Over that the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates has been reading Raymond Chandler's
The Big Sleep. I think it's safe to say that Coates doesn't get Chandler but that is not necessarily a bad thing as he makes some really challenging points about other issues, particularly manhood and sexuality.
I think to understand misogyny one has to grapple with the conflict between male mythology and male biology. There is something deeply scary about the first time a young male experiences an erection. All the excitement and hunger and throbbing that people is there. But with that comes a deep, physical longing. Whether or not that longing shall be satiated is not totally up to the male.
That's a good place to go and Coates does a good job of drawing out the pain that comes with getting an erection when you don't want to have an erection. Read the accounts of boys who are molested by older men or women and you will begin to grasp the full horror of it.
That said, I think Coates goes a little off track:
Laugh now at the boy at the middle school dance, who gets an erection on the slow number (God help him if he has orgasm.)
Well, no. Because you always do get an erection when your thirteen years old and you have that first slow dance and, provided you haven't made poor wardrobe choices, no one need know.
Except the girl, of course. She always knows. She isn't stupid and when she feels the boy's erection grow against her stomach, she knows exactly what is happening. And I can't speak for everyone but I can tell you that in the slow dances I had in the years in middle school, I always got an erection and not once did any girl pull away or leave the dance. They all pushed more firmly against me once they were aware of it. The only ones who did not where the ones who never got close enough to cause an erection in the first place.
This is one of these things that most people know about but no one talks about. There were teachers at these dances who saw it as their job to separate couples who were a little too close but those teachers never let on they knew anything about any actual stimulating going on. And neither did the girls. That was one of the rules, you could do the slow dance if the girl said yes. Then you could get closer if she allowed you. And then ... but you could not mention the erection that you were both so aware of. That was right out.
The ultimate thrill was if she parted her legs so you could slip one of yours between hers and feel this intense heat on your thigh when it pressed against her crotch. And that, given that this was all you got in those days, was about as intense an experience as a young man could imagine.
(One of the things that was really intoxicating and really educational when you were learning about girls in those years was that the vast majority of girls would push back against your erection while slow dancing but never admitted it to anyone. This is a valuable lesson because there are always sexual things that most women do but that they don't let on to others, especially to other women. Sexual relationships trump all other relationships for intimacy with spectacular ease as a consequence.)
Now, the point here is not just to linger on some erotic memories, although it is amazing the way these furtive experiences stay with you for decades. No, the point is that this whole game gets played out without anyone admitting it's going on. No boy in grades 7-8-9 could possibly admit that he had an erection while dancing with a girl and no girl in those years could possibly admit that they had willfully caused a boy to get an erection while slow dancing and that she enjoyed having this power.
But here is the thing, already in those years there are boys and girls who don't get it. Some are grossed out by it, some are so shy they are humiliated by it, and some never get asked to dance or accepted to dance with because they don't have the social skills to be accepted in the first place. (And that experience, not the getting of erections, is the source of most misogyny, as well as most man-hating coming the other way.)
And that is tremendously important. You are supposed, as I've already noted, to figure out that you don't acknowledge what is happening. But you are also supposed to grasp that when the dance is over, it's over. You don't, as some boys do, follow the girl like a lost puppy because you are so overwhelmingly swept up by what has happened. You also don't, as some boys do, brag about what happened. (And you live with
the very real pain that sometimes follows without complaining too.)
Even more than that, you need to know how to play the give and take. You need to read her responses well enough to grasp just how far you can go. And when you misread her and she stiffens or moves away, you are supposed to pick up the hint right away.
Back to Coates,
Masculinity's central tenet is control—and perhaps most importantly,
control of the body. Nothing contradicts that edict like erections. It
unmans you, it compels you through sensations you scarcely understand.
And it threatens to expose you, to humiliates you, in front of everyone.
That's only partly true. Masculinity's central tenet is control (and notice how Coates isn't at all bothered that he is being sexist here) but erections don't unman you. You can't control when you have an erection and you can't control when you don't. No, what unmans you is your own lack of self control after your erection has been stimulated by someone else, in this case by a young girl pushing her stomach up against it. That's the real test of control.
At that age we are all working out the game whereby we allow others to play games that get us heated up and the tricky social manœuvers that go with completely losing control. And even then it gets tricky. I knew both men and women in university who went gaga over their first sexual partner and proceeded to make complete fools of themselves because they were so wrapped up in their own feelings that they failed to see they were not reciprocated. (Which, if you think about it, is the lesson you are supposed to start learning back in middle school when the slow dance ends and the girl thanks you and walks away.)
But what about the other side? What about girls then women? Are they supposed to be learning any lessons about self control and about reading men's responses? Again, I remind you that Coates was not at all bothered by the sexism implicit in his claim that, "Masculinity's central tenet is control". As if femininity doesn't have to worry about these things. (One of the things that drives Chandler is that, already in the 1930s, our culture was liberating women from old strictures but failing to hold them morally accountable as any free being should be. The Sternwood sisters who run wild with no self control, while a little camp, were highly prophetic.)
The problem with the way Coates sees these things is that it's so atomic. Men, are like elementary particles brushing up against women and neither is supposed to have any understanding of how the other thinks. But that's nonsense, you can figure out what the other person is thinking without talking about it. Let's go back to that slow dance in middle school. You will earn a girl's contempt if you don't pick up on body language that is meant to tell you to back off a bit. But do you what is also true? You will earn the same, and quite possibly more contempt, if you fail to recognize and act upon signals to push a little further.
You can figure what is going on in other people's heads from observing them. And you can predict how they will react to you. You can't do it as consistently as you can predict , say, the response of billiard balls when they are hit by other billiard balls, but you can read people and respond to them on the basis of non-verbal clues. And that is a huge part of being a sexual adult when you consider how often the verbal clues you do get are simply not true.
Orchids
Chandler's portrait of the two Sternwood sisters is a misogynist but it's misogynist in a way that Coates might find hard to criticize if he teased it out a bit more. We see this right from the opening of the novel when Marlowe goes to meet General Sternwood who lives in an orchid room. The general has to live there because he has been unmanned:
'You are looking at a very dull survival of a rather gaudy life, a cripple paralyzed in both legs and with only half his lower belly. There's little that I can eat and my sleep is so close to waking that it is hardly worth the name. I seem to exist largely on heat, like a newborn spider, and the orchis are an excuse for the heat. Do you like orchids?'
'Not Particularly,' I said.
The General half closed his eyes. 'They are nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men. And their perfume has the rotten sweetness of a prostitute.'
This is perhaps a good opportunity to remind you what orchids look like. Here, courtesy of Wikipedia, is a white orchid:
If you don't think of a diminutive term for a cat also used to refer to female genitalia when you see orchids , there is something deeply wrong with you. You may not choose to say it, for example if you are with your mother and grandmother at the orchid show, but you will think it and Chandler is counting on your making that association.
Coates correctly notes
elsewhere that Chandler also trades in anti-gay remarks, although he fails to note that these are pretty mild by the standards of the era. I've been reading
Death by Ecstasy by Dame Ngaio Marsh, published three years before
The Big Sleep in my sick bed and she makes Chandler look gay-friendly by comparison.
And what should not surprise us as there is a huge homoerotic streak in Chandler. He keeps it safely sanitized of actual sex, but this fiction is all about male-male bonds. Over and over again these stories comes down to some relationship between two men and that relationship is an intense one with erotic overtones. (If you read the book as opposed to remembering the movie, the sexual tension between Marlowe and Eddie Mars in
The Big Sleep is more convincing than that between Marlowe and Vivian Sternwood
They are also about war and that will seem even odder because Chandler hardly ever mentions the war. Anyone reading his books would never guess that Chandler fought in the first world war and experienced the sort of horrors that would make most of us crawl up in a fetal position and cry the rest of our lives. But, although he never talks about it much, that experience is what his writing really springs from. It's about the bonds that form between men doing difficult things together and there is an unmistakeable homoerotic undertone that goes with these interactions. The thing about Chandler is not that he makes anti-gay statements but that, in making them, he protests too much.
Jasmine's basement
A girl this time, not a flower. Back in grade eight, a bunch of us swam until dark then we went down to Jasmine's basement and danced. And a girl named Joanne Roberge agreed to slow dance with me. That was pretty much the sum total of our relationship but I'll never forget her. She had all the social skill necessary to make the interactions work. And she had other skills too ...
This was the song that was playing that night when I danced with her:
It sure beat trench warfare.
