A Sport and Pastime con't

Reading my scandalous post of last Friday over again, it seems to me worth repeating that the story is intentionally a story about fictions: it is not just that this is a story and not reality but that it is a story whose function is to make us think about the way we tell stories about ourselves when we sit down and fantasize about what might have been.  The book is layers of fiction on top of fiction all the way down. These are imagined events. It's a book about what we imagine and the moral significance of those imaginings. The scandal is not in these events having happened or not happened in whole or in part. The scandal is in remembering that you wanted to do these things and punished yourself for even thinking them. Who and what made you do that?

This is nicely drawn out in the story in the way the narrator talks about Dean. He keeps drawing our attention to Dean's selfishness but, at the very same time, he recognizes that these things don't happen unless someone actually is selfish enough to make them happen. And when he thinks of Dean that way, our narrator is honest enough to show that he feels inadequate by comparison.

You may say, "To look at a woman with lust is to have already committed adultery in you heart." Perhaps. A lot depends on how we interpret Jesus here. But here's my question: suppose you spend your teens and twenties suppressing these thoughts (not the actions but the thoughts) as evil and the result is that you grow up to be a man who 1) feels there is something deeply wrong about him that he must always hide and 2) wakes up one day full of resentment and pain that he wasted years of his life suppressing himself and now feels life slipping away from him?

Women, some women anyway, will say they don't want to be thought of this way but why should we care? For starters, they are lying and every single study ever done of women's sexual fantasies confirms this. What the women who complain about these things really want to do is to be able to control what men think. (And all the ridiculous hand-wringing talk about a "rape culture" is just an attempt to control men's thoughts.)

Fight it.

Uses of nostalgia: A Sport and a Pastime

 If someone starts off by insisting he is telling the truth, the effect is usually the reverse of what he intends. That's not even close to an original thought. But what about the reverse? When a guy insists he is lying, do you tend to think he is really hoping to hide something? Do you think, "Maybe this story isn't a factual account of anything that actually happened but there is stuff here the story teller doesn't want to reveal about himself"?

And there you have the genre that A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter fits into. It's a genre in which a man lets his fantasies run wild and thereby manages to express some rather aggressive and frankly male truths that otherwise might not get said. We don't seem this sort of novel much these days but I think it's a legitimate genre and a very male genre at that. The most famous example is Huck Finn.

It's also a very American genre. Despite having Shakespeare and his poetic heirs to draw on, the English don't write novels like this and neither do the French or Russians. The other thing about it is that there is Eros between men at the core of it. It's a peculiarly American thing to write novels that are intensely homoerotic without being gay.

The feminist critique writes itself and isn't completely beside the point. The love interest, she isn't distinct enough to be an actual person, is a fantasy figure in a genre that used to be called exotica back in the 1920s and 1930s. The plot is always the same. Upper middle class (or even plain middle class) American goes to another country where standards of living are considerably lower than they are at home. That enables him to hang around for a long time while living a pretty rich lifestyle by local standards. He meets a girl and falls in love but, alas, he cannot stay forever because, well, just because, so he leaves her.



Our heroine, Anne-Marie is, as you would expect, given what was a-cliché-and-then-some by the early 1960s, a remarkably convenient girl. She is eighteen, she is easily available, she is highly excitable, she is agreeable to anal sex and apparently likes it, finally, and probably most important of all, she is skilled at not getting pregnant because, get this, her mother has instructed her on the matter. Ah, those French mothers, so unlike the mothers of nice girls at home.

As damning as all that sounds, the male love interest, and he is very much a love interest for our narrator, isn't any less a fantasy figure. Indeed, to complain that these two are fantasy figures is to miss that that is what they are meant to be. Our narrator, a francophile photographer who has gone to a small provincial city in France hoping to become famous, fantasizes them into existence. He doesn't care whether they live or die.

CAVEAT: Spoilers and some vulgarity uncharacteristic of this blog start here

In fact, he kills one of them off and the effect is staggering for the lack of difference it makes. The character is named Philip Dean and no one ever shed a tear at his death for he is a fantasy from the get go. He is 10 years younger than the narrator of the story and he shows up in a  Delage that he has sort of borrowed and sort of stolen that is ten years old!

A Delage is a real car but it is, as you can see from the image below, also a dream car; it is the car every man of a certain age wishes he'd been able to drive into the places one would like to drive a car shaped like this:

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar but there are other times where the phallic imagery is blunt enough that the only comparison blunt enough to count is, well an erect penis. So when a man in his mid thirties gets a crush on a boy in his twenties who drives a car that a man in his thirties fantasizes about but a man in his twenties would think silly and old, you should be able to figure out that the story is next going to involve a girl of the older man's dreams who is going to let the younger man park the car that isn't really his in her garage.

Dean, and he is referred to as "Dean" more often than Philip, drives the Delage expertly and, usually, fast. The car starts to rust and age over the time that Dean stays ...

... because he stays too long. He stays until his money runs out and then he stays some some. He takes advantage of others, including women, to make ends meet. He is clearly abusing the hospitality of our narrator, whom he stays with, and the man who was foolish enough to lend him the Delage. Most of all, he is abusing the trust of Anne-Marie who thinks this very rich (as compared to her) young man will marry her.

I found myself wanting to complete every mention of "Dean" with "Moriarty". Salter's character has a lot in common with Kerouac's. You know you shouldn't trust him but you do because he does stuff that you want to do, stuff you don't have the courage to do because ...

Well, why don't we have the courage to be men anymore?

Here is the Dean situation. He's with Anne-Marie. He can see that he is going to have to leave. He knows that he'll tire of her. He knows they aren't really compatible. He knows that she is hoping for more than he will deliver. But he stays. What, against that barrage of good reasons not to do this, convinces him to stay? He stays because, "Her — is sopping."

I know, I usually eschew that sort of language but I think it has a genuine artistic purpose in the novel and that is why I quote it here. Sometimes, quite often actually, you find yourself torn between something you really want to do and a lot of good reasons not to do it. The problem is that they're the sorts of good reasons that your teacher, your priest and your mother always hit you with. Even after you start to see that prudence really is a virtue you will continue to resent those people and their good reasons. You will think, and rightly, that while it would be a bad idea to pull a Dean now that it wouldn't have been such a bad thing to have done it back when you could have, back when they were most determined to stop you. And, now that it's too late, you want to turn around and hit them in the face with, "Because her ... was sopping, that's why!"

The whole thing is a fantasy just like Huck Finn lighting out from sivilization. It's the sort of fantasy you might have actually puled off but you didn't so it's just a story you tell yourself now. The thing that I loved most about the novel is the great lengths Salter goes to the drive this point home and the equally extreme lengths some critics go to miss the point. The only real thing in this story is the narrator. The fantasy really is his fantasy and that is the scandalous thing. That's the thing that men feel and we are increasingly made to feel like we aren't allowed to feel.

"I want you to express your feelings," says the woman. Okay, you think, here are some ... . Silly you, you didn't realize that the feelings you're supposed to express are the ones she gives you permission to express. No, it's worse than that: you are required to express the permitted feelings even if you don't actually feel them.

To return the fantasy point. There are a few scenes set in Paris where our narrator interacts with a couple of rich American expatriates who are so utterly fictitious that Salter may as well have cut and paste them out of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. He did that on purpose. Almost all the rest is set in small provincial French city that doesn't exist. In the unlikely event that a high school class put this on as a play, a couple of simple painted backgrounds would be all that would be needed to invoke the two places. They don't have any real existence beyond what they can evoke. It's telling that our narrator is a photographer because photographs of the places would be all you would need.

A related point: reading the criticism, I see that Hemingway is often invoked and that is odd because there is nothing of Hemingway in this book. The Paris scenes are a Fitzgerald pastiche, they are like Daisy and Tom Buchanan do Paris. The most important stylistic echoes we find in this book are a mixture of Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell. If you'd given Miller the draft of Justine and asked him to do for Durrell what Pound did for Eliot's Wasteland, you'd have gotten something close to A Sport and a Pastime.

There is a great touch towards the end of the novel when our narrator has to drive the Delage. Up until now, at the hands of Dean, this car has been a magic carpet, always moving smoothly and easily; with the narrator at the wheel, it drives like a truck. And of course it would. The dream sports car of your youth can barely keep with traffic now.

The narrator of the story is often described as an unreliable one in the criticism but that is the opposite of the truth. He's an absolutely reliable narrator of his own fantasies and thereby tells us more than he realizes. When he tells us that,

In his clothing he conceals, like an assassin, a small tube of lubricant

we get the point. The trick isn't getting Dean to talk Anne-Marie into anal sex. The thrill comes from narrator/author letting himself have the right to think this way. Try it. What small tube of illicit desire do you have hidden on your person? Imagine talking your girlfriend, your wife, or that woman two tables over at Starbucks into doing it. You're allowed to think of these things and your girlfriend or wife should be woman enough to deal with your thinking them and expressing them, which is not to say she will agree to let you do them. It's 100 percent okay to look at a woman, even a friend, and think, "I'd love to ..." You're not a monster for having the thought.

Men who came back from various wars in the mid 20th century had the courage to confront this. (Salter flew 100 missions in Korea!) Lately, we men have allowed ourselves to be whipped into being submissive little boys about this. This book is a healthy antidote. What you actually do with your sexual feelings is a more complex question but trying to pretend they aren't there will only bring you regret and pain. There isn't one ounce of regret for Dean or Anne-Marie in this book but there is the pain of an old wound that goes with the suppressed fantasy, the chances  that were never taken.

Artistic narcissism

A friend of mine brought this up. He was talking about a movie that I missed in the theatres and that is coming out on iTunes in just a few days. I'm really looking forward to seeing it. So much so that I'm not mentioning the title of the movie just so that no one who has seen it can spoil it for me.

My friend thinks that one of the themes of the movie is artistic narcissism and that has me looking forward to it even more.

Anyway, the thing that makes artistic narcissism so interesting is that it has spread to the rest of society. I'd go so far as to say that the high cultural value we place on art goes a long, long way to explaining why we live in such a narcissistic culture and that we'd all be better off if we stopped caring so much about art and artists.

Here is an example of what I mean. Last year, there was some graffiti, competent but not exciting work, on the wall of a commercial building about ten minutes walk from my house. After it had been there about three weeks, the owner of the building painted it over. The very next day some very angry graffiti, by a different person as this second contribution showed no skill whatsoever, appeared on the same spot that said,"This was art."

As the days went by, our second graffiti artists added some more lines expressing his (and you have to know it was a he) feeling that some act of barbarity had been committed in the painting over of this art.

Most art is worthless and even most of the stuff that is any good is of so little good that no one need feel bad about its disappearance. Even the greatest masterpieces, while it would be a shame to lose them, are not indispensable. Pretending otherwise makes it appear as if the people who make art and, this is the real trick, the people who appreciate art appear like important figures; it makes them into the star of their own show.

Graffiti artists aren't actually particularly important to anyone beyond their mothers but they don't want to know that. So they buy spray paint or sharpies and put ugly art on other people's property.

Once upon a time the guy who painted the painting had no more social status than the guy who painted the wall it hung on. It wouldn't hurt to go back to that.

Lent starts tomorrow

A while ago I admitted that I had underestimated Pope Francis. In retrospect, this is typical of me: to underestimate him simply because every one else is overestimating him.

Anyway, this bit from Evangelii Gaudium has really struck me.

Just as organic existing among virtues means no one of them can be excluded from the Christian ideal, so no truth may be denied. The integrity of the Gospel message must not be deformed. What is more, each truth is better understood when related to the harmonious totality of the Christian message; in this context all of the truths are important and illumine one another. When preaching is faithful to the Gospel, the centrality of certain truths is evident and it becomes clear that Christian morality is not a form of stoicism, or self-denial, or merely a practical philosophy or a catalogue of sins and faults. (Chapter 1, section III, #39)

I mention that because: I am guilty, guilty, guilty. I do it in a polar sort of way. For much of the year, I tend to lapse into behaving as if Christian morality is merely a practical philosophy that fits easily into contemporary culture. Come Lent, however, and I start behaving as if Christian morality is a form of stoicism and I must toughen myself up to be the lone standard of virtue in a culture gone hopelessly bad.

From now on, I'll be Socrates

A friend of mine encouraged all her Facebook friends to do one of those dumb Buzzfeed quizzes. This one was to determine which philosopher you are.

Okay, waste of time.

But it turned out to be useful in an unexpected way. I answered the questions by picking the options I thought a good person would (meaning the person I thought I should want to be) the first time through and got told I was most like Kant. Words cannot say how little I want to be like Kant. So I did it again and decided to answer the questions as I would if I didn't care about anyone or anything. My answers are below. They are provided without context because the context in this case is meaningless (but if you must know, click here and do the quiz for yourself first).

1. I decided chastity was the most over-rated virtue because getting rid of it would be very convenient. 
2. I picked Bree Van Der Kamp as desperate housewife because her facial expression in the photograph the quiz provides makes me want to hate her so I figured she deserved to be desperate. 
3. I picked “vegetarians are annoying to be around” because they are. 
4. I picked mayonnaise as my favourite condiment as a way of doubling down on those irritating scolds who tell me what I should or shouldn’t eat. 
5. I picked "I’m never bad" because I don’t [suppressed gerund] care what you think of me. 
6. I picked Gossip Girl because I wish more women were like Serena and I damn well don’t care if that makes anyone feel threatened. 
7. I picked cooking for Saturday activity because it’s true. 
8. I picked Barcelona because I thought the girls there looked hotter than any other European city. 
9. I chose to make an excuse to not see my grandmother. 
10. And I picked “feeling cheeky” for reasons that shouldn’t need any explaining. 

And for that, the quiz tells me that I am most like Socrates. It says,

If you don’t understand something, you’re not afraid to ask questions about it. You try your hardest to be a moral person and don’t value material possessions very highly.

And it got me thinking, why not approach all life's challenges like this? If it has so little effect on the results, why not just do the things and express the opinions I would if I didn't care what anyone thought of me? You know, I think I've just decided what to give up for Lent.

I kid you not.

What feminism is up against

Right from its roots, feminism has sought to transform society in ways that go far beyond just relations between the sexes. Which is why Ann Althouse's question is such a challenge for feminism:

What if women became fully autonomous, empowered individuals and nothing changed? What would that mean?

Althouse was, in turn responding to something Kim Gordon, who sang with a band you've probably never heard of called Sonic Youth, had said about sexism in the music industry then,

"In rock music people have certain assumptions that it makes people more enlightened and it really doesn't. It was the same thing playing for Neil Young's audience [in 1991] and being reminded that hippies can be really narrow-minded. We were around people who felt like, 'We're groovy, we're cool,' but they were so sexist. It was just in your face all the time."

 and now,

"Are women using their sexuality to sell records because they're empowered? In which case yeah, great. But with some women it's almost inbred and there's pressure of competitiveness: who can be the sexiest? Male executives don't have to say anything because women know. And it's all aesthetically pleasing but it gets a little boring after a while if that's the only side that gets promoted."

I want to slow the music down a bit here because there was an explicit detail about "sexism" then that has gotten lost. The way Althouse has clipped the first paragraph leaves out something that I think is rather important. Here is the head she clips off:

When Sonic Youth signed to Geffen Records after 1988's alt-rock landmark Daydream Nation, Gordon's lyrics became more explicitly feminist in songs such as "Kool Thing", "Tunic (Song for Karen)" and "Swimsuit Issue", which she wrote after discovering that one Geffen executive was being sued for sexual harassment. "I guess I had an authority problem," she says. "In rock music people have certain assumptions ... [here the quote carries on as above].

Back in 1988 an executive at Geffen was being sued for sexual harassment. Gordon wasn't thinking just of men thinking about women in certain ways but of something vile that an actual man had done to an actual woman. And her point wasn't that there was sexual harassment back then too but that men right at the heart of an industry that presented itself as "cool and progressive" did this.

Next, let's note that the song Gordon wrote about the incident was called "Swimsuit Issue". So how did Sports Illustrated get into this mix? It got into the mix because there was an unspoken premise at work that might be expressed like this, "When women's sexuality is used to sell magazines or pop songs it creates a social environment where men think of women themselves as products available for consumption."

You could argue for or against that proposition but even if, like me, you are skeptical, you have to take it seriously. It's a legitimate, coherent and plausible argument.

If we return now, to the second half of the Gordon quote, we can see that that hypothesis has somehow been undermined in Gordon's eyes in the ensuing years (and Althouse takes that as read).

Are women using their sexuality to sell records because they're empowered? In which case yeah, great. But with some women it's almost inbred and there's pressure of competitiveness: who can be the sexiest?

Gordon is not just allowing that women might be willingly doing the dirty work for male executives.  She is allowing that these women might be doing something for themselves that is a positive good as in, "yeah, great" by "using their sexuality". That really muddies the water. It's almost as if she is arguing that the means can justify the end.

The earlier argument was that if you use women's sexuality to sell product, you commodify women along with the product. But now Gordon, and many others, want to allow that the intention and the person who does this intending can change the moral status of the act. This new premise might be stated as follows: "If a woman freely and willingly uses her sexuality to sell product because it makes her feel empowered that is not only acceptable but good."

We might wonder what exactly causes this empowerment. Suppose, for example, that a woman set out to use her sexuality to sell music and it didn't work. What would she feel if the product was ignored? That wouldn't be very empowering. The product is now her sexuality after all. Or, suppose no one bought her music but that the promotional material became very popular because people liked the way her sexuality was presented but didn't like her music. Would that be empowering? Or suppose she sells both her sexuality and her music and she feels empowered by this but a collateral result is that the millions of men who buy her music start treating the women in their lives as sexual commodities?

Gordon's challenge is that she fully understands all these issues but she can see, as anyone can see, that millions upon millions of women are actively seeking empowerment by presenting themselves as sexual beings and that they are even willingly competing with other women as sexual beings. And they are not doing this to get sex so much as sexual status. They seem to regard the recognition this status brings as important, if not essential, to their happiness.

It gets worse.

But with some women it's almost inbred and there's pressure of competitiveness: who can be the sexiest? Male executives don't have to say anything because women know. 

First of all, notice that there is no necessary connection between the claim made in the first sentence and that made in the second sentence. The earlier argument makes a clear and arguable claim about a link between the cause (using sex to sell) and the effect (women being reduced to objects for consumption). Now it's women who are doing the thing that makes Gordon uncomfortable and men aren't actually doing anything to bring it about (but we know it's what they want). Blaming men is more of a reflex reaction than an argument. (And just try reversing that and claiming that you know women want some sort of sexual outcome even though they aren't overtly doing anything to bring it about.)

"With some women its almost inbred..." That "almost" is doing a lot of important fudging work. What Gordon means, but is having a hard time bringing herself to say, is that some women have a very strong desire to achieve sexual status in their own eyes and in the eyes of others that cannot easily be explained as the result of social conditioning; that's the point of saying "almost inbred". And that was part of the point of my earlier post, for while it is certainly true that you can sell beer, music and domain names to men by using women's sexuality, it is also true that you can get very rich using women's sexuality to sell, wine, beer, music, condos, chocolate, cigarettes, TV shows, panties and many other things to women. And you can so far more relentlessly. The Go Daddy ads stood out for two reasons: they stood out because they featured scantily clad women and they stood out because they used sex to sell corporate services. The vast majority of ads for corporate services don't use sex. Ads for products aimed at women are drenched in women's sexuality.

If you want to sell a product to anyone, you have to link the product to their aspirations. What Gordon and Althouse are implicitly acknowledging is that as they have gained more autonomy and sense of empowerment,  women have become more and more likely to seek out products that are associated with women they can see as sexually aspirational role models. This has become so obvious that it cannot be denied anymore.

Go to the New York Times bestsellers lists and visit the web pages of the authors. Look especially at male writers who appeal primarily to male readers and at female writers who appeal primarily to female readers. Ask yourself which group is most aggressively using their own sexuality to sell product? Don't worry, it won't be hard to tell; the difference is not subtle. Men are far more able and willing to separate their sexual status from other issues when determining their own worth and the worth of other men than women are able to do when determining their own worth and the worth of other women. Sheryl Sandberg has to be a sexually aspirational role model to attract large numbers of women to buy her book. Yes, some women would buy her book anyway but most would not. If Sandberg were the male equivalent of a man like Donald Trump (which is to say a man who is only attractive to women because he is rich and/or powerful and otherwise is a bit of a joke) women would not have been nearly as interested in her book.

It wasn't always this way. In the 1980s, Dr. Ruth Westheimer succeeded as a sex-advice columnist by being the very opposite of sexually aspirational. People who listened to her needed to be able to separate the woman giving the advice from what they thought of as sexual. If Dr. Ruth had been young, slim and sexually desirable, it would have detracted from her credibility. Today, the opposite is true and that is due in a large part to market choices made by autonomous, empowered women.

 What if women became fully autonomous, empowered individuals and nothing changed? What would that mean?

I don't the full answer but one thing it would mean is the end of feminism as we know it. That's why somewhere between 70 to 80 percent of women tell pollsters they don't identify as feminists. It's why so many female pop music stars tell journalists that they believe in equality of the sexes but not feminism.

The way women think men see women

This is from Leonora by Maria Edgeworth. Let me set it up for you. It is an epistolary novel and the letter in question is from General B ____ to his friend Mr. L_____. Mr. L is Leonora's husband and he has fallen in love with Olivia. Olivia is the house guest of Leonora who has, out of purest charity, set about helping Olivia restore her reputation, which reputation, we have come to realize she thoroughly deserved to have lost.

It's all sooo loaded that it would take a heart of stone not to hope that Olivia and Mr. L have a wonderful erotic affair that leads Leonora to throw herself off a cliff and that they are both so blissfully happy they don't even notice she is missing.

Anyway, in the middle of this, Edgeworth has Mr. L's friend General B write him a series of letters in which he tries to convince Mr. L to see the many virtues of Leonora. This is so wide of the mark as to seem crazy:

If you cannot believe in love without sacrifices, you must have them, to be sure. And now, in sober sadness, what do you think your heroine would sacrifice for you? Her reputation? that, pardon me, is out of her power. Her virtue? I have no doubt she would. But before I can estimate the value of this sacrifice, I must know whether she makes it to you or to her pleasure. Would she give up in any instance her pleasure for your happiness? This is not an easy matter to ascertain with respect to a mistress: but your wife has put it beyond a doubt, that she prefers your happiness not only to her pleasure, but to her pride, and to everything that the sex usually prefer to a husband.

If a man wanted to manipulate another man into having cheating on his wife, he couldn't do it better than that.

I'm only part way through the novel, but let's imagine that the portrait of Leonora above is accurate, as it may turn out to be. It would be pure hell to be married to such a woman. You couldn't please her because she'd always be sacrificing her pleasure to what she imagined was your happiness. The horror, the horror.