Thursday, October 14, 2010

Brutish?

There is a response to that Katherine Miller piece I wrote about earlier here. It's a male response. The male in question, whose name is Cameron Parker, chides Miller for being too concerned with mere style issues and not for the deeper truths. I can't help but think he also wants to suggest that he himself does many of the symbolic things Miller considers unmanly but is not actually unmanly.

Which is a bit of a problem in itself. I remember seeing a skinhead back in the 1980s who assured me that he wasn't like those other skinheads and the proof if this was that he wore a button that said "Skinheads against racism".

Symbols are more than buttons we can take off or put on. No one can do like some Lewis Carrol character and declare that symbols, gestures and clothing mean only what they want them to mean. It matters how we wear the symbols but the also symbols mean something independent of anything we might indend. The clothes, make up and tattooes on Amy Winehouse in the video for "I don't want to go to rehab" tell us pretty clearly that she should go to rehab.

But Cameron Parker misses the point entirely and thinks that Miller is just being superficial when she list the attributes she doesn't like. And you can see it here:
In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes describes the state of nature as “nasty, brutish and short.” From “Man Up,” it’s clear that Miller likes her men nasty, brutish and tall.

The problem here is that Parker doesn't grasp what brutish really means. Miller does and gives us a good example here:
Fratastic can thrill a girl with Lost Generation levels of raging and fluent French, but in between tequila shots, he’ll judge anyone with a harshness that stings.
 That is what real brutishness looks like. It's that combination of accomplishment with a deep insecurity that causes the person to go for the dagger to the kidneys when they think they can get away with it. You want to see what a real brute is like, read Frank Rich in the New York Times.

What Miller wants—and she says so—is a man she can rely on in a crisis. That Cameron Parker can't tell the difference between that and brutishness doesn't speak well of him.

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