Smooth song of the day # 6: Wives and Lovers

Champagne cocktails! Damn but I love those things. I don't drink them often because they are expensive at a bar. At home the problem is that you have to drink most of a bottle of champagne. That wasn't a problem this evening. I mention that because it may explain how I come to post what I have seen described as "the most sexist song ever" for today.



(That's not the original by the way.) It's telling that such a song is so threatening that it would attract such harsh condemnation. It's not like women don't willingly strive to be better lovers. There are websites out there that draw huge numbers of women simply by recycling the same lame tricks "to really blow his mind" over and over again. No, the thing that gets the feminists wrought up is the suggestion that a woman should make special efforts for her husband.

I don't think any further comment is needed on that.

That said, the song makes this pitch entirely in terms of fear. Do all these things so you don't lose him. It's a sad thing both then and now that doing the right thing simply because it is the right thing to do is beyond the reach of popular culture.

The song is an early hit for Bacharach and David and it has all their strengths. (Something I plan to revisit by doing Bacharach and David songs all week.) It is a remarkably sophisticated tune that doesn't seem to be.  Anyone catching it on the radio back in the day might have thought they were listening to just another pop song. It is the sort of art that conceals its art and that is always impressive.

By the way, the notion that a wife should be a lover too was revisited in a movie that came out in the late 1970s. Know as Mogliamante in Italian and Wifemistress in English, the movie was praised by the cool people when it came out. The difference was that the movie made it look like it was the husband who was keeping the woman from being both rather tan suggesting, as the uncool quote of the month does, that "One is born female, but being a woman is a personal accomplishment."

The Marriage Plot: Talking 'bout my generation

I am thinking less and less of the book as I move through it. The upside is that it may just inspire me to finally buckle down and write a novel myself as I think this is a great subject that could be handled better.

I'm beginning to think that the really important question here is not, "Are these three likeable?" (although I haven't see a whole lot to like) but are they marriageable? You might or might not like them enough to let yourself fall in love with them but it would be morally iresponsible to marry any of the three principal characters.

[Warning: spoilers ahead] This is from the beginning but it really struck me. Madeleine is thinking about playing tennis against her father, whom she calls by his first name "Alton".

Madeleine had been trying to beat Alton her entire life life without success. This was even more infuriating because she was better than he was, at this point. But whenever she took a set from Alton he started intimidating her, acting mean, disputing calls, and her game fell apart.

You know, if you've never managed to beat someone despite "being better than they are", then you aren't better than they are. And that is the telling thing about two of the three main characters in this book: nothing is ever their fault. Madeleine is beautiful, sexually desirable and sexually responsive, she is interested and interesting, but she seems utterly unaware that other people have feelings too. They exist entirely as opportunities for her to exercise her emotions.

Fittingly, she falls in love with a guy who may well be the only human being on the planet even more self-involved than she is.

Later in the story, this guy, his name is Leonard, will have a major breakdown because he chooses to stop taking the medication that controls his bipolar swings. When contemplating the ensuing (100 percent predictable) break down he blames pretty much everyone and everything except himself.

By the way, he stopped taking his medication immediately after Madeleine dumps him, a move even he admits was justified on her part. But look how he analyzes the thing:

... the power had shifted in his relationship with Madeleine. Early on, Madeleine had been the needy one. She got jealous when Leonard talked to other girls at parties. She flashed warning signs of insecurity. Finally, she'd thrown in the towel completely and told him, "I love you." In response, Leonard had acted cool and cerebral, figuring that by keeping Madeleine in doubt he could bind her to him more closely. But Madeleine surprised him. She broke up with him on the spot.

So Leonard goes to see a therapist and gets this out of it:

And though Bryce's analysis of the situation—that Leonard was frightened of intimacy and so had self-protectively made fun of Madeleine's avowal—was pretty much on the mark, that didn't bring Madeleine back.

The problem is that this analysis is a great steaming pile of it. It's just an appalling cliché—men are afraid of intimacy—bad enough to be in an eighties movie trying to pass itself off as wisdom. Nowhere does Leonard seem to grasp that the real problem is that he is manipulative little narcissist. Look at how he thinks: "Leonard had acted cool and cerebral, figuring that by keeping Madeleine in doubt he could bind her to him more closely". And then when he gets into therapy, his only interest is in getting something that will make Madeleine come back to him.

But while he is keenly interested in "making" Madeleine do things, that is, while he is interested in morally manipulating her to do the things he ants her to do, it didn't occur to him to pick up his phone and apologize to her.

I'll get to the third main character tomorrow. But for now, it strikes me that this book presents an inaccurate portrayal of my generation. And it has to be such a portrait because the conceit is that it is saying something about the possibility of marriage for the generation that came of age in the 1980s. A story about three people with problems unique to them who never managed to get married wouldn't make any general point. This is a book about a specific generation and, in that sense, I think it fails.

Sorta political: Shame and honour

Instapundit links the following excerpt from a CEO's suicide note

 

with a David Brooks article about the problems with out current meritocracy:

Over the past half–century, a more diverse and meritocratic elite has replaced the Protestant Establishment. People are more likely to rise on the basis of grades, test scores, effort and performance. 

Yet, as this meritocratic elite has taken over institutions, trust in them has plummeted. It’s not even clear that the brainy elite is doing a better job of running them than the old boys’ network. 

And that is interesting but what really struck me was how much the CEO's thinking confirmed a view that Brooks wants to counter:

Christopher Hayes of MSNBC and The Nation believes that the problem is inherent in the nature of meritocracies. In his book, “Twilight of the Elites,” he argues that meritocratic elites may rise on the basis of grades, effort and merit, but, to preserve their status, they become corrupt. They create wildly unequal societies, and then they rig things so that few can climb the ladders behind them. Meritocracy leads to oligarchy. 

For the CEO's problem is not living with being a failure but rather the loss of honor or, to use our current language, status that would go with this being public. "My ego was too big to admit failure". He knew he was a failure and could live with that. What he needed more than anything to, as Hayes put it, preserve his status by keeping his failure a secret so it wouldn't bring shame and loss of honour on him.

For the principle difference between a shame and honor culture and a Christian guilt and redemption culture lies in the differing views of the importance of detection. In a shame and honor culture you are taught to fear public shame rather than private guilt. If no one knows, not only do you not lose status, you also feel no guilt. That sense of guilt, that training our conscience to accuse us is what is missing. And that is what we lost in the revolution that began in the 1950s and reached its climax in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

 In our era, being "inauthentic" is seen as living a lie and a great sin. Being who you really are is a duty even though we really are sinners in need of redemption. That is the inescapable truth about all of us: no matter how we got to wherever we are or, alternatively, how we didn't get where we wanted to get, we are always sinners in need of redemption.

Recommended read

"The old advice focused on how to be a good woman. The new advice, however, focuses on how not to be a bad person." h/t Instapundit





It inspired me to change the uncool quote of the month.

The Marriage Plot: Chick Lit

It isn't, for reasons I'll get to, but it's very much like it. You get things like this:

Ten hours earlier, when she'd borrowed the black Betsey Johnson dress from Olivia, Madeleine had thought it looked good on her.

Every song anyone listens to or is playing in the background gets named too.

But what difference does it make that it's a Betsey Johnson dress? In Chick Lit we get this sort of brand identification because it's a convention. It tells us something about the person who owns the brand. But note here that Madeleine doesn't own the dress. She only borrowed it. It might tell us something about Olivia but Olivia exists only as a foil in this novel.

One of the things that Chick Lit doesn't do, and I've read a fair amount of it, is dwell on a sense of place. Characters spend more time analyzing their moral situation than they do thinking about the buildings or cities they are in. When a location comes up in Chick Lit, it tends to be iconic: Los Angeles, New York, London, Paris. A Chick Lit heroine would never go to Brown, she'd go to Harvard or Yale or to some community college while her friends went to Harvard or Yale. It's a very male thing to try to evoke a unique location in a novel. (This goes all the way back to Austen with her settings in Bath or London or her country houses which never have a specific identity. The whole point was to make it easy for you to draw on your knowledge to create an image of the house rather than to encourage you to think of a special house the way, for example, Evelyn Waugh does with Brideshead.)

The creating a specific location is not exclusively male, of course (Annie Dillard does it and does it very well to take only the first name to come to mind). But Eugenides tends to write a male sort of novel elsewhere in this book. I can't help but think that the Chick Lit motifs are Eugenides attempts to get inside a female character. I mention that because, as I go on through the book, I am increasingly convinced that he isn't very good at getting inside the female character.

It starts so strong with Madeleine at the center and very much possessed of agency. But he can't maintain that and she comes to exist more and more for others. Male others.

The big mistake, I think, is that one of the two men that Madeleine is choosing between turns out to be bipolar and on lithium. Now, as interesting as that might be as a plot complication, it entirely changes the way she assesses him. When she didn't know this about him, her choices turned on an impulsiveness and romanticism she found attractive on the one hand and a lack of stability and filthy apartment she didn't on the other. That is a fairly common set of traits in men and something a woman might analyze in terms of moral strengths and weaknesses. The second she find out he is bipolar, however, she can't really criticize those things but simply must deal with them.

Okay, real people fall in love with others who turn out to be bipolar so what's wrong with that? Well, maybe nothing, except that Madeleine's agency is sharply reduced. Now she moves to take care of the guy in more of a mothering role. She loses control over the direction of her life. Meanwhile he goes from being a romantic choice to being more of a problem for her to manage.

And there is the other guy, which is the subject for another post. But he is in love with her and the interesting tension all revolved around her capacity to make a choice and his just having to live with it. Only now she is no longer that woman but rather a character who is pulled into a typical "womanly" part.



PS: It is one of the more bizarre fixations of serious literature for the last few decades to think including that a character who is bipolar or (oh the horror, the horror) autistic will make the story they are telling more interesting or challenging. I think it is a left over from the 1960s drug culture and it's whacked out notions of expanded consciousness. Serious writers think that telling the story through or around a mentally ill person will enable them to make profound points about human experience and consciousness. This is a little like thinking you can make profound points about colour by describing how someone born blind "experiences" colour.

Smooth song of the day #5 for 2012

The Summer of 42 by Michel Legrand



Thank God for the movies. They kept real music alive through the horrible years.

If you remember seeing this movie you're old. I remember. Lame, lame movie but everyone saw it and this song served as a theme for not just the movie but just about everyone's yearning crushes for a few years. There were lots of different versions recorded. That's the thing about a really well-crafted song, it doesn't depend on your hearing a particular recording to work. In fact it lends itself to different interpretations.

Think of just about any Beatles song by way of contrast. Yesterday, for example, is (according to some sources) the most recorded song in history. I'm not sure I believe that but there must be a lot of versions. But the thing is, close your eyes and see how many you can think of. It just doesn't have the musical or lyrical depth to justify doing it that many times.

In case you're wondering: The woman in the clip just learned that her husband died in combat and yes, cringe, cringe. cringe, she is going to have sex with that boy. If we believe the screenwriter, and I don't, it's based on a true story. But even if I did believe him, I would've thought that even a sex-crazed teenage boy would have grasped that there are sometimes when, in the name of everything good and sacred about love and sex, you don't even if she wants to and this is one of those times.

The actress is Jennifer O'Neil. She has a look that was really big in the late 1970s and early, 1980s. More or less straight hair, willowy, not large-breasted, heavy silk shirt and knee-length skirt. It's funny, given all the things that came back from that era that that look never has.

You can call me gay if you want, but, beautiful as she is, I'd rather have that cottage than her.

Must have those shoes too:

Words were written for the tune, BTW, and they are not bad. I like this version by Patricia Kaas a lot. (It's from an album called Piano Bar that I love. If you were in that cottage with someone you love and lying still because it's too hot and you are waiting for it to cool down so you can have sex, Piano Bar would be perfect to have on in the background.)

A little light culture: passive-aggressive?

Some blog I read, I can't remember which one, gave a link to a post called: Top 9 Passive-Aggressive Things To Say To Your Husband During A Road Trip.

Here is a sample:

“Are you keeping this blackened banana skin for posterity?”

“Sure, I’ll read the map. I pushed your baby out of my vagina, but I’ll read the map, too.”

I think that is meant to be funny.

Okay, I've loaded the thing by picking a piece written by someone who is obviously just a jerk. (And lest you think I am being hard on Lucy Sweet, go read the comments that she got from her readers.)

To get a grasp on why what she does is so offensive, consider a counter example. Think of behaviours that can look a lot like passive-aggressive but are really just politeness. Think, for example, of how normal it is to pretend to "ask permission" instead of criticizing someone. We say, "May I turn this burner off?' or "Are you finished with this burner?" instead of telling someone that they forgot to turn it off. This can be irritating to be sure but it's mostly irritating because when someone says something like that to me I know I made the mistake—I did forget to turn the burner off.

In real passive aggressive behaviour, it is the person making the remark who is really at fault, not the one it is directed at. Banana peels get forgotten in cars. It's something we all do. You put it aside because you are driving and twenty minutes later, when you arrive at your destination, you've had to process a whole lot of other information, so you forget about the banana peel. We all do this and it's not much effort to pick up a banana peel someone else left behind and throw it away. And we all know that others have to pick up our banana peels too. The selfish and inconsiderate thing is to disingenuously ask the other person if they meant to leave it there. Likewise, if you are bringing up the fact that you went through labour years ago because you don't want to read the map now, it's only because you know you should just read the map and help us figure out where we are.

The sorts of conflicts that inspire passive-aggressive reactions are really about expectations. You got in the car to go on vacation and, damnit, you just want things to go smoothly without us getting lost like we seem to every #$&ing time we go on vacation. But if two people get in a car to make a road trip to somewhere they don't normally go or have never gone before, the odds that they will get temporarily lost are so high as to be a near certainty.

The popular culture tends to help us on the road to conflict by making us feel self-righteous about our expectations.  Think of how many stupid jokes there are about men never asking for directions even though there is clear-cut evidence that men are, on average, better navigators than women. And think of how many jokes there are reinforcing the notion that men are selfish pigs who make constant and unreasonable requests for sex. On the flipside, think of how many jokes there are suggesting that women talk too much. And next time a guy wants to complain the woman in his life is high maintenance, he might want to stop and think how he'd feel if she stopped doing the maintenance it takes for her to be the woman he fell in love with. (And he might even think about doing a little self-maintenance of his own.)

The first step on the way to being passive aggressive is agreeing to something we don't really want to do. Our spouse describes something that they want and we don't want to do it, We say, "Yes," because we think we should. That's what starts the cycle. And then we forget, procrastinate or even sabotage our efforts to keep our promise. When our spouse complains, we react angrily because we didn't really want to do it in the first place and that makes things worse and ... .

It's easy to slip into passive-aggressive responses because while the other person's request is reasonable, it isn't a moral slam dunk. No one would have to say, "Would you please help me get the kids out of the house because it is on fire?", for example. We all agree when it's a moral imperative. I know that I am capable of hard work because I can and have done lots of it when it had to be done but I'm not so good at doing hard work when it merely should be done.

That is why we all have trained ourselves to describe our wants as needs. It makes something that we think the other person should do for us sound more like something they have to do for us. In fact, our spouse doesn't have to give us sex because no one has ever died from living in a sexless marriage nor has anyone actually gone crazy from having to do all or most of the housework. What we really mean by our "needs" is, "This is what I believe to be a normal expectation and, since I believe that, I will be unhappy if I don't get it."

Now if we go to the response to these requests, "Please put more effort into the kinds of sex you know I like?" or "Could you help me with the dishes more often?" we can see the problem. Sometimes, maybe even most of the time, it's easy to say yes to these requests. In fact, we all know that we have said yes to requests like this many times in the past and done the task with enthusiasm and even enjoyment. And we know the other person isn't being unreasonable. But we don't feel like it anymore!

And the resentment makes it worse. If I do it now even though I don't feel like it, I'm really not going to feel like doing it next time. And I can turn to the popular culture and get support for my selfish attitudes.

The hard thing is that we have to change not just our behaviour but our attitude as well. When confronted with our spouse's expectations, we have to make them our own. We have to train ourselves to say "Yes" and actually mean it. If she/he really believes that X is a thing a husband or wife should do for heir spouse, then I should train myself to be the sort of husband or wife who thinks it is normal for a husband or wife to deliver this sort of thing.

Yes, yes, sometimes the other person's expectations are just unreasonable or wrong but which side do you think we err on most? As I say, we get a constant barrage of popular culture encouraging us to believe that we are all terribly put upon so we can just go ahead and self-righteously refuse to do things for one another. But it just isn't true. The total marriages where someone is being put upon with unreasonable requests for love, sex and help with housework might add up to ten percent of all marriages. Might! But in at least 90 percent of marriages the problem is that we don't do enough for one another and then add insult to injury by punishing one another with passive-aggressive resistance.