Tried to use holiday downtime to plow through some books I've had stacking up, and was successful, though perhaps not as successful as I'd have liked to me. But one book struck me as of being of particular interest to the Pandagon crowd: Sybil Exposed: The Extraordinary Story Behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case by Debbie Nathan. For those who don't think that there's a meaningful intersection between feminism and skepticism, I challenge them to read this amazing recounting of how three women, each in the grips of self-delusions caused by needs that Nathan definitely demonstrates were created by the constraints sexist culture puts on women, managed to hoodwink themselves, Hollywood, the publishing industry, the psychiatric establishment, and the entire country into believing that a small town Midwestern girl with a stubborn and baffling set of symptoms (mostly physical at first!) had actually suffered constant rape and other forms of abuse at the hands of her mother, and developed multiple personalities to cope. This story, in turn, created an epidemic of "multiple personality disorder" cases and other claims of repressed memories of child sex abuse that frequently couldn't have happened. Lives were ruined. You have the people (mostly women) who ended up in the hands of the wrong therapists and, instead of getting proper treatment for conditions like biopolar disorder, depression or schizophrenia, got worse as they kept inventing new personalities to inhabit and going further down the rabbit hole of mental illness. You had people thrown in jail, often with multiple life sentences, for crimes they simply couldn't have committed on the testimony generated by people who had been provoked in various ways to fantasize and then believe their fantasies had actually happened. And it all started with this one book and three women who, if they'd grown up in a better, more feminist world, probably wouldn't have been so damn messed up.

Nathan turns out to be the best possible candidate to write the expose of how the case of "Sybil" was generated through a series of self-delusions and outright fraud. Nathan brings a thorough understanding of feminism and its complicated history to this book, which means that she manages to achieve the delicate balancing act by both holding feminists who perpetuated the hysteria over "repressed memories" and "multiple personality disorder" responsible for what they did, but also applying a sympathetic, feminist analysis to the various pressures on women in the 20th century that led to this hysteria. (I'm using "hysteria" in the group sense, as a society-wide panic over nonsense, instead of as the sexist label attached to individual women as a way to shame them out of being righteously angry about something.) After all, child abuse and rape are both real and depressingly common, and the understanding of that that developed in the 70s and 80s basically traumatized the country to the extent that plausible accounts were hard to distinguish from implausible ones. Additionally, unlike with other crimes, the "realness" of sexual and domestic violence is often judged by how damaged the victim feels, which created an unfortunate incentive to highlight cases where severe trauma was claimed in order to get people to understand that rape is, you know, wrong. Now I think feminism has come around to realizing that "victims must display extreme trauma" is a trap used to let rapists off the hook, and have moved on to arguing that we need to treat rape, battering, and child abuse like we do any crime, where the victim's ability to recover doesn't mitigate guilt. But in the 70s and 80s, that wasn't as clear. This doesn't excuse people who generated false stories or made existing mental illnesses worse, but it does explain why there was a sudden interest in stories of greater and greater trauma from sexual violence.

Carol Tavris and Laura Miller have excellent reviews of Sybil Exposed that run down the facts of the case, but a quick summary: Shirley Mason was a depressed and neurotic woman with likely undiagnosed pernicious anemia who got caught up with Dr. Connie Wilbur, a charismatic but deeply unethical (though often well-meaning) therapist who always resented that the world didn't see her as the brilliant "pure scientist" she felt herself to be. Mason become emotionally dependent on Wilbur, and when she realized that what it would take to keep Wilbur's attention and interest (and continued services without immediate payment), she started producing multiple personalities, having read about them previously in some literature Wilbur gave her. Excited that she was finally going to make her career, Wilbur encouraged this development, keeping Mason strung out on barbituates for years while exerting massive pressure on Mason to both generate new personallties and come up with "memories" of severe child abuse. Meanwhile, Flora Schreiber, a journalist who, like Wilbur, felt marginalized and underappreciated, got involved by agreeing to write a book about it. Repeatedly throughout the invention of "Sybil", each woman involved has moments of doubt and worries that they're perpetuating a fraud, but their desires (Mason's to get attention and pay her debts, Wilbur and Schreiber's to finally do work that the world has to notice) cause them to tamp down their doubts. At some point, the need to keep the whole thing going gets to the point where Wilbur and Mason deliberately create fraudulent diaries to give to Schreiber, rather than let the fact that Mason's claims about child abuse couldn't be true derail the whole project. It's an amazing story of how ordinary human desires for love, ego gratification, and money can, under the right circumstances, create situations that simply spiral out of control.

Nathan's feminism makes her see the nuances in this situation that another journalist might miss. She grasps immediately why it was women who half-consciously perpetuated this fraud. As Nathan puts it, the continued marginalization of women in American society, added to the newfound ambitions and dreams of a feminist era, created some outright bizarre behavior in women who, in a more feminist time, would have had more productive avenues for their energies. She also suggests that this feeling of wanting so much while having so little created the audience for the book Sybil, and unfortunately created fertile grounds for women to generate false memories and multiple personality disorder. Not to put too fine a point on it, but "repressed memories" and "multiple personalities" had symbolic resonance with women who were torn between their feminist desires and the continued constraints put on their ambitions by a sexist society. Now that those tensions are slowly getting resolved and pressures have lightened up a little, it's unsurprising that these trends have faded away.

The lesson here is a subtle but important one: Skepticism without empathy has its limits. You can make an airtight skeptical case about multiple personality disorder, repressed memories, and the "Sybil" case without understanding the pressures on women that allowed this to happen, but your analysis would be severely limited. You could say that these claims weren't true, but you wouldn't understand why this particular hysteria took off. By bringing a feminist analysis to the situation, Nathan adds understanding, which suggests ways that clusterfucks like this could be prevented in the future. Reading this book, you realize how much damage that sexism and homophobia can do to the mental stability of those oppressed by it---by the time the book is over, you can cite dozens of examples of how sexism and homophobia provoked bad choices and weird behaviors in the people involved in this situation. Sybil Exposed is an excellent example of the best kind of skepticism, one that's rooted in a desire to understand why people believe false things. Highly recommended.

Via Whiskey Fire comes this illuminating piece from Jeff Carter at Townhall explaining why the sole blame for high unemployment is that people are too stupid and lazy to get jobs, coupled with "advice" on how to get one. Carter appears to believe that since a talentless moron like him can get work, so can you, though he's reluctant to offer wingnut welfare as an option, fearing the competition that arises when literally any moron could do your evil job. But what makes this piece special in the growing pile of hateful nonsense wingnuts are churning out to rationalize our terrible economy? Carter's amazing talents at literary interpretation:

If you are an unskilled laborer, it may seem like there are no opportunities. But, there are if you move to where the jobs are. In the 1930's and 1940's, there were several great migrations in the United States. The migration from the Great Plains to California was captured in the John Steinbeck novel about the Joad family. Many families moved from the rural south to the industrialized north for work. Just because you have lived your whole life in one area of the country doesn’t mean you are stuck there.

I'm surprised he didn't take it to the next level, and argue that you should avoid going on food stamps by pressing women with newborns into sharing their breast milk with you in lieu of purchased food. Maybe mow their lawn or something in exchange. My guess is that he didn't think of it, because he probably hasn't read the book, because even someone as dumb as Carter would grasp, upon reading The Grapes of Wrath, that Steinbeck has a fairly low opinion of people like the entire staff of Townhall. 

Which made me think about other classic works of literature and how they could be interpreted by conservatives, with or without actually reading the books in question. So I thought I'd make a list:

Oliver Twist: This story clearly demonstrates that putting bastard children into workhouses puts them on the path to peace and prosperity.

To Kill a Mockingbird: Innocent men can be convicted of rape just on a woman's word, so we should dismiss rape cases unless the crime happened in broad daylight in front of multiple witnesses, and the victim was a virgin on her way to church. Additionally, growing up in racist communities brings out the best in little girls.

Angels in America: The key is getting religion before you let dudes put it in your butt, and then you wouldn't get AIDS.

Moby Dick: The endangered species list is wrong, because it prevents good men from fulfilling their dreams.

A Christmas Carol: The ending demonstrates that we need  no government regulation, because our capitalist leaders are so naturally generous and fair.

The Handmaid's Tale: Women should simply give up on this feminism thing so that men aren't forced to take drastic action.

The Lottery: When your number's up, it's better for everyone if you don't whine about it so much. 

Tess of the d'Urbervilles: Women who don't accept that men prefer to marry virgins are pathetic lost causes.

The House of Mirth: Women should spend their youth trying to get married as quickly as possible to the first man that will have them. 

Slaughterhouse-Five: WWII truly produced the greatest generation.

Come up with your own!

Samhita from Feministing and  I are doing a weekly chat podcast for our friends at Citizen Radio. This show will be completely different from my weekly podcast at RH Reality Check, which has a more NPR-style news and opinion format. (By the way, RH Reality Check is having a fund-raising drive. Since they're the best source of reproductive rights news on the internet, please consider chipping in and supporting them.) This new podcast is going to be more freeform and chatty, much like Citizen Radio. It's called Opinionated and we have a cat for a logo. You can check out the first episode here. We discuss the library situation at Occupy Wall St., which has since been updated with news that at least some of the books survived. It remains to be seen this morning what the return of the library to protesters will look like.

Speaking of Occupy Wall St., I went out there last night to re-donate my book and take some pictures/show support (I would have re-donated others if I'd had second copies, but I only have, for obvious reasons, multiple copies of my own), and was thrilled to both meet commenter rowmyboat, who is working as a librarian, and to find out how frigging organized they are with the People's Library. They were entering ISBN numbers on an iPhone, presumably so they could be registered on this database. You can look around and see if there's holes in their collection of books that would be useful to their cause and donate here, if you're not able to get down there. If you are able to get down there, they need help retrieving books from the storage facility that is holding them. I know we all look forward to hearing about how well the books survived the raid, as well as hearing about the other stuff that was confiscated. My friend Darcy was tickled to have contributed the first copy of No Logo to the rebuilt library.

Observations about last night:

*People were in surprisingly high spirits, though there was still lingering ill feelings about the raid. I think the combination of adrenaline, thrill at surviving, and disgust about what happened is easy enough to understand. People showing up who were released from jail still seemed shell-shocked.

*The crowd was heaviest around 8PM, probably around 1,000 people. We left and came back after a couple of hours, and it had thinned considerably, but the General Assembly was still going on (and probably the reason that the crowd thinned, honestly. The work they do is important, but it's also hard to sit through.) 

*The police strategy for keeping people from rebuilding their camp was, as you can imagine, controversial. They barricaded most of the park and were searching anyone with heavy bags to make sure they weren't smuggling in tents, sleeping bags, or blankets (though some people did get in with blankets). Some times they seemed to think food was banned, and some times they let it in. People yelled at them for doing this, and it seemed to bother most of the police tremendously. In fact, I would say the most relevatory thing to me was the way the police were behaving. Most of them seemed genuinely  unhappy that the city was using them as schoolyard monitors to harass the hippies, who are, after all, advocating for police economic rights along with everyone else. When accused of being fascist, they seemed less pissed and more hurt, at least the ones I saw, though I'm sure some cops get off on pushing hippies around. Some cops were quietly supportive. Two separate officers went out of their way to help us find our way into the park, and I saw at least one cop engaging the protesters in a friendly fashion as they explained their views. 

*Funniest exchange heard all night, when there was yelling because the cops started getting aggressive about bag searching. Protester 1, at cop: "Nazi!" Protester 2, at Protester 1, "Don't say that. He may be a fascist, but he's definitely not a Nazi." Real life Godwinning! Also, I suspect from the cop's reaction to this that he is neither. 

We left before it even really came close to the point where questions would be asked about camping out. In my time there, no one even talked about it, honestly. I haven't heard word yet about what they eventually did. 

I was on Bloggingheads with Erica Grieder yesterday, and we talked about the raid:

I'm not sure why people are acting like there's a debate over whether or not it's good for the cause to have a political crackdown like this. From what I understand, the whole point of non-violent protest is to provoke authority figures into showing their true colors, and garner sympathy for your cause. 

Updated: The Gothamist has a timeline that shows exactly how long the books went missing, which certainly added to suspicions that they had been maliciously destroyed.

Whoops! Mayor Bloomberg's office has come to the realization that tearing down and carting off a 5,000 book library particularly looks bad in a situation that already makes him look like a tone-deaf authoritarian. The mayor's office put up a picture of some of the library contents with this caption: "Property from #Zuccoti, incl #OWS library, safely stored @ 57th St Sanit Garage; can be picked up Weds." The only property shown in the picture is books:

That the books will be returned is excellent news, and let's hope the rest of the belongings of the protesters will also be returned. 

It's telling that this defensive retort to the understandable panic in response to having all the protesters' things carted away in the raid is to display a picture of the books. As I noted earlier, there's nothing that says authoritarian overreach like the destruction of books. Bloomberg is trying to create the illusion that he's not interested in anything but a clean park, and so it's in his interest to dispel the notion that he sicced the cops on a people-built, ragtag library. For some, this picture of books will, in fact, dispel that notion. I would warn people not to make too much of this, however. Bloomberg can't undo the attempted media blackout, and the fact that all this property was seized from peaceful people in an unnecessary raid is still outrageous. 

For now, I'm glad that the books were not destroyed, and hope they are all returned promptly without being damaged. This is reportedly only a fraction of the library that's been accumulated, so we won't know the full story until the protesters get their things back.

As far as I know, we're still having a writer's protest to show support for the basic right to free speech and community education at Zuccoti Park at 6PM, though that may change depending on the ongoing clusterfuck at the courthouse. Details available here and here. Regardless of whether or not the mayor's office gives the books back, the whole raid has shined a light on the admirable efforts of Occupy Wall St. to use this opportunity not just for protest, but for education and expanding one's worldview. That affirming the value of reading has been so central to the protest should warm the hear of all writers and lovers of the written word, and we should show our support. 

Even though it will be pointedly ignored by mainstream media types wed to the narrative that the Tea Party is a spontaneous uprising of people who were apolitical before Obama sent them around the bend, I'm guessing many of you read with interest Robert Putnam and David Campbell's distillation of their intense research in political attitudes of Americans that shows that the "Tea Party" is the same ol' right wing base, but just with a new name.  And they're the most Bible-thumping-est part of the right wing base (as well as the most racist---these things tend to go together). 

More important, they were disproportionately social conservatives in 2006 — opposing abortion, for example — and still are today. Next to being a Republican, the strongest predictor of being a Tea Party supporter today was a desire, back in 2006, to see religion play a prominent role in politics. And Tea Partiers continue to hold these views: they seek “deeply religious” elected officials, approve of religious leaders’ engaging in politics and want religion brought into political debates. The Tea Party’s generals may say their overriding concern is a smaller government, but not their rank and file, who are more concerned about putting God in government.

All of which doesn't mean we can just shrug this off as same-shit-different-name.  One important thing has changed---giving them a fancy new nickname and a bunch of Astroturf rallies and endless coverage in both right wing and mainstream media has emboldened these dickweeds.  It's same-shit-different-name, but with more power and energy because of the fancy new name.  

One measure of how emboldened the religious right is at any point in time is looking at book challenges and censorship in local schools.  Interfering with the intellectual empowerment of minors is right up there on the priority list with raising the teenage pregnancy rate to produce a constant flow of examples to point to when wailing on about the wages of sin.  And censorship attempts have already seen a lot of success this year, according to the American Library Association.

Last month ThinkProgress reported that a Missouri high school had banned Kurt Vonnegut’s classic novel Slaughterhouse Five because religious residents complained that it taught principles contrary to the Bible. Now the American Library Association reports that this year alone, U.S. schools have banned more than 20 books and faced more than 50 other challenges, with many more expected this fall as school starts.....

While parents have traditionally launched the lion’s share of challenges, Deborah Caldwell-Stone, an attorney with the association, says she has noticed “an uptick in organized efforts” to remove books from public and school libraries.

The uptick in organization is a disturbing trend to watch more closely. With religious right whining censorship efforts aimed at the internet or television, I think it's easier just to see them as "concerned citizens", since a lot of well-meaning but misguided people tend to get bent out of shape at kids' investment in pop culture, which they erroneously believe is significantly different than their own youthful love of pop culture.  But attacking books shows that this isn't about the religious right being concerned that kids' minds are being numbed.  It shows that they're worried kids' minds aren't being numbed enough!  Which, in turn, should make people inclined to agree with them about TV and music stop and think really hard.  If people whose main concern is making kids stupid and compliant get upset at kids' exposure to music videos and video games, it's because they  see those things, like books, as potentially horizon-broadening. Strangely, the religious right sees things the way I do in this way---they don't see a significant difference between fiction in a book, on a stage, or on a screen. The big difference is they oppose all ways that can broaden horizons, and I see the potential to broaden horizons in all these various mediums, and believe that's a good thing. 

Alyssa Rosenberg has an interesting post up about how some people refuse to accept that "Harry Potter" has political themes.  There are probably two camps of people who believe this, though it's obviously false (which I'll get into): a) people who just think politics is a nasty sporting event and has no real world implication and b) people who strongly disagree with JK Rowling's point of view and so pretend that she actually agrees with them so they can continue enjoying the books.  Alyssa deals with both groups in her post.  I'll point out that I blogged just the other day about a variation on the second group, situations where people like certain characters in fiction so much they impose their own worldview on them, even when there's textual evidence against them.  I was also dealing with this to a degree in my (what I thought was light-hearted, but man, the angry responses I got) piece on how Harry Potter is more of a jock character than a geek character.  Unfortunately, I got responses from people that liked my post that also missed the point.  They wrote me to say that because Harry wasn't a geek, they disapproved and wouldn't read it.  In general, I find a tendency to treat fiction this way, like it's supposed to be a comforting fantasy of a world full of people that are more like you kicking ass, upsetting.  I prefer fiction to be challenging, and that challenge to include characters that are enticing as characters even if they wouldn't be my best friend in real life.  

Okay, that out of the way, I do want to talk about the political themes in "Harry Potter", though I want to be very clear that because X is a theme in the story in no way means all the good characters agree or even understand with the ideas that the story brings forward.  It's fiction, not a treatise.  Waht makes the political themes poignant is that the characters struggle with political ideals in the same way ordinary people do, without full historical knowledge or really thinking things through or applying political philosophy to current events. The characters may not even grasp that political ideas are political, with the exception of the hyper-aware Hermione.  They just react to them with a bundle of desires, compulsions, fears, and moral bravery, and the politics of their world are very personalized and attached to real, complex people.  It's quite a bit like real life, where the big picture is hard to see. 

After seeing the last movie Saturday, I was impressed by how much the political themes of it really resonated even more with me than when I read the books.  I don't think it's a coincidence that it's because this is post-Obama's election, which has brought forward a surge of nationalistic fervor from people who are insistent on both American exceptionalism and have a very specific idea of what makes America exceptional, and it no more involves electing black Democratic Presidents that the Death Eaters in "Harry Potter" are interested in electing Muggle-borns to head the Ministry of Magic.  The focus is on the personal vendetta-holding and power-mongering of Voldemort, but that Voldemort is an asshole doesn't really explain why he's able to get so much support from the wizarding world. To that, we have to look at the internal politics of their world.  The Death Eaters---and the latest movie does a really good job of conveying this austerely---are fundamentally traditionalists who have no desire to bring the wizarding world into the modern era.  This was obvious enough in the past, but now that we have the Tea Party to compare them to, it almost reads as anvilicious, except that the story predates current events.  The good guys are far more modern, but even within that, they're hardly saints but are often completely complicit in the injustices of their world that allow the views of the traditionalists to have so much sway.  At the end of it all, you are left with the hope that the good guys realize it's not enough to be generally tolerant of the Muggle-born but still living in a society built on unjust labor practices and casual racism towards Muggles. 

That's what I really think raises these books above more pedantic literature.  Rowling doesn't let anything be easy in the wizarding world.  In the first couple of books, you are really right there with Harry thinking that wizards are just a superior group of people to Muggles, though there are hints that their self-imposed segregation that they claim exists to protect Muggles instead serves to keep them from learning and modernizing in ways that would make them a kinder, more evolved people.  Over time, you learn more about how disturbing and often medieval their culture is, and how they don't think twice about barbaric acts.  More disturbingly, you discover that even the more liberal people of their society have massive blind spots, especially with regards to the enslavement of elves, the abuse of goblins, and their own inabilities to really take advantage of all the benefits of modernization.  The way that wizards are actually behind Muggles in certain ways---they don't have TV!---is something that's easy to write off at first, but as the books go on, you realize that the wizarding world is actually very dysfunctional and their sense of superiority to Muggles has basically closed them off to major avenues of innovation that would improve their world. 

And just to complicate it further, our hero Harry is just as guilty as anyone else.  His initial responses to Hermione's complaints about the injustices of their world is to find her either annoying or unpatriotic, even when his conscience tells him that she has a point.  He's too immature to realize that you can both love a culture and be critical of it, and in fact it's often because someone loves a culture that they criticize it.  They believe that this culture has the potential to grow and change and become something better.  (Indeed, Hermione grows up to be a bureaucratic activist who fights to make the wizarding world a better place.)  It's a lesson that obviously misses a lot of adults in America, from conservatives who conflate loving America with refusing to see, much less correct, injustice.  But sadly, I've definitely seen leftists who let their criticisms of America cause them to be reflectively anti-American.  It's rare, of course---we're definitely more Hermione-mature on average than conservatives---but I definitely saw, for instance, a couple of people on Twitter say that they were going to root against the U.S. team in the World Cup just because it's the U.S.  They're ridiculously naive, of course, starting with the notion that other countries ther reflexively support against us are such great places.  I'm far more Team Hermione: we should love our country, and because we love it, we should fight for it to be better. 

This aspect of the books really came out well in the latest movie.  The scene where you see the tortured, miserable dragon in Gringotts was deeply moving, and a scene in the movie that pretty much every person I've talked about the movie with has mentioned.  The ugly fact of the matter is both the bad guy and the good guys in the wizarding world looked the other way as the goblins tortured this dragon for the financial benefit of wizards.  It's Hermione's talent at imagining a better world that saves them; she sees the dragon as a creature who longs to be free, and this gives her the inspiration to find a way out of the bank.  It was a neat little encapsulation of some of the larger themes of the book.  In "Harry Potter", it's not enough to be against the bad guys.  The characters cannot excel until they stop being blind to all the ways they also benefit from injustice, and instead make the brave choice to be better than that. 

Which is, incidentally, why I think a lot of feminists see feminist themes where I didn't really see any.  The justice theme underpins the entire series, and the fact that it's not grappled with on gender in much depth is a disappointment.  I have my own theories as to why that is, but that would require another post entirely. 

I will say I have one small criticism of Alyssa's post.  She relies heavily on Rowling's real life activism and views when it comes to extrapolating the themes in "Harry Potter".  I'm uncomfortable doing that.  Often writers use political ideas they don't agree with as themes because they work with the story.  Joss Whedon is an atheist and a liberal, but "Buffy" and "Firefly" have religious and libertarian ideologies as themes, because within the work, those ideas are more evocative.  I still like both works a lot, and again, I maintain that ideological tests of art are just a bad idea. 

With all the excitement over the last Harry Potter movie coming out, I thought it would be a fun time to float a thought I've had about the book that often seems to surprise people when I mention it.  Even recently I was talking with some folks who were plowing through the books and enjoying them, and when one of them characterized Harry as "nerdy", I had to take issue. 

"Harry isn't a nerd," I said, "Harry is a jock."  I mean, Harry has an existential crisis that gives him some depth, but social outcast and/or geek he's not.  The opposite, in fact. 

I realized then that the "band of misfits" theme has so much power over the American imagination (maybe not the British, which could explain Rowling's choices) that people just sort of shove Harry and his friends into that mold, and then rely on a handful of rationalizations for it---Harry wears glasses, Hermione is a bookworm, Ron is a redhead---in order for that theory to make sense.  We're used to the X-Men or Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Scooby Gang, so much so that we don't see that Harry's trajectory is the inverse of Buffy's.  Buffy is a former cheerleader whose magic powers actually make her a geek and an outcast.  Harry is a nobody-special who finds out that he's special, and becomes not just the star athlete and hero of his school, but an actual celebrity.  Sure, there's ups and downs, but his trajectory is away from being the outcast and towards being the homecoming king.  Which may not be as emotionally satisfying as "my greatness makes me an outcast", but is probably more realistic.  In his world, being a badass is appreciated and he's realistically rewarded in his society for it.  

I'd argue that not only is Harry a jock character, but his friends also do not fit the traditional "band of misfits" mode.  Let's look at the evidence:

*Harry is the star of his Quidditch team, and basically is the equivalent in English football to a star striker, and in American football to the quarterback. 

*Harry's girlfriend is not only a star athlete as well, but is clearly the most popular and beautiful girl in school, with all the boys fawning over her.  It's a feminist touch that Rowling didn't make her the wizarding version of a cheerleader, but that's what makes the books so perfect for the modern era.  Rowling gets that girls can be popular in their high schools without being merely support for the boys.

*Which brings me to Hermione.  Hermione is the best piece of evidence for the "band of misfits" theory, but she still doesn't rise to the level of a true geek character.  Oh sure, she gets taunted for being Muggle-born and is the smart girl who annoys the other kids.  But while I'd say she's a tad nerdy at the beginning of the books, she evolves into one of the popular kids at Hogwarts.  She becomes very beautiful, is good friends with the most famous young man in their world, and she dates a famous Quidditch player.  Seriously, at one point she's basically a high school kid dating the equivalent of a young Cristiano Ronaldo.  I think it's cool that Rowling is acknowledging that the culture is making room for girls that are both accomplished and still popular.  And that's what Hermione is; no true outcast character would actually date one of the most famous athletes in the world. 

*Harry and Ron, on the other hand, are more stereotypical privileged young men who only put forward a C effort in school because they know they can coast into adulthood on their families' reputation.

*By the way, Harry's parents are wealthy, handsome people.  If anything, Harry's father is more of a cocky son of a bitch who coasts on charm and privilege.  Harry's mom is the homecoming queen who is nice to the geeks, a type that isn't as familiar in pop culture as the "mean girl" type, but is still a type.  Harry is portrayed as a chip off the block. 

*The most genuinely nerdy character is Severus Snape, which becomes even more clear in the flashbacks where Snape hates James Potter for his easy charm with the ladies, especially Lily, who Snape loves.  Snape is shown as being tortured by the popular kids when he's young.  As an adult, he and Harry don't like each other, and it's a continuation of the nerd-jock animus that both of them feel. 

*Let's face it; if "The Social Network" took place at Hogwarts, Mark Zuckerberg would be in Slytherin and the Winklevoss twins would be in Gryffindor.  Case closed. 

It's worth pondering if Harry Potter is so much more popular than many other series that have similar settings and themes because the books avoid the "band of misfits" structure.  "Band of misfits" is a trope that has great appeal to the traditionally geeky fantasy audiences, but Harry is accessible to people who have no relationship to that trope or what it feels like to be a misfit. 

Update: Correction.  The blogger was Dara Lind, filling in for Adam while he was out.

Thanks to Adam Serwer for making my day by drawing the parallels between the Birthers and people who believe the conspiracy theory that there are "questions" about Shakespeare being the man who wrote Shakespeare's plays. I was a lit major, so I've probably had higher-than-average exposure to this conspiracy theory, and it has made me bananas since the first time I heard it.  The implications of it should be immediately clear, but if not, Adam spells it out:

The reasoning behind Barderism should also ring a few bells for anyone familiar with the questions directed at various parts of President Obama's biography, from birth to his enrollment at Harvard Law School (supposedly the result of Affirmative Action Magic). This is because just as much of Obama-skepticism is motivated by the belief that a black dude could not possibly be legitimately qualified to edit the Harvard Law Review or become president of the United States, much of Barderism is motivated by the belief that a man from a small town without a university education couldn't possibly have written some of the best literature in the English language. Barders will frequently argue that the references to, say, falconry or court intrigue in Shakespeare's plays could only have been written by an aristocrat, or that no one would be able to write as intelligently about law as Shakespeare did without a degree from Cambridge or Oxford. The snobbery of this is pretty obvious -- it's as if the Barders had never heard of an autodidact before.

The notion that someone who is an outsider couldn't be in innovator, or that someone who spent his entire life working in the theater couldn't evolve into a great playwright---all because he didn't spring from the loins of people whose people had arbitrarily assigned them to a higher class status---is so stupid that it can only be based in a belief that the upper classes are in fact genetically superior.  I find it less plausible that an arisocrat would be able to demonstrate the creative flexibility and willingness to break with tradition that's evident in Shakespeare's plays than a commoner, because the class system puts so much emphasis on tradition and conformity.  A commoner just has less to overcome, socialization-wise, when it comes to working up the gumption to write in envelope-pushing ways.     

I'll add that another flavor of this kind of thinking crops up with a woman demonstrates talent and creativity and people start looking around for the man behind the curtain, though in many ways, that tendency is finally beginning to fade.

It’s been a couple of months at least since I’ve read a book that was so much fun that I resent any interruption from life, work, or sleep that requires me to put it down.  But this weekend, I tore into just such a book: Reading Women: How the Great Books of Feminism Changed My Life.  The book is billed largely as a memoir, but don’t let that fool you. It’s got great touches about the personal life of the author, and why she wanted to return to the feminist texts that she had left behind in college now that she’s a married mother and a freelancer whose life at home makes her often relate a little too much to the housewives that Betty Friedan interviewed for The Feminine Mystique.  But what really makes it fun is to read someone reading so many great books, and really engaging the ideas. The personal stuff just adds color to the intellectual stuff.  After all, for feminists, the personal is political, and Staal does a great job of relating fights with her partner over housework and struggles to balance motherhood with career to the text she’s reading while she audits a course called “Feminist Texts” at Barnard that she took when she was an undergraduate.

It’s also fun to read someone engage these texts with a sympathetic view towards the women who wrote them.  I think, all too often, it’s easy to slip into the “criticize all the time” mode, and not take the time to praise, expand upon, or engage positively alongside our criticisms.  This is particularly true in feminism, where a lot of discourse around feminist thinkers is about nipping at their weaknesses over discussing their strengths.  It’s nice to revisit the strengths and insights of famous feminist writers, even as some of their ideas fall out of fashion or are legitimately disproved.  This doesn’t mean being a Pollyanna and never seeing the flaws in someone’s work. But it was nice reading Staal engage with nuance these writers, and touch on what she really gets out of them even if something else in their writing doesn’t work.  I particularly was engaged in her defense of Shulamith Firestone, who has some ideas that are really quite wacky in retrospect, but as Staal notes, her anger is invigorating.  Indeed, the anger of the second wave is something that gets pissed on a lot, but it was absolutely necessary.

So, with that in mind—-and a just general desire for positivity on what is a rather gray day—-I thought I’d toss out this discussion question.  I asked it of Staal when I interviewed her today, though you’ll have to wait for the podcast to find out her answer. What famous feminist, dead or alive, would you want to have a beer with?  Not, who do you think is perfect and has no flaws or downsides to her thinking, or who would you want to confront.  Who would you enjoy a conversation with?  Whose brain would you want to pick, and have a friendly conversation where ideas are being teased out and exchanged?  Who would you think it’s fun to banter with?

Me, I think my answer is pretty obvious: Simone de Beauvoir.  Again, this isn’t me saying she’s perfect, but it’s also not me saying that I’d want to drill in and attack her for what I perceive to be the flaws in her thinking.  I just think she had some amazing, provocative ideas and I’d love to ask her some questions and offer my thoughts.  She also seems in general like she’s my kind of lady, with a whiff of peevishness to her, which often indicates that a woman has a spine.  I appreciate that.  I also like what Staal was surprised, in the book, to find that the professor attacks de Beauvoir for, which is the way she makes feminism an intellectual enterprise, instead of forever mucking around in her own feelings and emotions for analytical tools.  I think that a proper feminist canon should have all types, and it makes me sad that someone thinks there’s a “wrong” way to do feminism.  (I mean, outside of being straight up wrong or using make-believe instead of reality-based tools for analysis.) 

But obviously, everyone is different.  So, who’s your famous feminist?  Why would you want to have some drinks with her?

Susan Faludi’s book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women came out in 1991, but I’m going to include it in 80s week, because it was a book about the 80s.  Faludi started from the premise that the 80s were a time where there was a lot of reactionary energy, and she went on to demonstrate, in exhaustively researched detail, how much of it was against women and the gains women had made under feminism.  I don’t know when it went into the canon of must-read feminist books, though it feels like immediately. I do know that feminist blogging as we know it owes more to this book than anything.  It was Faludi who created the model we often subconsciously follow when analyzing sexism in political organizing, news articles, and pop culture.  Faludi created some of the most trenchant and memorable pieces of feminist criticism ever—-disproving Newsweek’s assertion that a woman over 40 was more likely to be killed by a terrorist than get married, holding up the film “Fatal Attraction” as a prime example of 80s misogyny, and basically laying down the criticism that anti-feminist women have had to grapple with ever since (which is that they create careers out of telling women not to have them).  Faludi’s best work in this book did remake the world in fascinating ways.  Newsweek finally took back their article, 20 years after the fact.  Conservative women have capitulated and are now trying to create a new anti-feminism that is tolerant of women having careers.  “Fatal Attraction” is now understood as the hokey piece of shit that it is.  What’s amazing about Backlash is how readable it is still, even though the culture she’s describing are 20-30 years past.  She did more than talk about the 80s; she used it as a launching pad to talk about American sexism at large.

In a way, though, the decade she was working with was the best source material imaginable, for the reasons she outlined.  The 80s were a reactionary period.  The 80s were when culture warriors who opposed everything that had happened, progress-wise, since at least the 1950s on were able to regroup and start to roll back all those gains.  The 80s were when the other side of the Boomer generation—-the ones who were reactionary, racist, sexist, conservative, and nostalgic for a “Leave It To Beaver” world that never really existed as they imagine it—-showed themselves and showed that they actually outnumbered their liberal, hippie Boomer compatriots who got the lion’s share of cultural attention until then.  (I’m not—-I repeat not—-bashing Boomers.  I’m just pointing out that there are liberal Boomers and conservative Boomers, and while there are a lot of the former, there are a few more of the latter.  That’s it.  If you don’t like it, bury yourself in some statistics and then we can talk.)  The 80s were conducted with Reagan as President.  I’ve blogged a lot about the 80s in terms of the countervailing forces in pop culture, but the dominant paradigm of the time was indeed conservative.

When I first read Backlash, it had only been out about five years.  Next year, it turns 20.  (This, by the way, is why I cackle like a witch whenever people tell me how “young” I sound when I write about this stuff.)  I think when that anniversary rolls around, there will be a lot of asking the question of how far we’ve come and how far we haven’t.  I’d like to start that process now, as part of 80s week.  There are two areas that I have a lot of questions about and want to toss them to you guys for thoughts.

A lot of Backlash was dedicated to analyzing pop culture, in a way that had been done before, but probably not to the depths and extent that Faludi took it.  Ever since, pop culture analysis has been a major weapon of feminists.  Every feminist blog that’s got substantial readership engages in Faludi-like analysis of pop culture.  An entire magazine, Bitch, exists just to do precisely this.  What definitely works about this mode of feminist analysis is that it’s accessible and popular—-it brings in readers, starts lively discussions, helps people see things in a light they may not have understood before, recruits newbies to feminism. 

But what Faludi and I think most feminist analysts of pop culture want is so much more!  We want the entertainment media to stop peddling sexist propaganda.  On that front, we have very mixed results.  On one hand, you’re seeing some more diversity and respect for women than you did in the 80s.  Women on TV and in movies are far more likely to have careers without getting some sort of horrible punishment, for instance.  Women are even celebrated for strength and competence.  You are beginning to see lesbian characters that aren’t immediately killed for it.  There is progress on this front.  The hunger that drove women to demand the return of “Cagney and Lacey” has resulted in many shows like it, even some featuring teenage girls as competent but flawed human beings, just like, you know, men have always been portrayed. 

On the flip side, some of the issues Faludi brings up are even worse.  If anything, the body image standards have gotten worse with the advent of inexpensive digital retouching of photos and an increasingly anorexia-obsessed fashion industry.  The proliferation of romantic comedies and other media that promotes the image of women as desperate, man-and-baby-hungry monsters who are unsatisfied because their careers get in the way has only gotten worse.  And, in fact, you sometimes get the impression that it’s gotten worse as a fuck-you to feminism, that people feel this lie about women must be more true because feminists disagree with it.  In these ways, you have to wonder it the constant drumbeat of pop culture analysis is helping or if it’s actually making it worse.

Then you have the problem of trend pieces that portray women as unhappy because of feminism.  The empirical evidence is and always has been against this assertion.  Faludi set the model—-Newsweek implied women are going to die lonely old hags because they don’t get knocked up and married at 19 and drop out of the work force to raise kids in the suburbs, and Faludi disproved their assertions so thoroughly that they eventually (eventually) issued a retraction. But instead of being shamed, mainstream media has kept on plugging.  It’s created this weird cycle.  News outlet publishes story about how feminism hurts women.  Feminist bloggers and writers bring empirical evidence to disprove it, or otherwise attack the process and unverified assumptions—-basically, they follow the impeccable Faludi model of criticism. Everyone agrees the feminists win, but it ends up amounting to nothing, because these stories come out at a faster pace than they can be debunked.  And that’s because the burden of proof is entirely on feminists.  Those making the sexist assertions feel no obligation to prove it.  Pointing to the plot in some episode of “Sex and the City” suffices, because defending sexism is always assumed to be the proper stance until proven otherwise. 

I’m not going to quit approaching this problem with the Faludi tools, but I have to ask the question: what’s it going to take?  Empirical evidence, logic, rationality, and rigor are all on the feminist side and yet we keep losing out to a sea of bullshit.  We need something else, and I don’t know what else. 

Some of the trends Faludi spotted and critiqued, she was able to actually able to damage significantly.  She was even able, I think, to help usher in an era where women feel more flexibility in fashion than they perhaps used to.  But in these two arenas, I feel like we’re spinning our wheels.  We’re still in the 80s in these instances, and I don’t know what it will take to move forward.

With Election Day drawing near, it’s probably a good time for a solid reminder of exactly how scary the agenda being pushed by the Republican party is.  And I have just the book for that, Jeff Sharlet’s follow-up to his bestseller The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power called C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy.  While The Family, often called The Fellowship, is sort of bipartisan, it is more in name than in practice.  For instance, Democrat Bart Stupak was a resident at the C Street house owned by The Family, and he was clearly doing the hardcore social conservative bidding of his Republican fellows in the house, especially Joseph Pitts, who was really the author of the Stupak-Pitts amendment that has been such a disaster for abortion access in this country.

On the podcast this week, I interviewed Jeff, and I highly recommend checking it out. His first book ended up getting him on TV a lot, but it was almost solely because so many members of The Family got tangled up in sex scandals involving their own adulteries.  In the book, he expresses frustration that it’s this and not their political machinations that got so much attention, so I asked him about it on the interview.  His answer is great; check it out. 

This election season, the narrative has all been about how those nutty Tea Party types are throwing mainstream Republicans out and taking over the party.  What has largely gone undiscussed is how the mainstream Republican party has been controlled by the nuts for a long time.  They’re just more genteel, more elitist nuts, but they’re just as fundamentalist.  In a lot of ways, they’re even worse, because their “religion” is adaptable to their needs in ways that would make even the most O’Donnell-like hypocritical goober blush.  The way they coddle each other’s adulteries while pushing a kind of “family values” that is, naturally, about as misogynist as you get is just the tip of this. It’s the way they blatantly bend their beliefs to justify their naked power-mongering that I found most alarming.  For instance, Jeff found that they bring Muslims into the fold, so long as said Muslims have power and resources they wish to exploit.  Even though The Family consider their fellowship to be all about Christianity, they justify this by calling the Muslim fellows “followers of Jesus”.  It’s all just a gloss of religious faith on the reality of what they’re up to, which is creating an extra-governmental, worldwide power brokering alliance, one that’s in service of creating iron fist theocratic powers that just so happen to have lots of natural resources to exploit for their own personal gain. 

A recent example of this is The Family’s interest in Uganda, where members of their fellowship have worked to pass harsh anti-homosexuality laws that would result in the death penalty for anyone caught being a “serial offender”, i.e. someone who has sex twice with someone of their same gender.  You can read about some of that from Jeff in Harper’s.

It’s been a long time coming, in large part because I really spent my time reading and thinking over this book, but I finished it last night and want to recommend it: The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama by Will Bunch.  The timing of the book couldn’t be better.  It’s out right as all the trends he crosses the country to record are coming to electoral fruition.  In fact, Bunch spends a lot of time in Delaware, recording the growth of the 9/12 Patriots that eventually managed to oust Mike Castle from his front-runner position and nominate Christine O’Donnell for the Republican slot on the ballot for Delaware Senator.  But he crosses the country from one end to the other, interviewing Tea Party activists.  And what he concludes, at the end of the day, is that all these folks are getting took.

If you want to hear Will talk about his own book, I interviewed him here.  It’s really great, very deep and interesting. 

Which isn’t to say that they’re necessarily wonderful human beings who aren’t playing a major role in their own process of getting took.  They’re generally pretty racist and paranoid, prone to throwing entitled fits and sinking into comforting delusions instead of facing reality.  Even when they’re being nice to Will, it’s hard to shake the general feeling that your average Tea Partier is a sanctimonious bigot who thinks the Jesus whose name they drop so regularly was just kidding when he talked up glass houses.  It’s a testament to Will’s skills as an empathy-driven journalist that he makes the reader still see them as human beings whose emotional needs aren’t being met and who are therefore perfect targets for the not even remotely hidden loose conspiracy of billionaires and Republican politicians who are exploiting them for profit.

The pitch is that the Tea Partiers can make their mark, become important by working with the Tea Party revolution.  The reason they’re getting took is there is no revolution.  It’s just a fantasy constructed to get out the vote and, just as importantly, drain their wallets.

Tea Partiers like to fancy themselves as grassroots organizers, and while Will shows that there is some truth to that, at the end of the day, they’re easy marks for astroturfing efforts like Glenn Beck’s or the Koch brothers’, because they authoritarians who fall in line easily behind leaders.  What Will found is no matter how much any Tea Partiers he met styled themselves as mavericks taking back the country, they tended to be in love with Glenn Beck because they saw him as someone they could follow without asking too many questions, because of “character”.  And said leaders are all about using the language of revolution to meet their own ends, but they’ve carefully crafted a “revolution” that is practically designed to do nothing, for a few reasons that Will is great at teasing out:

*The participants are simply too old.  Invariably, someone will scream “ageist!” when I point this out, eager to police without thinking about nuance.  But it’s not a slam on older people to suggest that you don’t create a revolution out of 50-80-year-olds. You’d be hard-pressed to do it with a group that was mostly over 30.  In fact, it’s a testament to older people that they’re harder to organize in such a way, because their—-our—-main reason to call in sick when things get heated is that we have too much to lose.  This is a repeated theme you can’t take for granted: too much to lose.  On just the revolution standpoint, it’s one thing to buy a bunch of guns and shoot them off on weekends and feel like a big man. It’s another to actually dedicate yourself to the violent overthrow of government. There’s a reason armies, state-sponsored or not, are composed mainly of people 18-24.  It has less to do with how strong they are and everything to do with the fact that it’s way harder to get people to drop it all to fight when “it all” means a spouse, children, responsibilities, attachments—-the kind of things you accumulate with age. 

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It’s August.  People are grumpy.  It’s time for extremely silly blogging based on this kick-ass article from Cracked about why a zombie apocalypse would fail. I’m a big fan of zombie apocalypse as a story, and I doubt many of these objections would reduce my enjoyment of these stories, since the answer for a lot of them is, “Magic, bitches.”  (Such as why zombies can fend off maggots, injury, heat, and the cold, and why zombie viruses would spread through bites.)  But I have to admit, I laughed out loud for #2 and #1.  Number 2 is basically, “It’s not nearly as fucking hard to find zombie-proof spaces as the movies would have you believe.”  And number 1 touches on a reality that zombie stories basically all have to ignore.

As we touched on briefly above, if Homo sapiens are good at one thing, it’s killing other things. We’re so good at it that we’ve made entire other species cease to exist without even trying. Add to the mix the sheer number of armed rednecks and hunters out there, and the zombies don’t even stand a chance. There were over 14 million people hunting with a license in the U.S. in 2004. At a minimum, that’s like an armed force the size of the great Los Angeles area.

Remember, the whole reason hunting licenses exist is to limit the number of animals you’re allowed to kill, because if you just declared free reign for everybody with a gun, everything in the forest would be dead by sundown. Even the trees would be mounted proudly above the late-arriving hunter’s mantles. It’s safe to assume that when the game changes from “three deer” to “all the rotting dead people trying to eat us,” there will be no shortage of volunteers.

The number one cliche of zombie stories that makes me bananas is the, “Oh noez we’re running out of supplies!” gambit.  I’ve been reading The Walking Dead series, which is a very scary, very addictive horror comic.  They get a lot of things right about what would happen if most of the country was wiped out by a zombie attack.  For instance, I notice that many zombie flicks assume that we’d still have electricity for weeks and possibly months, when in fact there are actual people who keep power plants running, and so electricity would be the first thing to go.  And right on the heels of electricity would be running water, since most water systems rely on the electrical grid.  Robert Kirkman includes all these kinds of things, and he thinks of cool shit like holing up in gated communities or better yet, prisons. 

But then he pulls out the card that makes me go nuts, the “oh noez, we don’t have food or guns!” card.  This is bullshit.

Why?  Because the one thing you can be assured there would be plenty of if the vast majority of Americans ceased to exist would be a steady supply of canned beans and Doritos.  The second thing there would be more than enough of would be ammo.  This is because you and your small band of survivors would not be competing with a whole lot of people for these precious commodities.  But in Walking Dead, they always seem to run across empty cupboards, and even though most of it takes place in the South, no one seems to think about stopping at a sporting goods store to wipe them out of literally more guns and ammo than you could ever use. 

But they do seem to always get enough gas at the pump, a strange oversight because gas pumps also don’t work without electricity.

I will say that in this sense, I really enjoyed the movie “Zombieland”, because even though they incorrectly portrayed a working electrical grid, they were well enough aware that reducing the population by 90% would mean that you would literally never run out of Twinkies or guns.  Or cars.  (Though, of course, they, like basically every other zombie story out there, seem to have no problem pulling gas out of pumps even though the entire infrastructure that makes that possible would collapse.)

While this is all very silly, I do think there is an interesting political observation to pull out of all this.  Zombie stories are a product of a society where most people literally do not think about, much less comprehend, how complex and interconnected everything is.  Or huge.  We have dark fantasies about what it would be like if that infrastructure collapsed, but it is so big and so complicated that even people writing stories where they have to imagine what that would be like struggle to really capture all the details.  We don’t think about stuff like, “If there weren’t people at the power plant, I couldn’t actually flush my toilet or pump gas.”  But nor do we consider how much food a grocery store really sells in a day compared to what any individual family’s needs are.  Trying to wrap your mind around all these different cogs and details about even just the way life runs in a mid-sized city is more than most people can really manage.

Spoilers.

Scott Pilgrim!  Yes, I saw it.  I’ve already engaged in some media about it, by being a guest on Overthinking It, where I contributed by being the person who’d had the opportunity to read all the way through book 6 of the series.  But I thought I’d go ahead and post on it, because I want to expand on my sadly cliched opinion that the books were ultimately more satisfying.  I really, really liked the movie.  It was entertaining as fuck, and perfectly pitched to people like me.  As we discuss on the podcast, the movie is supposed to take place in present times—-the technology and a couple of cultural touchstones indicate that—-but the fashion, attitudes, and majority of cultural references had a 90s era feel to them.  Scott even wears a Smashing Pumpkins T-shirt.  In this, they’re basically like the books, and that makes sense, because the writer Bryan Lee O’Malley is playing with the idea of past and memory, so it feels right to invoke the era when people our age (he’s two years younger than me) were actually the ages of the people in the book. Between that, the video game stuff, and the loving rendering of the indie rock scene, this movie was bound to be exactly as fun as it is for someone my age.  I don’t know if it has much appeal beyond that, which is why I think the box office wasn’t as great as it should have been.  Too bad, because it really is a funny movie.

But I really hope people read the books, because there’s a depth to them that simply wasn’t in the movie.  I ran into Sarah Jaffe last night, and she put her finger on exactly why, noting that they basically had to save time in the movie by writing out Ramona’s character. I mean, she’s still there and she’s still cool, but the entire story line in the book where Ramona has to struggle with her past and get over it isn’t really in the movie.  The many layers of Ramona are just lifted out of the story.  Scott is also rewritten somewhat to fit a more standard Hollywood narrative where the meek guy gains courage.  In the books, Scott is never what I’d call meek.  His journey is more that of a self-centered guy who has to stop thinking of himself in black-and-white heroic terms, and choose instead to be a human being.  The books are hilarious and clever, but ultimately they’re a meditation about the nature of love and the past and what it takes to go forward and take the leap of faith that is committing to love after you’ve had your fuck-ups.  And for that, the more in-depth portrayal of female characters like Ramona and yes, Knives and Envy is a critical element. 

Mike Barthel at Awl really dug into this issue, making similar observations about how the movie simply doesn’t have time to flesh out the female characters, much less pass the Bechdel test.  Which isn’t to accuse the movie of sexism!  Like Michelle notes, it’s actually a really refreshing film in that the female characters behave like actual human beings.  They have actual personalities that are theirs and not some manifestation of some generic Hollywood assumptions about femaleness.  Even as Ramona is holding down the spot of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, she’s really not, since she doesn’t have MPDG mandatory traits like being all-forgiving and accepting of the hero or being unattached to reality.  (She even has a job that she’s uniquely suited to perform!)  It’s hard to blame the movie for not having the depth of soul of the books because it’s not a function of sexism or bad writing so much as just an issue of time.  Once you work in the seven evil exes and the video games and the battle of the bands and the love triangle, there’s not a whole lot of room to explore the issues the book ends up being most interested in, namely what it means to choose to love someone and to fight for that. 

So, see the movie but please also read the books.  It’s very rare to see romantic love portrayed so honestly and yet without losing any ability to be touching.  In fact, I’d argue that it’s more touching for all its realism.  As one of the podcasters on OTI said, the movie falls into the trap of talking up destiny when it comes to love.  The books are basically the opposite of that—-they’re more interested in choice.  The person who thinks love is about finding The One that you’re destined for and living happily ever after in harmony is a fool, but I do think it’s a widespread kind of foolishness.  Moving forward and being able to choose to be happy is, in the books, a matter of dealing with the past not as something to ignore or as some kind of horrible baggage, but just being what it is.  It shapes us but it isn’t us. 

Plus, it tells this story with more than a little humor and cleverness. 

Update, to make it interesting: Can you think of movies/books/TV shows where there were obvious technology fails in the plot?  Or, conversely, what movies/books/TV shows would be completely ruined by being set a little later in history, when the characters would absolutely have things like cell phones and email?  No cheating with medieval stuff! 

Spoilers galore.

Years ago, I was listening to a podcast and they were talking about how disconcerting it can be to watch mid-century caper films, because there are routine situations in them where the introduction of the cell phone would clear up the problem creating all the tension.  Of course, they didn’t have cell phones back then, but that was the point—-they’ve become so ubiquitous that the idea of not having one is becoming hard to imagine.  It was something that came to mind for me recently when something quite unusual happened on “True Blood”.  We’re only on season two of the wretchedly sick but deliciously campy horror series, and I think this was the first time I saw a character in these supposedly modern times actually do something most of us do all the time—-receive a communication of some sort on a cell phone.  And of course, it wasn’t actually a communication of any real sort—-Sam the shapeshifting dude gets a call from his restaurant Merlotte’s and it’s a hang up. 

It brought home something about the show that drives me bananas.  Oh, it’s not the fact that vampires, shapeshifters, telepaths, and demon goddesses all are drawn to this tiny little Louisiana town.  Frankly, I can’t think of a better place to get into supernatural mischief than Louisiana, which was practically made for it with its combination of swamps and tolerance for eccentricity.  Nor is it that Sookie is one of those Mary Sue characters, because Anna Paquin plays her with enough knowingness that I find myself not especially perturbed by the obvious wish fulfillment aspects of a character that every sexy male vampire seems to fall in love with at first sight for no particular reason.  I can overlook a lot in a show that doesn’t take itself too seriously, and “True Blood” absolutely does not.

But man, the lack of communication on that show!  It’s clearly set in present times—-the first book came out in 2001—-and yet no one seems to think to make a fucking phone call, much less send off an email.  I’ve been to Louisiana.  They may be different from the rest of the country in many ways, but they enjoy the use of modern technologies just as much as the rest of us.  But the characters on this show carry on like it’s some huge burden to pull your phone out of your pocket and make a phone call.  For instance, even though we know for a fact that Sam has a phone, he never stops to call Sookie for help or advice when he finds himself targeted for abuse by Marianne.  Even though, if that happened to me, the first thing I’d think is, “Who do I know that might also be a ‘supernatural’ that is impervious to Marianne’s spells, and also has a bunch of badass vampire friends who can kick some serious ass and are probably the only people I can think of to take on a demon goddess?”  She may not be able to help, but it’s not like the cost of asking is that high.  Maybe Sam is watching his minutes, but even so, I’d say spending a few on saving your own life is well worth, especially if you have a bunch of rollover minutes in the bank.  Or what about all the angst Tara has about whether or not to let Marianne & Co. stay at Sookie’s place.  Perhaps you could ask her?  She’s in Dallas, not on the moon.  They have cell phone towers in Dallas.  Or what about Jason Stackhouse disappearing and not telling anyone?  I know Sookie’s head is deep in Bill’s ass, but maybe she could check up on her brother through his Facebook status?  I accept the whole thing where Sookie is kidnapped and trying to reach that other telepath, because you would have your cellphone stripped from you in that situation.  (In fact, if I were the director, I would have made a point of showing the kidnappers frisk the victims and take their phones.)  But a lot of the time, it just doesn’t make sense.  The plot developments on the show rely far too much on a lack of communication that doesn’t make much sense in the 21st century.

This really is an ongoing problem for storytellers in our modern era.  For literary novelists, it’s not really a big deal—-there’s an allergy in anything with literary aspirations to using cheap plot devices like lack of communication to create tension—-but for people making popcorn entertainment, this problem is huge.  You don’t really think about how much lack of information and communication is the fallback technique until you see it shoehorned into a narrative illogically.  I love Harry Potter, but that was the biggest flaw in the books.  JK Rowling created tension by depriving the main characters of information by having the adults talk down to them.  It made sense initially, but after the kids single-handedly win a couple of big battles, you’d expect realistically that the adults start at least coming clean with them.  I will say that Rowling neatly sidestepped the cell phone problem by making the wizard characters ignorant of Muggle technologies, so that even if they would see the benefit in something like cell phones, it’s unlikely they would have the chance to learn about them. 

I’m continually fascinated by the ways that writers of popcorn entertainment find ways to get around the problem of instant communication and information, when so much of what drives their plots is lack of information.  “Lost” was smart in that the writers decided that the way to get around a world full of previously unthinkable modern convenience is to put characters in a situation where they’re completely deprived of it.  But you can’t do that on every show.  The writers on “Angel” knew that this was going to be an issue for them, and they hung a lampshade on it, by having Angel mutter darkly all the time about how much he hated cell phones.  I’ve seen phones cut out on TV shows and characters deliberately refuse to answer.  And in a brilliant move that just goes to show why David Simon is the shit, “The Wire” had a plot where the use of cell phones was the reason that the main characters were deprived of the information they needed, because the cell phones were being used to avoid a wire tap. 

And then sometimes they just ignore the issue altogether, and the writers on “True Blood” are the worst offenders.  I’m sure the justification is that the show is set in a kooky world to begin with, but I don’t accept that excuse.  The whole point of shows like that is to juxtapose the supernatural elements with the known world.  In fact, that’s what makes “True Blood” so fun.  Vampires are out because of advanced technology that makes them able to live without feeding on people, and their struggle is overtly analogized to the gay rights struggle.  Their world is full of HDTVs, innovative drug use, internet pornography (Lafayette makes money web-camming), and even the fundamentalist Christian church has all the markers of the modern day tech-happy megachurch.  But even though we know the characters have cell phones that they use when it’s plot convenient, they somehow seem to forget they have them when the plot needs them to not be communicating.  From what I understand, the show follows the books very closely, so it seems the original sinner in this regard is Charlaine Harris.  I imagine in genre fiction on paper, it perhaps doesn’t seem that strange to have characters not pick up a phone and call when they absolutely would in real life.  (Though even there, I’m going to say it’s a stretch.)  But on TV, it’s absolutely jarring and I wish they would do something about it. 

I will say this—-you hear over and over again from aficionados of genre narratives that they are absolutely the same thing as literary fiction and that making distinctions between the two is elitist.  And I’m often inclined to agree.  You see genre fiction that rises to the level of literary fiction, as I believe “The Wire” did, and you see overtly artistic works borrow heavily from genre tropes.  But in our era of heavy duty information overload, I think genre writers on all levels really have an opportunity to blur the distinctions by accepting that the same old plots that rely heavily on not knowing critical information just don’t work any more.  This burden can be reconstructed as an opportunity to start coming up with new plot devices that rely much less on cliche.