As of this morning I will be on the road to visit the family in Texas (partially because I haven’t seen them in ages, partially as a maneuver to get the car back in time to pick up a guest from Atlanta), so GT and The Daily Linkroll may be sporadic for a little while. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

In the meantime, have a ball reading T. Phoebe Reilly’s review and critique of Ghost World from Bitch. I recently saw the film and enjoyed it a great deal; the review does a pretty good job of summing up both what I liked and what worried me throughout.

Last year, Iran was terrorized by the serial murder of 21 women in prostitution, most of them in the Shi’ite holy city of Mashhad, over the course of 12 months. On July 26, 2001, the spider-killer Saeed Hanayi was finally arrested by Iranian police. He confessed to murdering 16 of the women and raping 13 of his victims before he killed them, and said he would have gladly murdered 150 if the police hadn’t stopped him. He was hanged for his crimes in April of this year.

The Iranian police, of course, were doing what they could to stand up for the victims of this slaughter. The day before Hanayi was arrested, with credible information that a gang had been involved in some of the crimes, police took decisive action to stop the slaughter. No, they didn’t arrest the suspected murderers; they arrested about 500 women in prostitution in Mashhad and threw them in prison [IranMania News]. On July 29, the followed it up by arresting 32 more in northwestern Iran.

Immediately after Hanayi’s arrest and confession, the religious conservatives who hold absolute power to direct the civil government, showed their commitment to humane government and women’s rights by writing in Jomhuri Eslami (which speaks for the religious ruler Ayatollah Khamenei): Who is to be judged in Mashhad? Those who look to eradicate the sickness or those who stand at the root of the corruption? That’s right: they stood by a serial murderer who had strangled 16 women, because he did not spill the blood of innocents.

Update: By a freak coincidence, today the Mashhad police decided to re-affirm their commitment to imprisoning and punishing women for trying to survive. They arrested 44 women in prostitution in a crackdown on vice in the holy city. Since the majority of the 148 people arrested are apparently men, it seems that the government is at least arresting pimps as well, which is better than we ordinarily do in the United States. But does the attention focus on the 104 men who are exploiting women whose only crime is trying to survive in hard economic times? Of course not. What’s important to the Iranian police is that:

The police are ready to pick up all street women and prostitutes in less than 72 hours across the country, he added.

On the other hand, apparently they couldn’t be bothered to pick up a serial murderer for over a year.

There are a few still in the Left who continue to believe that any regime which opposes American imperialism is, ipso facto, good, no matter what horrors it perpetrates against its own people. The poster-child for the sociopathic Left, for the past 25 years, has been the Islamic Revolution in Iran. I’ve even met male Leftists who claimed that the Islamic Revolution was a revolution for women’s rights. Well, look, it’s certainly true that the Shah’s blood-soaked tyranny in Iran was oppressive to women. However, this revolutionary Islamic Republic has a theocratic government which praises serial murderers of women in prostitution, and young women are burning themselves to death at increasing rates due out of poverty, desperation, and political oppression. It is high past time we asked: Whose Revolution was this? When women played a central role in the fight against the patriarchal tyranny of the Shah, was this what they were fighting for?

For further reading:

• The Real Spider Behind the Spider-Killings, Iran Bulletin Editorial
• GT 8/30/2001 Repression of Dissent in Iran
• GT 5/17/2001 Guardian Council of Iran Suppresses Women’s Presidential Bids
• Articles on Women in Iran in the Iran Bulletin
• Fighting His Revolution by Lilith Adler

As a preface to this post, you might want to take a glance over a mostly complete but rather alleatory sampling of the books that I was assigned to read during my high-school English career, which occurred during the heady crest days of the feminist education movement in the 1990s.^[1] (Note to English teachers: I am not complaining about this lineup in the least; the English program at AHS is one of the best parts of the school. This is intended merely as a counterpoint to certain claims made in the article being discussed.)

So, then, what have we here? Yet another heaping helping of Christina Hoff Sommers from Salon. I swear to God there must be some kind of law requiring Salon to publish one sloppy lovefest for media creation antifeminist Christina Hoff Sommers once every year (2/5/2002, 3/9/2001, 6/21/2000).

And it’s the same old thing they’ve been insisting in the last three articles: feminist education efforts in the 1990s have somehow slighted boys’ aspirations to a good education, and now it’s time to start tilting the balance back the other way or somesuch nonsense. At hand is boys’ lower performance in verbal / literary subjects, compared with the narrowing of the advantage they once enjoyed in science and mathematics classes.

In this article, at least, the author allows voices other than Christina Hoff Sommers to speak (not the case in Befner’s regrettable Battle of the Celebrity Gender Theorists, an article allegedly about Jane Fonda and Carol Gilligan, which nevertheless consisted entirely of a sympathetic interview with Christina Hoff Sommers). However, it just so happens that Hoff Sommers and those who agree with her are given the last word in every case; allowed to skewer interpretations of data by Gilligan and other feminists, but given a free pass on truly bizarre statements.

This, for example, is reported without any comment from an opposing voice:

Our English classes are strongly feminized, even in boys schools, says Hoff Sommers. We want literature to make boys more sensitive. But I’m not sure that we need to invest in literature as a form of therapy.

This claim is not just contentious; it’s downright bizarre. Look over my reading list^[1] again and ask yourself how much it’s really feminized. The reading list is packed with literature of boys, by boys, and for boys. It used to be that learning from a reading list not very different from this one was expected to be part of the ritual of a boy growing up into manly adulthood in a civilized society.

She points out that a majority of English teachers still assign fiction in the classroom, while she believes that boys prefer nonfiction. (In the PISA study, girls and boys were asked to self-report on the kind of reading materials they preferred. Boys reported reading more comic books, Web pages and newspapers, while girls read more novels.)

Of course they primarily assign fiction. It’s an English literature class! If you want more nonfiction reading in schools, push to have more primary sources included in History, Science, Mathematics, etc. classes. That’s where it belongs. (And for God’s sake. Comic books? Please.)

Boys love adventure stories with male heroes, says Hoff Sommers. Many would love books by Stephen Ambrose and Tom Clancy. Since they are so far behind in reading, why not give them texts they enjoy? Some teachers are promoting political correctness at the expense of the basic literacy of their male students.

Hoff Sommers mistakenly assumes here that the reason for not including Tom Clancy pulp in the English class is because teachers are craven p.c. slaves. This is false. The reason Tom Clancy pulp is not included in English literature class is because it’s pulp fiction written on a third grade level. And no, encouraging Reading at all costs is not worth it–what in the world is developing an appreciation for Tom Clancy novels going to do for you, other than make you spend more money at the bestseller rack and get you a knowledge of military gadgetry? Similarly, boddice-rippers and Harlequin romance novels do not deserve to be, and are not, included in the English curriculum, either, even though they are intended for, and often written by, women.

My own son had to struggle through Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club when he was in the 10th grade, she adds. It has some attractive features, but it is full of annoying psychobabble about women and their self-esteem struggles. He disliked it. If teachers are going to assign books in popular literature, they should consider the needs and interests of boys.

Hoff Sommer’s vehemence about The Joy Luck Club makes it pretty clear that she just hates the book and is projecting her own feelings of distaste for it onto a generation of boys. If she hates the annoying psychobabble so much, then isn’t her real issue that it’s simply bad literature, not that it’s cutting against boys in particular?

Moreover, for Christ’s sake, in any English curriculum, there are going to be many books which you find absolutely dreadful and which bore you to tears. I, for example, was forced to wade through such dreary wank-a-thons as A Separate Peace and A Farewell to Arms. If the mere presence of some books you find boring is enough to turn you off to all literature, then you need to learn how to stop whining and get through to the next book.

Meanwhile, Tom Mortensen makes the astoundingly bad suggestion that

If I were teaching, says Mortenson, I would get boys out of the classroom. Take them to a swamp, dig through the muck, look for pollywogs. Then maybe take them back and have them look at pond water through slides and write up a lab report. They need hands-on activities. They get bored and distracted if you ask them to sit down and reading a chapter and writing up a paragraph — the kind of work that girls excel at.

Take them to a swamp? Dig through the muck? If I were subjected to this kind of treatment in school, I would have dropped out by fifth grade. You know what I love? Sedentary desk work. Reading a chapter and writing up a paragraph about it. Boring, dry textbooks. Who does he think he is teaching, the Lost Boys from Peter Pan? This is not a way to encourage serious education amongst boys; it’s a way to get a lot of boys goofing off and throwing mud at each other. Christ, man. Pollywogs?

(Furthermore, Mortensen’s proposal about how to change science education neglects the fact that boys are doing just fine in science education relative to girls. What hands-on activities does he propose we use to deal with disparities in literature? Take boys out to the moor to muck around and fetch wittles while they read Great Expectations?)

Meanwhile, Christina Hoff Sommers ridicules the perfectly reasonable hypothesis by Carol Gilligan that In American culture, says Gilligan, children learn to associate math and science with masculinity; knowledge of the human world and emotional lives are associated with femininity. Why should this be so surprising? It’s definitely true that English curricula are perceived as feminized. But this is not a matter of the reading list being somehow weighted heavily towards girl-power-chic titles, because, well, that’s crap. There is no such bias in English curricula. The issue, rather, is that in boy culture, reading literature and poetry is seen as a feminine activity, and it’s a good way to get yourself derided as a sissy, faggot,geek, dweeb, and otherwise un-manly boy. This, I think, is the only explanation that even remotely makes sense: why else would anyone think that, say, reading John Donne in English class is a feminized curriculum? And if this is the case, then jamming Tom Clancy pulp or comic books into the curriculum isn’t the way to solve the problem. The way to solve the problem is to address the boy culture nonsense which sees reading as girly, and sees being perceived as girly as a curse to be avoided.

Finally: let’s drop the crisis rhetoric, and let’s forget this nonsense about feminist educators being responsible for the situation. Why? Because the disparity in literature education has existed as long as the Department of Education has records, since 1969 (when the organized feminist movement barely existed in politics, let alone in education). The gap has not opened out or widened in the past 10 years; there is no new crisis of boys’ verbal / literary education from feminist educators in the 1990s. There’s merely a disparity which was there before and which has not been addressed yet.

But, of course, Salon has a long history of providing an uncritical platform for media-created anti-feminists including Christina Hoff Sommers, Cathy Young (a regular columnist), Camille Paglia, and Warren Farrell. I can’t put it better than Jennifer Pozner of FAIR did, in her letter to the editor of Salon (located at the bottom of the page):

After listing worthy topics from drug law imbalances to welfare policy to educational and workplace biases, Sweeney asks, Where is a feminist when you need one? On a beach somewhere, apparently … With all due respect, it is easy to find feminists working on those issues and a wide range of others if you look beyond what is represented in carping book reviews and academic arguments. But it is unsurprising that Sweeney or Salon readers in general might believe feminists missing in action: Salon provides a regular platform for anti-feminist pit bull Camille Paglia and feminist ankle-biter Cathy Young, but has no feminist columnists addressing the many ways in which women’s rights advocates are tackling violence against women, poverty, health care, child care, reproductive rights, media representation, workplace issues, sweatshops, trafficking in women and a host of other issues on a national and international stage (from a variety of sometimes opposing liberal, progressive and radical perspectives).

I couldn’t agree more with Sweeney’s assertion that neurotic rationalizing and self-conscious crowing is a profound waste of time in the face of the continued biases women (especially women of color and low-income women) face. To that end, I’d encourage Salon to publish fewer hit pieces on feminists, more articles about sexism in Life and in the news sections, and to balance columnists like Paglia, Young and Horowitz with a few progressive feminist writers like Molly Ivins, Laura Flanders, Katha Pollitt, Farai Chideya, Barbara Ehrenreich or Julianne Malveaux. Salon, which is often a valuable resource for perspectives not found elsewhere (Greg Palast’s election pieces were a great example), could benefit from broadening its approach to gender politics.

— Jennifer L. Pozner, Women’s Desk Director, FAIR

P.S.: While women are excelling boys at verbal and literary subjects, and now make up the majority of college students (college students being, in the majority, liberal arts students), engineering and science departments are still about 80-90% male, and men still make more money than women for equal work (the gap has widened in at least some fields, despite Salon’s claims to the contrary) and still make up the overwhelming majority of high-paid executives — whereas women still make up the overwhelming majority of low-wage service workers. So, something tells me that this educational crisis is perhaps not the biggest gender equity issue on the table right now.

For further reading:

• GT 2001/04/24: Salon, Cathy Young, and the Frilly Pink Mantle

• GT 2001/03/14: LTEs Challenge Salon’s Love Affair for Pop Anti-feminists

  Read the rest of The Weird, Wild World of Anti-feminism …

1. ^[1]Sidebar: An aleatory sampling of my high school reading list
   • The Odyssey (abridged) – male author, male protagonist
   • Great Expectations – male author, male protagonist
   • The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet – male author, male and female protagonists
   • Mutiny on the Bounty – male author, male protagonists
   • Animal Farm – male author, male protagonists
   • To Kill a Mockingbird – female author, female and male protagonists
   • A Separate Peace – male author, male protagonists, all male school, boy culture coming-of-age wank-a-thon
   • The Tragedy of Julius Caesar – male author, male protagonists
   • Oedipus the King – male author, male protagonists
   • Antigone – male author, female protagonist
   • Edith Hamilton’s Mythology – female author, but from all male sources, male protagonists
   • excerpts from Sundiata and Ramayana – male authors, male protagonists
   • One Hundred Years of Solitude – male author, mostly male protagonists
   • Ficciones – male author, male protagonists
   • The Lost Steps – male author, male protagonist
   • Ethan Frome – female author, male protagonist
   • A Farewell to Arms – male author, male protagonist, same old swaggering Hemingway crap
   • The Awakening – female author, female protagonist, proto-feminist
   • The Cherry Orchard – male author, male and female protagonists
   • The Great Gatsby – male author, male protagonist
   • Death in Venice – male author, male protagonist
   • A Streetcar Named Desire – male author, female protagonists
   • The Crucible – male author, male protagonist
   • Native Son – male author, male protagonist, overly apologetic for brutal violence against women
   • The Inferno – male author, male protagonist
   • The Taming of the Shrew – male author, male protagonist, ragingly misogynistic
   • Hamlet – male author, male protagonist
   • The Bachelor of Arts – male author, male protagonist
   • Heart of Darkness – male author, male protagonist
   • Pygmalion – male author, female protagonist
   • The Importance of Being Earnest – male author, male protagonist, strong female characters
   • Their Eyes Were Watching God – female author, female protagonist, proto-feminist
   • Things Fall Apart – male author, male protagonist
   • Bread and Wine – male author, male protagonist
   • The Metamorphosis – male author, male protagonist
   • Richard III – male author, male protagonist
   • Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead – male author, male protagonists
   • One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – male author, male protagonist↩

The literary feud provoked by the opening salvo of B.R. Myers’ Atlantic Monthly philippic "about the GODAWFULNESS of today’s ‘Great Writing’" rages on, as both Laura Miller in Salon and Meghan O’Rourke in Slate weigh in (and, dear God, a Salon article actually linked to a Slate article? Has the Internet culture feud reached a detente?).

The Atlantic Monthly article is, sadly, not online (sad because, whatever its intellectual merits or demerits, Myer’s sniping is hilarious in the grand old tradition of Mark Twain’s broadsides against James Fenimore Cooper). But, to give a synopsis, Myers spends a long, growling, not entirely well-organized essay attacking (i) the marginalization of plot by "literary" writers and reviewers in favor of obsessive concerns with ostentatious style, and (ii) the style itself being opaque and near incomprehensible. Along with lots of "hoo-rahs" from critics and readers, there have been plenty more who step up to the plate to grandiloquently defend the Great Writing of the critical darlings Myers’ slams, provoking exactly the kind of notoreity and feud that I’m sure Myers had hoped his literary molotov cocktail would provoke.

One of the main complaints against Myers seems to be that his stance of populism against the critics boils down to a patronizing defense of unchallenging writing. Miller and O’Rourke try to straddle the divide with a bit of ironic detachment; sure, there’s a lot to complain about in these targets, but older classics often had very sloppy writing; there’s room for stylism and works whose pleasures are primarily linguistic rather than narrative; and besides which, the targets he hand-picks are a bit dated anyway. All well and good. On the other hand, I think people have short-shrifted Myers a bit on a few different points.

For one, he doesn’t have anything against stylistic writing; rather, he complains about writers who "exploit the license of poetry while claiming exemption from poetry’s rigorous standards of precision and polish." The problem is not that writers aim at the suggestive and the mysterious rather than the lucid, but that they try to do this while ignoring the economy and focus that makes good, truly "evocative" or "suggestive" writing laser-accurate rather than diffuse nonsense of the sort seen in bad Ken Wilbur books about The Universe or black-clad adolescent angst-a-thons.

A perfect example of this problem is Barbara Kingsolver (who, Miller pointedly notes, Myers never mentions), who apparently took a very powerful and, yes, evocative series of vignettes about a doctor’s descent into dementia, then decided to stitch them together into a novel (Animal Dreams). She needed some bridge pieces to show the objective, outside world as a contrast to Doc Homer’s growing disconnection from reality. Her exercise could have worked out well in one of two ways: she could have abandoned the stitching project, and kept disjointed vignettes (in the style of, say, The Wasteland), while including the occasional return to reality as a paragraph or so fragmentary insert. Or she could have put together a strong, prose novel with a compelling plot and characters, with the vignettes appearing from the backdrop as brief descents into the inarticulable. But, defiantly eschewing both poetic mystery and prosaic sensibility, proudly knocking down both economy and clarity and dancing a jig on their backs, Kingsolver decided to concoct a sloppy, plodding bundle of banalities and clichés, peppered with meandering digressions, capped with a trite and pointless resolution. This is intersected every so often with evocative vignettes which, ultimately, fail to evoke much of anything unless they are analytically detached from the melodrama they are supposed to illuminate. Considered as a package the novel takes you nowhere, shows you nothing, and even where it was failing to take you is a boring, stupid place. This kind of a sloppy prose bellyflop, which flails about everywhere hoping to hit something praiseworthy somewhere through the law of averages, is a large part of what Myers is rightly criticising.

The other critique I find to be somewhat unfair is the complaint that Myers is being patronizing and suggesting that the "common folk" can’t take difficult or challenging prose, so good writers ought to aim at workmanlike, but non-heroic, lucid work. But this isn’t fair at all. Myers has no complaint about taking work to struggle through a book about something important. The problem with the self-styled literary prose of today is more that it, with trendy postmodern credentials, takes "challenge" as an end in itself, rather than the means to an end of realizing a genuinely complex and challenging truth. A book like Don DeLillo’s White Noise, in which one of the definitive paragraphs consists of "Is this true? Why did I say it? What does it mean?" presents an excruciating thicket of wordplay, ironic detachment, and non sequiturs which, when hacked through, only gets us to more nonsense. Rising to the challenge of a work is one thing; wasting time and effort on a work in which there is nothing to rise to and in which the "challenge" consists entirely of continuing the torturous challenge rather than using the book as a postmodern drink coaster is quite another.

All this fulminating to one side, no matter how much may be right or wrong with Myers, or his critics, I love this feud and I hope to be entertained by it for some time to come. I love seeing a critical battle, with every last drop of wit, bombast, and indignation deployed; there are few geekier pleasures in life.

Lauren Sandler explores the underground Christian hardcore and hip-hop scenes in the Village Voice. The article is not only a fascinating piece of sociology of religion, but also of personal interest to me: I have a cousin who played on the underground Christian metal scene during the 1980s and 1990s. He was into death metal and thrash rather than the hardcore/punk scene, but from what I can tell it’s basically the same dynamics.