Lillith Has Left the Building

So Kathleen Parker.  She’s some trip.

Lady recently wrote a book called “Save the Males.”  Yuk yuk.  KParks is what one might call a “conservative feminist,” but not a brainless Republicunt.  She misses out on the sort of radical subjectivity that remains to be the invaluable legacy of a Dworkian feminism (what we keep), but she’s no slouch in recognizing the contingent failures that came coupled with that new understanding (what we must give away).

Specifically, she recognizes how the debasement of all which might be maligned as “masculine” has in many ways sadly castrated feminism itself.  She falls short because of her disregard for identity/queer politics, which ends up bogging down feminism’s misandrist mechanism as if it were a tiff it was having with the pettiness of biological gender.  It goes so much farther beyond that.

But man, did she drop a bomb on those neocons today.  Parker, why don’t you sidle on up here next to me for a second?

My friends Jake and System Sally were having a debate ultimately about pain and its place in the “path” to enlightenment which I couldn’t help but weasel into (the discussion by the way is, as J8 calls it, “a fucking burner” and proof of why having brilliant friends is the most rapturous blessing one can have in a world full of suffering bastards).  Jake and I have long agreed that the best system of living is to understand there is no system, but one thing that’s interesting here is that Buddhism, for example, is a self-annhialating principle.  A tantric approach advises the only way to free oneself from suffering is to unflinchingly embrace it.  You can take measured steps towards this consciousness, but only insofar as they eventually reveal to you that there are no steps.  As Sally notes in a later post, “there is, of course, the real beautiful Heart Sutra, which basically says…’Hey, there’s actually no suffering.’”

Feminism and freedom are the same; like Buddhism, it is a structure erected in the pursuit of happiness which will eventually dissolve when we have the strength to face the world with selves that are fully awake.  Parker alluded to this in a less sensational way than Camille Paglia caught shit for when she suggested that Palin is an odd and unsightly trophy of feminism:

Should Palin and McCain prevail come November, feminism can curtsy and treat herself to a hard-earned vacation. The greatest achievement of feminism won’t be that a woman reached the vice presidency, but that a woman no longer needed feminists to get there.

It’s not that Palin is herself a feminist, but she is a gestural icon of “success,” in the same way that Obama’s coming presidency will be a gestural icon of how we are changing the landscape of racism, yet still light-years away from having dismantling the entire operation all together.  As I wrote earlier, I do not personally believe in “enlightenment” under any context, political nor theological, because it would imply stasis, but I do believe in never giving up the chase.  Notably, Parker does not exactly abandon the term feminist, which I think she, too, understands as somewhat inadequate in the scope of things.  Perhaps she, like me, is waiting until the word and the movement it stands for become so constitutive of our consciousness that it simply evaporates entirely.

What’s really interesting about Parker is her resistance to speaking in the language of “women” immediately precludes her from being heard by the audience who needs her most, which is liberal feminists.  At the heart of feminism is the belief that we can be better, all of us, that we can be more fully actualized beings.  Ultimately, this is what she seeks to impart with “Save the Males;” the virtue of feminism is not that it inverts hierarchical order, supplanting misogyny with misandry, but that it undermines that hierarchy completely.  There’s actually no more radical of a message than urging us to allow a “soft male” to coexist alongside a lumberjack alongside an inspired poet alongside an anti-social misanthrope, all within one (wo)man.  The Guerilla Girls gave us a goddamn illustrated encyclopedia of female stereotypes, all of them so reflective of one another you could only conclude these were just facets of humanity at large, not a singular truth embodied in a singular person.

Unfortunately, Parker’s intolerance for “totalitarian groupthink” leads her to a total rejection of “politically correct” speech.  After the razzing she’s endured, I don’t think this is fraudulent.  I, too, hate the silences created when one narrative is forcibly privileged above all others, but it’s here again where an understanding of radically left, post-structuralist sensitivity would wildly enrich her laudable distrust of language to reflect a whole truth; it’s no use to try and speak from outside the thing you are trying to change.  She includes a quote from another writer named Dalrymple:

In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to Humiliate; and therefore the less it corresponded to reality the better.

When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself.

One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control, I think that if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

The element of humiliation is sharp and cuttingly true, but the implication that humanity is at moments corrupted by a force outside itself is a little too Paradise Lost for me.  We have the capacity to be humane and sinful in equal measure.  This is the same sort of rhetoric which effectively alienates us from our own agency by divorcing us from our government, as if is anything but literally ourselves.  The communist impulse is actually only semantically different from the fascist one in that whereas communism seeks to silence through humiliation, facism does this by whittling away at dissenting voices to violently impress a sleek, mechanized aesthetic—such as “one nation under God,” which holy fucking hell, Kathleen Parker explicitly spoke out against in her column yesterday.  It’s titled GIVING UP ON GOD.  omg.

The problem might be that “Save the Males” does not give up God quite enough—of note is the observation that it was published back in early August, before the GOP electorate stood before the nation naked as a jaybird, before it truly dawned on any of us what grotesque barbarism the McCain campaign was operating from, and before Kathleen Parker lost her throne as lustily boneable Republican fox whose paternal loyalties answered directly to the GOP, not any wussy sideshow like morality or something.  The crown, of course, was handed to Sarah Palin, who somehow managed to pull off both fuckable and ambitious (power hungry) in the American masculine imagination—but not convincingly capable. This would be was the missing component that made her simultaneously a GOP wet dream, a literal inversion of a feminist, and the single face which would subvert Parker’s conservative credibility, inviting such charming support of her irreverent stance to the lowest common denominator such as retroactive disappointment that her mother had not aborted her.

Like any good man would, I’d like to take this opportunity to pet Kathleen’s hair and tell her that she smells like Love’s Babysoft and assure her that the conservatives, they don’t deserve a girl like her.  Also like any good man would, I’m only saying this stuff because I want to get into her pants.  She’s vulnerable, wounded by the GOP.  Baby, let me be your knight in shining armor.  Seriously, they just don’t treat you like a lady should be treated.

And let’s get something straight: the feminist fangs never seem to be packing quite as much venomous heat like those of the “Values” party.  Not because a feminist would be shamed into silence by her peers (who felt so holy watching some of the more democratic corners of media sheering their claws on a pregnant teenager?), but because those who sincerely seek to honor life do not call for it to be extinguished just ‘cause they got mad.  The level of “truth,” sincerity, and relevance, if such a thing could ever be measured (it can’t) will always be higher on the dialectic fringe.  If Parker’s beliefs about god, discourse and the tyranny of mediocrity were not wildly re-calibrated in the wake of this election, then I’m overestimating her insight.  But I hope I’m not.

Without queering the concepts of masculine/feminine, ie. destabalizing and rhetorically cutting them loose from biological gender (regardless of what she personally believes to be natural/nurtured—gotta give up the God, remember?), discussions about the plight of the white American male are as comically impotent as the dopey, bumbling sitcom dads they lament.  Especially when argued from a place which rejects the “soft” speech of subjectivity, the value of celebrating both the ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ in ourselves and the world is completely obscured.  Why should we care to coddle men when they are ostensibly the agents of all suffering in the world?  When they are the warriors, the sociopathic politicians, the rapists, the pedophiles?  Why should we care when one out of every three or four of us in the US alone will be sexually assaulted in our lifetimes, many of us more than once?  When women are sold into sexual slavery, forced by their governments to abort their own children, kept illiterate, starving, exhausted, and immobile since before history even began?  How could it be meaningful for feminists to promote men any further than they have promoted themselves, and is such a project even possible?  Even more to the point, why the hell should I?

Parker understands why, but the ultra-mechanized severity of right-wing modes of speech do not allow her to fully articulate, and thus perhaps embody, the broadest implications of her uncommonly salient observations.  They’re tempered by both god and capitalism, in other words the necessity to be marketable to both.  Instead of appealing directly to of whom you speak by guiding feminist discourse towards a more mature awareness of its own history, responsibility, and future, she instead crosses her arms and snaps her gum in our general direction.  She says a tremendous slew of shitty things, such as “Factually…the pregnant ‘man’ was really a pregnant woman who mutilated herself and grew a beard.”  Eye roller, but would she defend it now that she isn’t working from the bible?  If so, she’d be breaking my heart.  She wouldn’t be calling for conservatives to reprioritize their beliefs, she’d be calling for neocons to more covertly keep their secret god agenda under wraps.  That ain’t you, is it baby?

She also strums the old harp about the negative consequences of hypersensativity to sexual harassment for boys and men without ever, even just once, touching for on how shitty it can feel to be reduced to your cunt by a coworker when you’re just trying to get a job done, and the cherry on top is that he’s an ugly mother fucker, too, so now you’re haunted by a mental movie of what you think he was thinking he might try and do to you.  Ew.  However, we don’t need god to discuss this issue reasonably. What never seems to happen is someone saying hey, Naomi Wolf, you were sort of a wiener when you acted like you’d never fully recover from the blow delt by the clammy hand of Harold Bloom that one time he got all grabby at your thigh.  Bloom, you’re a sad creep whose brain just isn’t big enough to blur out that old, warbling turkey neck you’ve got for a face.  Get some game and try looking up from your own dick before deciding no woman could resist.  They can.  Real talk.

Instead, however, “Save the Males” presents itself like a cheeky take on the silent agony of castration wealthy white males bravely trudge through day after day, ne’er a girlish scream to escape their mouths, even as the brutality of the feminist agenda howls in masochistic ecstasy serving our poor soldier with yet another lawsuit.  Oh, and then there are all those panty waists we turned into self-tanning chicks.  The title alone elicits a little “fuck men” in the back of my head when I read it, and that’s ME—I have invested a whole lot of energy thinking about where masculinity fits within a feminist ethos, and how caring for the whole spectrum of sexual and gender identity, rather than privileging only one, is the next step in the evolution of radical politics.

Dissimilar from the mediocre middle of feminism (comparatively, a place of much higher standing than the middle of the mainstream), she seems to feel appreciating difference is the preferable path of greater virtue over the wrecking ball of “equality.”  Narratively pitted in opposition to Jessica Valenti in a NY Times review called “Endangered Species or Still the Enemy?”, the journalist points out that both books use the same study to prove ostensibly conflicting points; it’s a study that concludes women are “biologically” engineered to like housework more than men.  Parker ‘dumbs it down’ for us: “Allow me again to translate. There’s no way to make men into women.”  And god, it’s so true, truer than the inadequately developed logic of Valenti, responding “In our happy little sexist world, things run much better when women are relegated to the home.”  But then what of biology?  Are my desires dictated to me by a patriarchal conspiracy, or is this just who I am?  And yes, contrary to everything you might have read in Jane Sexes It Up, the answer to this question matters.  The extent of our future depends on it.

What sucks is that Parker’s affection for difference rests on the tenuous assertion that god made only man and woman.  But now that she’s telling god to get lost from everywhere but our own hearts (as she puts it, “nonwhites won’t get whiter. And the nonreligious won’t get religion through external conversion. It doesn’t work that way.”), will she be revising the place of god in the experience of gender?  Can she crack the door just an inch more to expand her affirmation of difference into the singular, the “I” instead of the “Venus” and the “Mars”?  Maybe it’s too Marlo Thomas for Parker, but imagine if we were living in a world where pronouns were implicitly used as shorthand to describe something more complex, something that encouraged us to articulate and choose for ourselves who we are and were and want to be?  Consider the ways that kind of voice might liberate everyone from the straightjackets of prescribed gender roles.  With God out of the public picture, what excuse does anyone have to take the private interiors of anyone else as an affront to everything they believe about the world?  No longer would we be defined by how we were plucked like a wishbone from some dude’s chest and ended up a degenerated mutation of his perfection.  We’d be defining ourselves.  Hows that for a baptism?

It’s all so close I can taste it, but the chasm makes me hate this book, even though I sort of love it.  Must I defend my own sense of humor before I point out that it’s ultimately the gimmicky schlock Parker pushes to titillate all those neocon tits which ends up neutering her own argument?  Indeed, she’s funny.  But in the presence of god, her routine might be too sincere to be rewarded with anything heartier than nervous laughter.  It’s she who becomes the eunuch-jester, not the boys with poor balls bust by the unforgiving combat boot of radical feminism (we bust because we love!).

One of the tyrannies of capitalism is that it treats intellectual “wealth” as a finite resource.  What that means in the contemporary sense is evidenced by the shift within the publishing industry away from seeking and marketing literature to enrich our lives through the sophistry of art, and quickly devolving to serve a much larger and much stupider market who preferred the empty calories of artless art.  John Cage and Warhol were once reviled, deeply offending even the most peripheral artists sense of purpose, but their critiques were inquiries into the objective “truth” of art; in Cage, that meant music in total silence, in Warhol it meant an assembly line of images which had saturated the artistic economy before they could even be priced for the market.  What comes next, once their self-reflexive intentions have somersaulted into themselves once or twice or three times over, and we cannot scan the barcode on a can of Campbell’s tomato soup without an silent nod to its screenprint?

For Parker, that means speaking in the language of an audience who will not hear her.  Her words must already be written priced to sell.  There must be a focus group who will indicate the profit margin her thoughts will breach.  She mocks the charge to dismantle “patriarchy” as a crude misandrist crusade, but the word casts a shadow over every contrary paragraph of “Save the Males.”  If it’s not patriarchy that you loathe, then what is it?  If you know “preaching to the choir produces no converts,” then why are you?  What do you call the obstacles which try and keep us from our masculine and feminine selves?  What I can’t seem to understand is how patriarchy can be understood as much more than the violent imposition of one will above all others.  It’s not a war against the metaphoric or biological masculine; paternalism is totalitarianism.  Like all masculine/feminine values, their actual possibility transcends biological inventions.

So why isn’t Parker aiming for who will really listen?  An audience who will enthusiastically pay for the thrill of conservative treatise, which is infinitely more entertaining and theatrical than the overly-ornate, downy softness of academia (see also: talk radio), is not a fleet of people who hold conservative values.  It’s a herd of anti-intellectual cattle.  And they’re not your people, Parker.  They just tried to crucify you for an imagined betrayal just like the bastion of forgiveness they rhetorically worship.

What, then, is conservatism without god these days?  Whereas once that meant fiscally, perhaps leaning towards a more libertarian model of economy, that narrative means nothing to neocons now.  The delusion that two dudes exchanging vows will somehow diminish the sanctity of their own, or that posting the ten commandments inside a classroom is a somehow adequate substitution for a discussion on how to not get knocked up so you don’t have to hassle with having or paying for an abortion—these are the “values” which trump all others.  “Big Government Democrat” vs. “Free Market Republican” is an outmoded dichotomy, painfully so, and she knows it.  Predictably, it has denigrated to “secularists” vs. “Pastor for Prez.”  And well, we all know how well things work out for the empires marked by an incestuous church and state.  Parker’s call to “give up on god” is effectively a resignation from an audience who were spitting fire at her anyway.  I love it.

When she says conservatives must give up the holy father himself, I can only read this as a plea to abandon Eve, born from Adam’s rib with a weak will and a sickly envy, in favor of Lilith, Adam’s uncooperative ex-wife.  She too “gave up on god,” bored as shit by Adam’s trifling sexual imagination and dogmatic devotion to only fucking her missionary-style.  Lilith wanted it every which way, reverse cowgirlin’, wheelbarrowing around Eden, bent over a rock, slung up on a jungle vine like it was some pre-modern sex swing, flat on the ground like a slug with her face all pressed into the grass.  Even though they were both born from the red clay of the earth, God was the shittiest marriage counsellor ever and said she should take that shit lying down, which she did not find particularly satisfying.  He just wasn’t very interested.

When she got sick of their shit, the two of them, both The Dude and Adam, so she decided to utter the secret name of God.  It was like a safeword he had told them both if they ever wanted out, and she did.  Instantly she was ascending into Heaven, extracted from Eden and promptly deposited on the ends of the earth somewhere, she wasn’t clear on just where yet.  It took a while to figure out that it hadn’t been the sex which had disappointed her so deeply, but Adam’s rigidity and God’s indifference that she cold no longer endure.  She got a kick out of the whispers which would sometimes drift along her way, all sorts of juicy gossip about how she was eating babies and getting revenge on anyone who looked like her ex by seducing him and then breaking his will to live.  Keats even wrote a poem about her.  She was tickled.  But still hanging out on the ends of the earth.

You and Lilith and me, we’re not all so different, eh?  Welcome to exile, Parker.  You’ll find it’s a great relief how many parts of your body you no longer must meticulously groom with the level of care paid to an English garden; when you’ve got a mouth like yours, everyone just assumes you’ve grown a thatched roof over your muff anyhow, no matter how you like to style yourself.  That’s just one of the perks women like us, the kind you had described as “women who were not precisely interested in bonding with the opposite sex,” get to enjoy once the arbiters of “real femininity” no longer wish to exchange with us blowjob pointers from Cosmo.  We get by.