad Men, and, although “Smells Like Teen Spirit” became a hit when I was 16, I was not a fan of Nirvana. When it comes to monster pop culture trends, especially those with the greatest appeal to my demographic, I find myself frequently being the person watching everyone else with bewilderment and going, “Sure, it's okay – but that's it.” Or, “Maybe this really is the greatest thing in the world. But doesn't anybody have a different opinion?”

I am not, however, indifferent to The Cultural Conversation; if everybody's talking about it, and I have even the slightest bit of independent curiosity about it, I probably want to think about it, talk about it, and maybe blog about it too. So not only did I watch the finale of Mad Men last Sunday, and then see Montage of Heck in the theatre on Wednesday, but I've also been thinking about them, and about they mythos of America, since then. I was therefore pleased, though not surprised, to learn that the director of Montage of Heck, Brett Morgan, majored in something called American Mythology at Hampshire College before getting his MFA in film.

Don Draper, American Anti-Heroes, and the Soap Opera Heroine

I started thinking about American mythology in relation to the ending of Mad Men. The use of that iconic Coke commercial reminded me of the skin-crawly things about the show that made me stop watching it after a two-season trial binge (which happened, I think, around the time Season 4 was airing): how it takes advantage of the way that something that would have appeared to the world, at the time, as innocuous or even positive, now seems, with ironic, knowing hindsight, at once naive and sinister. In other words, our relationship to the recent cultural past, in Mad Men, is one of condescension, disapproval, and envy, which means that the show is not about the past and what it may have been like to live in it, but about our relationship to cartoon ideas about the past, which relies on, and fosters, cartoon ideas about the present.

I've heard a lot about Jay Gatsby in relation to Don Draper/Dick Whitman, but the series finale of Mad Men actually called to mind the endings of two other classics of American literature, one highbrow and one low: Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady and Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (another work that grapples with the present America's guilty nostalgia for its past). In the final sequences of both novels, an important character dies, while the protagonist, after reaching her lowest point, gets an ambiguous ending. Actually, Don Draper's final story arc even more closely recalls that of Charlotte Vale (Bette Davis) in what ought to be an American classic, the film Now, Voyager, which takes its title from Whitman. In a moment of crisis, Charlotte, like Don, bolts from the city and seeks help and guidance at a retreat for the rich called Cascade. In Portrait, Isabel Archer, after increasing conflict with her husband, the social-climbing fortune hunter Gilbert Osmond, travels from Rome to England to see her dying cousin, Ralph, at his familial estate, the Edenic Gardencourt; after being confronted there by her obsessed stalker, Caspar Goodwood, who argues that Osmond's cruelty justifies them running off together, she decides, for reasons not revealed to the reader, to return to Rome and her awful marriage instead. And in the movie version of Gone With the Wind, Scarlett, after being left by Rhett, realizes that going home to Tara will give her the strength she needs to go on living and think of a way to win him back.

One of the interesting ways in which Mad Men alters the Victorian ending is by killing off the most hated, rather than the most loved, character. The effect of this was not to punish Betty Draper, but to give her some unexpected dignity and redemption, in a muted, sardonic way that kept true to the character's limitations and, thereby, to human limitations in general. The best way to understand American endings is by looking at how the shared plot elements transform in these different works. Don attempts a kind of homecoming when he goes to see Stephanie, but when he tries to help her, she points out that he's the one who seems to need help, which he gets, in the end, from her spiritual retreat; Charlotte goes to Cascade to get help, but discovers that the best way to help herself is to help a girl who reminds her of a younger and more helpless version of herself. Isabel's one sentimental and ethical tie to Rome is her relationship with a helpless young woman, Osmond's daughter Pansy, whom Osmond has sequestered in a convent for her disobedience, and whom Isabel has promised to help. Don has sentimental ties to all three of the women he calls from California – his daughter, Sally, her mother, his childlike ex-wife, Betty, and his workplace protegee, Peggy – and obligations to the first two. Yet Peggy is the only one who wants him back, suggesting that the workplace is his only real home, just as his professional life is the area where he's been successful.

The American hero or heroine is profoundly alone at the end of his or her story, whether isolated by errors and others' wrongs or by their own bad behaviour. Scarlett O'Hara is still, curiously, the only female American anti-hero of iconic stature. Another way in which the Mad Men finale inverts the Victorian ending is that rather than going to a friend at the time of their death, Don travels away from Betty. The already-famous group therapy session hug combines the emotional breakdown, and breakthrough, that occurs for Isabel at Ralph's bedside with Caspar Goodwood's kiss – non-sexual touching being perhaps as difficult for Don as sexual touching is for Isabel.

Don Draper follows in the footsteps of Isabel and Scarlett by not having his future resolved at the end of his story. In this, he differs from all of the other major characters at the end of Mad Men, who are left in a place of contentment or at least acceptance, and who at least believe that they understand their future: Betty will die, reconciled with her daughter to the best of their ability; Sally will take care of her mother, which is enough to think about for the moment; Roger is newly married; Pete is reunited with his wife; Peggy is in a new relationship and settled in at her new workplace; Joan has started a business. He also differs from iconic American male protagonists, like Gatsby and Charles Foster Kane, who are dead before the narratives that tell their stories begin – or even his anti-hero peer, Walter White.

We don't know why Isabel chooses to go back to Rome and her marriage, but it's hard not to interpret the ending pessimistically: that she may be able to help Pansy somehow, and that the idea of being Caspar Goodwood's mistress doesn't appeal to her, don't seem like enough to constitute a bright future for her. The future looks somewhat brighter for Scarlett, although obviously not as bright as it would have been if Rhett hadn't just left her. At the end of Gone With the Wind, we don't know what's going to happen to Scarlett; at the end of Portrait, we not only don't know what's going to happen to Isabel, we don't know what has happened to Isabel: why she made the choice to return to Rome. And at the end of Mad Men, we have to infer what has narratively happened to Don from the juxtaposition of the image of Don meditating with the Coke commercial, without knowing thematically what it means.

The final image of Don Draper, meditating and wearing an enigmatic smile, has resonances with the famous final images of King Vidor's weepie Stella Dallas, starring Barbara Stanwyck, and Rouben Mamoulian's Queen Christina, starring Greta Garbo. Both women have lost seemingly everything important to them and that defines them (a throne and her lover, in Garbo's case; a marriage and her daughter, in Stanwyck's). (What does it mean that I keep thinking of narratives with female protagonists in relation to Don Draper – supposedly a symbol of turn-of-the-millennium masculinity? Just that the genre of Mad Men, unlike Breaking Bad, is soap opera?) Garbo, her masklike face a careful blank (Mamoulian wanted the audience to read the emotions they wanted to see into it), looks toward the future with stoicism, grimly “going forward” in Don Draper, and corporate capitalist, fashion; Stella Dallas, in contrast, smiles, finding a source of joy unknown to us as she strides alone into a future that we equally don't know. 

From what I've heard and read about the internet reaction to the finale moments of Mad Men, a lot of viewers seem to think that the ending is saying, in a straightforwardly cynical way, that Don's smile seems to signify an epiphany, even enlightenment, but turns out to “really” be an idea for how to commodify his experience of connectedness and wholeness in the form of an ad; using our desperate thirst for higher meaning, “the real thing,” to sell Coke – and America, globalization, and capitalism – to the globe. That's the reductive interpretation, comparable to saying that Isabel goes back to Osmond because there's a conservative part of her that won't allow her to divorce, even if she's revolted by the idea of a sham marriage. There's also the interpretation that no enlightenment, however sincere, is entirely pure, at least none achievable by ordinary people; and at the same time, no really powerful popular image can be entirely cynical, even if its naivety benefits evil.

But isn't that America – or its mythology? I think Henry James would think so. Isabel Archer makes a mistake when she makes the most important choice of her life because, in her naivety, she believes she is free to choose, as the Americans (and aspiring Americans) who chose Coke believed they were free to choose.

The ending of Mad Men also poses the question, without giving us the answer: has Don changed in some way during the course of the show, or, in turning his epiphany, and the entire 60s revolution, into his most powerful image of desire yet, is he the same – only more? Portrait raises this question even more directly by making Isabel make the same disastrous choice again, but here Don really belongs in the company of fellow pop American icon Scarlett O'Hara, who is virtually incapable of change, to the secret pleasure of the reader or viewer, who finds her exciting, and a suitable wish-fulfilment identification figure, because of her flaws. Don is somewhat unique, however, in that he finds some reason to go on that is not external to him (as Charlotte certainly has a reason in Tina, her quasi-adopted daughter, and Isabel perhaps to some extent in Pansy), and that is not simply a reason to survive (like Stella Dallas's, in her loneliness and poverty), but to be great, and maybe joyous. And that's his work, meaning both his creative ability and his professional success. In this he most closely resembles (David O. Selznick's) Scarlett again, because although winning Rhett back may give her a project (like working on Coke), it's Tara that gives her the strength to undertake it, and Tara is nothing more than a symbol of renewal (Mother Earth, continuity): not Coke, but Om.

Montage of a Feminist-Postmodern-Punk Marriage

Kurt Cobain is a very different kind of American icon from Don Draper; and yet, as Montage of Heck also shows, maybe not so different. Feeling abandoned and unloved by his divorced, working-class parents as a teenager, Cobain sought to escape from himself in the very American fashion of reinventing himself as a rock star. Unlike Don, however, Cobain couldn't wholeheartedly embrace the American dream in all of its naive sincerity and absolute inauthenticity. He wanted a happy, united family, and wanted to rebel against it; he wanted to be a world-conquering rock star, and wanted to be a civilization-smashing iconoclast; he loathed conformity and craved acceptance.

At the birth of rock and roll, there was no conflict between being a world-famous billionaire and being a great rock musician. But Cobain belonged to a post-Don Draper generation that had seen everything that looked like the real thing become commodified, including every attempt to rebel against the process. He knew that there was no way to matter on a large scale except by conforming, or at least spawning conformity, and becoming a corporate tool. Cobain stood out not just in being the charismatic zeitgeist vehicle that brought punk into the mainstream, but by being willing to die – not by hedonistic accident, but by shotgun to the head – to establish his authenticity. In that, he was more Isabel Archerish even than Don Draper: in one interpretation that I've always liked, Isabel self-destructively goes back to her husband so that the marriage she was tricked into will be her own choice after all; and Cobain, it seems, killed himself to get back control over a narrative that was being determined by impersonal cultural forces.

Courtney Love's relationship to the mainstream and success is every bit as fucked-up as Cobain's, but very different, too. Her desire for success and acceptance has always been absolutely naked, and for that reason, the cool kids of punk (like Kim Gordon), who never questioned their punk ethos, found and find her embarrassing and disturbing; and yet she's more punk rock than they'll ever be, louder, angrier, rawer, more jagged, absolutely incapable of being assimilated into the mainstream. Or so it seems, but she, too, has engaged in an ambivalent dance with success. There was a moment in the late 90s, when, riding the wave of mainstream success that Nirvana had made possible for alternative acts, she released a perfect pop-rock album with Hole in Celebrity Skin; got the plastic surgery just right; successfully launched a Hollywood acting career; and was dating a nice, stable, talented Hollywood actor. Even Camille Paglia approved. As Love has said many times since, she could have fulfilled her dream, then, of being Hollywood Courtney. Did her demons reassert themselves at that point, or the realization that her dream contained a large component of bullshit? Punk Courtney and Hollywood Courtney are each as real as the other – like Professor Kelp and Buddy Love. And that internal tension is what makes Courtney Love (like Jerry Lewis) such a great American star. Whereas Cobain seemed to be unable to live with that tension and conflict, Love made it the subject of her art, and her life into her art.

To see Love and Cobain together in their home videos in Montage of Heck is to see Gen X allegorized in the form of a famous, fucked-up couple who are like inversions of each other. They've got the kind of playful, solipsistic soulmate bond that, in rock stars in their mid-20s, you normally only see between the creative duo in a band: the Lennon and McCartneys, Morrissey and Marrs, Doherty and Barats. Or yes, okay, the Lennon and Onos, which is one of the reasons Ono attracted such hatred: because finding a bond with a fellow artist within a feminist heterosexual marriage precludes the need for the homosocial bond that's the traditional basis of culture. And that fucks up our pop culture. You don't just want the music of The Beatles: you want the Beatles romping together. Morrissey and Marr flirting with each other. Doherty and Barat practically having sex on stage together.

The clips chosen for the documentary give the impression that Love and Cobain, in a way that's very 90s postmodern, were incessantly meta about their relationship and the way it was being mythologized by the public, as interpreted by the media. They were also, in a way that also strikes me as very 90s, very my generation, meta about their gender roles in relation to themselves and to their relationship. This did not produce harmony, however, but rather struggle within oneself and with each other. Cobain despises masculinity as traditionally conceived, but sometimes seems to struggle with conventional attitudes (“Mommy's loud,” he complains to the infant Frances at one point; at another, he pretends to punch Love in the arm and refers to his action as “wife beating,” but he's clearly actually frustrated with her); Love is openly competitive and effortlessly assertive, but has a conflicted attitude toward femininity (she complains about women being mean to her and warns Kurt about the woman who are going to try to get their claws in him on tour). (As I learned from rewatching my wedding video at the time of my divorce, there's nothing like video to capture the small tensions and aggressions that constantly flare up between friends, acquaintances, and members of a couple.)

I found myself recognizing myself in Love, in terms of our relationship to feminism, again and again. Growing up in the 80s and early 90s, one was constantly bombarded by the media (which in those days was TV and magazine articles) with the message that men considered women inferior and didn't like you to be intelligent or angry; that men would ignore women when they spoke, or not take you seriously; and that being female meant to be threatened by objectification, sexual harassment, and rape. As a person with a healthy ego and a pretty elastic relationship to gender (learned from David Bowie – a Cobain favourite), I accordingly cultivated a persona of maximum force and directness. There were limits to this, since by nature I'm a quiet, introspective, meek person who likes to read and write and be left alone. And it was mostly brought to bear in relationships and intellectual engagement with men, and in the university classroom, where I usually dominated discussion; and in the street when having to walk through bad neighborhoods at night. In workplace contexts, on the other hand, it tended to work against me until I figured out what I was doing wrong: the constant expression of frustration just reads as entitlement in situations that call for high levels of patience or cooperation.

Love's context was punk rock, and for her that didn't mean cool, as it did for Kim Gordon, since cool was far beyond her, but the ability to express your aggression. And not only onstage, but to some extent in your personal interactions. There's a scene where she and Cobain are getting ready in the bathroom, their backs to each other, each apparently facing a mirror, where Love, rambling on with her trademark logomania on her usual topic of her perception by others, expresses her concern that she will become the most hated woman in America. Cobain pipes up, muttering, “You're already the most hated woman in America,” to which Love responds instantly by halting in mid-hair-tease and asking, an edge in her voice, “What?”, daring him to repeat himself. I smiled at that point, because I have done that so many times in conversations with men – especially in my 20s, as Love is here. He rephrases himself, placatingly, “You and Roseanne Barr are tied for the most hated woman in America,” and they move on. (Hyper-aware of their mythology, both Cobain and Love like to consider themselves, and each other, in relation to other pop culture figures of the present and the past. Cobain seems especially fixated on Axl Rose as his antithetical doppelganger.)

What's at stake in that exchange? Love is momentarily in denial about how much the public hates her, and doesn't want to hear the truth just then, from him; she's also sensitive to the possibility that by repeating the sentiment, he's supporting it. She has a category of things that men are not allowed to say to her and ways that they are not allowed to speak to her without challenge. In later footage, family and friends sing “Happy Birthday” to Frances on her first birthday, which seems like a joyous occasion until, the moment the song ends, Cobain exits the frame and Love shrieks “KURT DON'T LEAVE!” Was he only able to stick around for the length of the song before he had to get high? In any case, he's shirking his parental duties, and Love won't put up with it, telling him that she won't open Frances's present until he gets back there.

As men and women who'd grown up exposed to second-wave feminism sloughed off their traditional gender roles, it didn't produce equality so much as a new, topsy-turvy imbalance: the spectacle of an openly aggressive woman bossing around a small, quiet man. And yet the power imbalance in the public sphere remained the same, with the man having the more successful career. Which means the dynamic is less something new than the Macbeths archetype. Love is such an important figure not because she had the most respected career of a woman in rock (that would be PJ Harvey, who, unlike Love, has never inspired me to buy one of her albums, because I don't actually care about rock), and not because she and Cobain had a celebrity “power marriage,” which they didn't entirely (if you want celebrity marriages where the members of the couple have equal power, there have always been those, from Liz and Dick to Brad and Angelina), but because, again, she exhibited the ambivalence of ambitious women who were trying to achieve equality with men. Love wasn't content with being separate but equal: unlike Liz Taylor, Yoko Ono, Angelina Jolie, or Beyonce, she evidently considered herself to be in direct competition with her husband for his job of being the greatest rock and roll star in the world. At the same time, because that role wasn't as easily available to her as it was to a man, she was tempted to get power the way women have traditionally had to do it: through association with her husband. That is where feminism was at in the early 90s (see also the Clintons).

A curious way in which we mythologize famous couples, when their personalities or narrative fit the archetype, is by demonizing one of the members. Surprisingly, it's not always the woman who's demonized. When a woman is taken up as a cult figure, often by feminism, like Zelda Fitzgerald, Jane Bowles, or Sylvia Plath, the husband may be demonized, suspected of somehow contributing to his wife's struggles with mental illness. On a larger scale, there's Princess Diana, victimized by her husband and the shadowy machinations of the Royal Family; or the conspiracy theories about Kennedy involvement in the death of Marilyn Monroe. The woman-abuser, wife-murderer, or gaslighter is one gendered Gothic narrative we have at our disposal; its counterpart is the emasculating bitch-wife, so iconic in Anglo-American culture that you can just call her The Yoko, although more recently she's been popping up in cult TV focused on male protagonists through which writers, and apparently viewers as well, work out their relationship to traditional masculinity. That is where feminism, which perhaps should now call “gender relations” (since we're well into getting meta about masculinity in pop culture), is at in the mid-2010s.

The Cobains weren't The Osbournes, in part because Love did pursue her own career rather than being part of her husband's, even as his “boss.” Love and Cobain also come across in the videos as far too intelligent, funny, and self-aware to play the parts of termagant and clueless “schlub” husband. On the other hand, who knows what they would have been like by the early 2000s, if Cobain and their marriage had survived. Is it better to die young, with integrity and dignity, or to get a reality TV show and become an unfathomably rich joke, but evidently enjoy your family life? Love has continued to cling to punk dignity, refusing to take the easy way and become the reality TV star she was obviously meant to be, even though her popularity as a musician didn't survive the 90s. But is it worth it, in a world in which no bit of real reality can survive the touch of commerce or media, and in which “reality” is a TV genre that means “gawking at freaks”?

Game of Thrones and the Obligations of Writers of Fictional Violence

Besides the Mad Man finale, the other thing that happened in TV – which makes up about 85% of The Cultural Conversation in any given week (with 10% devoted to Stuff That Happened on the Internet and 5% to news stories involving celebrities) – was, of course, the latest Game of Thrones rape scene. I don't follow GOT, because I can't imagine anything worse than its combination of static talking heads scenes, grim, grisly, sexualized violence, and tits. However, as with my other two subjects for this week, that won't stop me from weighing in. I've only got three more posts to go after this; I'm giving up this blog to focus on writing a novel after I turn 40 at the end of August. One is going to be on Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism, which I've almost finished re-reading; one on my feelings about feminism (not to be confused with my feelings about gender equality); and a final one on the forms my reading has taken in my 39^th year.

This subject makes a good introduction to some of the issues I'll be talking about in the feminism post. Having listened to podcasters on the subject and read several articles on the internet, I want to weigh in from a perspective that I haven't heard represented: a woman who's written in the same genre as Game of Thrones. I'm not talking about sword and sorcery fantasy, although I've seen articles defending the scene based on Martin's deconstruction of the “heroics” of the genre, or whatever. (That shows a bit of a short view of literary history, since the preeminent canonical fantasy epic, The Faerie Queene, is full of the rape and torture of women – for which see Fiedler and Paglia.) No, the genre I'm talking about is pulp, the pop culture continuation of medieval romance (in the sense of “fantasy”). It's the basic underlying genre of pretty much all popular novels, TV drama, superhero comics, daytime soaps, and such movie genres as film noir and horror, and it's characterized by a fascination with sex, violence, and their intermingling, as well as such moods, emotions, or states as “suffering” and “angst.” Thanks to Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, we have come to refer to its pessimism (a lowbrow form of the sublime of tragedy) using terms like “comic book darkness,” a mood that strongly informs cult TV.

I myself was writing a fan fiction soap opera parody, but it was in the mode of pulp, which is exactly the same whether it's coming from the imagination of TV, novel, or internet writers. What I found is that following my Muse where it took me while writing a sexually explicit soap opera meant conjuring up a series of increasingly horrible scenarios of intimate abuse, violence, or exploitation. None of which, incidentally, were meant to be titillating, although a lot of other scenes in the story were. Notably, doing really horrible things to the people closest to you is also the basis of Greek tragedy, and in the case of Oedipus Rex, the most iconic of all the Greek tragedies, the crime is sexual; which, as an educated sort of person, I was thinking about in writing my silly, but dark, soap parody.

One of the arguments that critics of the GOT scene have made is that if you're going to put rape in a story, you should treat it sensitively and responsibly and not just use it exploitatively, for shock value. To which the counter response has been that the show is full of horrible violence perpetrated against multiple characters, male and female – beheading, stabbing, torture, castration. So why should this topic receive special treatment? And if you're going to get upset about this fictional act, why not get upset about all of the others?

Now, I think that a writer is aware of when they are writing something primarily to entertain, whatever the work's actual status as a work of art (as if that's something that's objective and unchanging across all contexts). Writing to entertain doesn't preclude writing to challenge, including writing with the hope that your audience will be shocked, upset, and disturbed. But the sensitive and thoughtful writer who is writing to entertain will pause before using a subject that's a real-life problem, and highly emotional for many people, as fodder for their project of shocking and disturbing in a way that entertains. Such a writer will want to treat those subjects in a way that, without ceasing to be shocking and entertaining, is thoughtful and sensitive, and has consequences for the characters.

So, for example, the penultimate shock-scene in my story was a climactic act of intimate partner violence within a relationship between two men that had been characterized by quasi-consensual rough sex. The result for the characters was that the victim ended the relationship, which was never even temporarily resumed, despite the continued existence of strong feelings. The final shock scene was an act of rape perpetrated on a woman by a man (the worst villain in the story, a sadistic madman), which I used to illustrate that acquaintance rape doesn't have to be violent and can even involve incidental arousal. Subsequent chapters dealt with her emotional healing, confusion, and anger, without making her final story arc entirely about her rape. (A complex and ambiguous character, like every character in the story except, for the most part, the hero and the rapist-villain, she was something of a stalker and sociopath, so her arc had to deal with those things too.)

The question is how I knew to treat intimate partner violence and rape differently from other kinds of violence, in a story that features such acts of violence as: attempted murder of a baby (twice); two murders (one extremely gruesome) and two notable accidental deaths; a good old melodrama shove down a staircase; and arson (twice). And those are just the parts I plotted. (I had two collaborators, and one of them was as “dark” as I was; the other one mainly ran around hooking characters up.) And the answer is that feminism has raised awareness of, and demanded sensitivity toward, those types of violence.

All of which means that I agree with both sides: I do think that writers should treat sensitive subjects with sensitivity; yet I also think that we should use furors like this as an opportunity to ask why only certain representations of violence deserve sensitive treatment, and usually only those in which female characters are the victims; while elsewhere, the sadism of the writer and viewer can run rampant. We should ask ourselves why so much of our entertainment (and, taking the long historical view, our art) is so violent, and whether we should embrace the reign of the unconscious in fiction or choose less violent fictions.

The reaction of self-declared feminist critic Kate Kulzick on The Televerse, one of my favourite podcasts (I listen to it even though I don't watch 95% of the shows they cover and have never watched 80% of them), is instructive of the weird compartmentalization going on with this topic, because after expressing her anger at and disappointment with the GOT scene, she went on to express excitement over David Lynch's return to the Twin Peaks revival. I love David Lynch and the first season of Twin Peaks, but if ever there were a show that used violence against women for no purpose except shock value, that was it. I think particularly of the scene in which the villainous thug Leo advances on his kneeling and cowering wife while swinging a bar of soap in a sock, which was the most shocking thing I'd ever seen on TV as a 15-year-old. (As a superhero comics reader, I'd seen more violent images, including a couple of murders of men that stayed with me for the rest of my life.) Nor was that scene ever meaningfully followed up on. And the horrendously violent scene in which Laura Palmer's murderer is revealed in Season 2 was so gratuitous, disgusting, and silly that I not only never wanted to see Twin Peaks again – I never wanted to see anything by David Lynch again. (He didn't fully regain my trust until Mulholland Dr, a decade later.)

Lynch is a writer-director who knowingly trades in shock imagery, yet one seldom gets the sense that Lynch's intention is to entertain (except in the episodes of surreal humour that drain off some of the constant dread). At its best, such “meta” violence has the result of making the audience pause and question our relationship to violence, imaginative and real, while violence in entertainment has the precise opposite effect; yet it shouldn't be surprising that offence and rage is one possible reaction to such deliberately crafted extreme imagery. Since violence is a staple of entertainment, as it is of life and the imagination, I would in fact, as a viewer/fan, like to see more examples of it being treated as a thing with consequences in fiction, simply because it's an opportunity to deepen the characters and world.

However, violence doesn't show up in writing because writers want to portray “real” issues in sensitive ways, but because the imagination is violent, and a huge amount of what art (not only narrative but also visual) and entertainment does is imagine scenarios of violence and suffering, inspiring pity and fear. (I have now, in case you didn't notice, switched to using “art” in the broader, more inclusive sense of all cultural artifacts with which a significant segment of the public has strong engagement.) We should have strong reactions to these images that permeate our culture, and those reactions are bound to be emotional and confused, because the life/art boundary is confusing, or art couldn't inspire these reactions, or in other words, be art. But I think it's the duty of critics and feminists (and I count myself as both) to not just express emotion and have reactions, but also be critical about our reactions, and get clear about what is confusing and what is going to remain confused.

And let's also keep in mind that internet outrage, a type of mob emotion, is every bit as base a source of pleasure as an exploitative graphic scene. To give a foretaste of the Northrop Frye post (can you wait??), here's one of many great sentences from Anatomy of Criticism: "At play [e.g., in art or sports], mob emotions are boiled in an open pot, so to speak; in the lynching mob they are in a sealed furnace of what Blake would call moral virtue." The internet is somewhere between play and a lynching mob.