The Unmade Bed

by Stephen Marche

  The setup is really closer to World of Warcraft—social justice warriors against trolls—than it is to a genuine debate. The problem is mistaking it for debate. Digital outrage is comically ephemeral in hindsight, but while it’s happening the deadly earnestness of attitudinal politics can be unbearably oppressive, mainly by the absence of any larger perspective. The case of the feminist folk singer Ani DiFranco was unhappily instructive in the nature of this new virtue. Here is a woman who has devoted her life to progressive causes, who has made real sacrifices, refusing to sell herself to a record label, for example, and who is one of the very few singers under the age of seventy who has managed to write powerful songs on political subjects. None of this helped when the Internet discovered she had planned a “Righteous Retreat” on the site of the former Nottoway Plantation in Louisiana. The outrage went viral and global: how dare she make music in a place in the southern United States where there had once been slaves?

  DiFranco apologized but made the mistake of trying to explain herself and to excuse her actions: “I did not imagine or understand that the setting of a plantation would trigger such collective outrage or result in so much high velocity bitterness. I imagined instead that the setting would become a participant in the event. This was doubtless to be a gathering of progressive and engaged people, so I imagine a dialogue would emerge organically over the four days about the issues of where we were.” Her appeal to reason was a colossal tactical error. The devout cannot tolerate pride in their penitents. The outrage only went more viral, more global. The righteous demand abasement before they will permit readmission, and DiFranco gave it to them in her second apology: “It is obvious to me now that you were right; all those who said we can’t in good conscience go to that place and support it or look past for one moment what it deeply represents. I needed a wake up call and you gave it to me.” So the forces of righteousness had won and were satisfied. Their not inconsiderable efforts had humiliated one of their staunchest activists. They had given Ani DiFranco a wake-up call. I am sure they felt good about themselves. I hope they did. What else could the point have been?

  There is a small group of men who respond to panvictimology by trying to join in. They call themselves “male feminists.” They launch websites. They speak and write, mostly about how shitty (other) men are. They go to rallies. Sometimes they even try to help organize these rallies. These men want to join in the struggle because they want the joy of hatefully overcoming, a form of angry pleasure often tinged with a distinct eroticism. They don’t realize that they themselves, inevitably, will be turned into those who need to be overcome. Identity politics is not involved in the construction of productive allegiances based on the desire for similar goals. None of these groups is looking for allies; they all want enemies. A good enemy can manufacture an enormous amount of outrage.

  The most famous of recent male feminists is Hugo Schwyzer, a former professor of gender studies at Pasadena City College and a blogger who wrote for Jezebel and the Atlantic. His prolific output of female-positive writings online did not prevent him from being called out for sleeping with students, sexting a twenty-seven-year-old porn star, and other examples of bad male behavior. Eventually the chorus of accusations from the women whose cause he so desperately wanted to join led to a form of intellectual suicide. He offered a Maoist-style self-criticism on Twitter, with over a hundred posts like “You can denounce me now, I’m out of feminism, not because I don’t believe in it, but because I’m such a p***poor [sic] example of it.” Then he checked himself into a psych ward.

  Other so-called male feminists took his moment of collapse as a personal triumph and crowed gleefully online over his downfall. There’s no better way to achieve ideological purity than to attack fellow travelers. The great Rabbi Hillel in the Pirkei Avot had a vision of self-consumption that fits neatly here: “He saw a skull floating on the surface of the water and he said unto it: Because you drowned others they drowned you; and those that drowned you will eventually be drowned.” The hunger for outrage eventually turns on its neighbor, as it has in every ideology. There is always someone more oppressed than you, who can claim a more authentic position and who can find you a participant in the structure of privilege. Just being thin is enough.

  One thing I learned from living through the political correctness of the 1990s is that, if you’re a woman and you hear a man calling himself a feminist,II run, don’t walk, away from that man. Jian Ghomeshi—who was acquitted after facing sexual assault charges by three women, and had a similar charge by yet another withdrawn in exchange for a peace bond and an apology for his sexually inappropriate behavior in the workplace—was an icon of the fine young upstanding male feminist. He graduated from York University, the most politically correct university in Canada—which is saying something—with a minor in women’s studies. He even blurbed The Guy’s Guide to Feminism as “an admirably accessible guide for guys to understand and embrace the other (often more incendiary) F-word. And it’s even funny. Quite remarkable. Everyone knows feminists have no sense of humour!” His comment appeared alongside blurbs from Gloria Steinem and the editor of the online feminist site Feministing. And he turned out to be who he turned out to be. As people do.

  The world doesn’t need male feminists anyway. It needs decent guys.

  * * *

  The politics of intimacy has been hijacked by misogyny and outrage. We have lost ourselves in games of humiliation which deny us insight—the exact opposite of the original hope contained in “The Personal Is Political.” Every debate in this book—from how men and women talk to each other to the pay gap to pornography to the new fatherhood to the division of housework—exists in the mainstream of discourse not as a discussion of radically complex and novel aspects of human interaction, but as lament on supposedly obvious facts. “How can this still be happening?” “Why won’t society change?” “Why won’t the world treat me better?” Under examination, the situation is always more chaotic; nothing is obvious when it comes to the state of men and women in the twenty-first century.

  Instead of furious despair, what our moment demands is humility and compassion. Men and women living together as equals is not easy; it reveals new asymmetries rather than destroys old ones. We’re in a new order we barely understand: everyone is going to fuck up, and probably most of the time. The approach to equality is filled with turbulence, not equilibrium. For the immediate future, it promises an overflowing embarrassment. And the turbulence and embarrassment will be worked out in our everyday lives, in strip clubs and in playgrounds and in offices, through the changes in our lifestyles (ancient word). We must ride the turbulence or perish.

  In the game of identity politics the stakes are the righteousness of the players. One need only demonstrate, with as much conviction as possible, that one is on the right side of history. Loudness is important. The louder the outrage, the better. Argument drifts into irrelevance. The old boys’ networks love it. You want Jane Austen on the ten-pound note? Done. (It will keep the newspapers from discussing why there has never been a female chancellor of the exchequer in British history.) The kamikaze leaders of progressivism have been inherently self-defeating, but they hardly mind. The point is to lose with grace. The point is to nurture the idea of oneself as a victim, while doing so from what is self-evidently a position of privilege—since these debates occur overwhelmingly on campuses or on websites filled with posts by Ivy League graduates or in the op-ed pages of major newspapers. Naturally the pursuit of victim status does nothing to help victims; it indulges tortured intellectual absurdities instead.

  Under the faceless barrage of loathing that the Internet unleashes, the organic response is to join in or to run and hide, to root out the failures of your allies, to pursue ideological safety as a replacement for physical safety. But the business of correcting idealism is a parlor game in which, one by one, everybody leaves the room. Empty rooms are boring, and besides, they’re empty. Personal politics has become a kind of hygiene of history, and
living with others is messy, often filthy. We have brushed the dirt of centuries from our bodies. Do we have the courage to sink our hands into the muck again? An intimate gender politics will not be pure.

  Outrage and the pursuit of correctness are modes of purity. The intellectual poses of a vacuous correctness are attractive exactly because they make such good cover. The culture of outrage is so popular because it’s so convenient, so efficient. And undemanding too: it requires no empathy, no study. Merely apply the simplistic principles of the new virtue more loudly than your neighbor. When those simplistic principles fail, when the world fails to improve, lapse into despair. Despair has no responsibilities. The consequences of the toxic environment of current gender debates could not be more severe. It has become morally dangerous to discuss the ideas that are the most complex and the most important to our shared lives. You don’t just risk making an intellectual mistake; you risk revealing yourself as a terrible person. The screamers have raised the stakes to the point where data and exchange have a highly circumscribed and limited place.

  The problem with identity politics is not the politics part; it’s the identity part. Identity politics strips identity of its danger and unfathomability and fits it into handy social categories. The shallow poses conform to only the crudest facts of identity, unconcerned with the unfathomable depths of its various origins and the intense flux of the transformation we are undergoing. Rather than enrich the realm of politics with the difficult business of intimate life, identity politics flattens the personal until it fits into established intellectual categories. What gets lost is the tormented, gorgeous, infuriating, labyrinthine space between power and intimacy, where the substance of the human drama lives, and the mystery of love. It’s in this space that we live. And only in this space can we hope to find out what men and women might be.

  * * *

  I. That guy, several decades my senior, was sexist in a subtle, paternalistic way common to his generation. To his credit he was encouraging of my work. He set high expectations for me. We spoke frankly with each other, and he respected my opinions. But unlike the men my age, who grew up with feminism, he would often draw attention to people’s gender; he’d refer to the “gentlemen,” the “ladies,” the “tough broads,” and yes, he called me “Honey.” He once said a high-ranking female staffer sounded “shrill.” He made a big fuss of complimenting women in the office who dressed up. And here is the advice he gave me, based, I believe, on a sincere, good-natured desire to help me in my career: He told me that I should wear brighter clothes. He told me I should smile more. And, even more objectionably, he told me I should talk less. He actually said, “You have two ears and one mouth,” a phrase so antiquated I had to Google it. I was embarrassed and outraged, and, to my surprise, I also pitied him a little because he seemed so out of touch. Needless to say, no one ever tells men they should smile more. I told a female colleague about the advice I had received, and we agreed that there was truth to it, that powerful women often accomplish more if they sugarcoat things. Then, in a moment so intimate I can barely stand to remember it, my colleague started to cry. Women have come so far—and yet the workplace still demands that we mask our power, tone down our strength, act feminine, girly, unthreatening to the men above us on the food chain.

  II. I winced at first when I heard that Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister, referred to himself as a feminist at the Davos World Economic Forum (it seemed a little boastful), but if he has to use the word to make equality a front-burner issue, I’m all for it. And anyway, deeds are more important than words. He has put so many smart, qualified women on his cabinet, he could call himself a Mouseketeer for all I care.

  SIX

  * * *

  The Boys’ Crisis, the Girls’ Crisis

  THE most dramatic scenes have the most banal settings. My wife and I perched on the tiny, uncomfortable chairs in my son’s kindergarten, a room smelling faintly of markers and boredom, and across from us his awkwardly smiling teacher, a lovely young woman who cared deeply for his well-being, her hands delicately folded on her lap, gave us the news as gently as possible, which made it even more chilling. “Your boy is a bit of a mess.”

  Is this the beginning? My instinctive thought. Is this the first of a hundred conversations with a hundred teachers, each smiling, each with her hands folded delicately on her lap? Is this the first of a hundred bland rooms smelling of markers and boredom? Is this the original of many messes to come? My son’s teacher was referring, literally, to his unkempt hair and his backpack full of crumpled paper and his indecipherable handwriting, but I knew she was also speaking to a vaguer, more indefinable sense of messiness, the messiness I also carry around in myself—his disorganization, the way he throws his body around, the condition sometimes known, with a comical lightening to mask the throat-constricting judgment, as the “wigglybums” but is more usually identified, with lowered voice, as Difficulty Concentrating.

  It’s not like Sarah and I hadn’t been expecting it. When my wife and I sat across from my son’s teacher, all three of us knew that the condition we were dealing with was not solely about him but was also about his gender. The hollow patriarchy—the rise of women to dominance of the middle, with men at either extreme—has left boys in a hole. As my wife and I sat down to deal with the messiness of our son, we knew the stakes were high but also that we were not alone. Far from it. Our problem was typical: the problem with boys.

  * * *

  Children are delicacies of fear that comes in two flavors: boy and girl. I’ve tasted both varieties. A family friend—an old-school feminist, the kind with the Rosie the Riveter “We Can Do It!” poster in the bathroom, photos from Zionist summer camps in the hallway, and many brightly patterned, shapeless tunics in her closet—once told me, “If you have a daughter, you worry about the rapists. If you have a son, you worry that he will become the rapist.” That’s broadly fair, it seems to me. When I hold my daughter, I fear the world. Step outside the little bubble of Western democracy, and the notion of the boys’ crisis verges on the obscenely hilarious. A girl growing up poor in sub-Saharan Africa has a less than one-in-four chance of going to school. In the rich West antique misogynies lurk everywhere. What I fear for my daughter is that the world, in one guise or another, in the figure of a monster or a man or other women or a cloud of oppressive expectation, will one day step into her life and crush her dreams, subtly or violently, invidiously or outright, with the proverbial but also literal whimper or bang.I The girls’ crisis is ubiquitous and ancient. The boys’ crisis is local and new.

  The reality of the souls of children, and the confusing business of being responsible for them, is where the theoretical constructs of gender and the messiness of life meet and where the impositions of our antique traditions, often invisible to ourselves, meet our hopes for the future. In the revolution of intimacy children are the ultimate theater of conflict. Children reveal the poverty of our thinking, the ludicrousness of our assumptions, the uselessness of our most coveted beliefs. And exactly in the face of what is most precious to us, exactly at the moment we crave certainty.

  It has now been more than a decade since Christina Hoff Sommers wrote her landmark bestseller, The War Against Boys. A cry of anger, a lamentation from the heart, and a thoroughly researched assault on the entire system of pedagogy, The War Against Boys sparked massive public debate. Boys have not lacked for articulate defenders since—dozens of titles have followed—but the fate of boys has only darkened. The boys’ crisis is accelerating ferociously. ADHD diagnosis increased by 3 percent a year from 1997 to 2003 and 5 percent a year from 2003 to 2011. Boys get 70 percent of Ds and Fs in school. The typical eleventh grade boy writes at the same level as an eighth grade girl. Boys are expelled from primary school five times as often as girls. Boys’ delinquency rate is three times what it is for girls. Boys account for two-thirds of school suspensions.

  The educational divergence between men and women, which was alarming before the recession of
2008, has swollen into science fiction territory since. Women now account for nearly 60 percent of all university enrollments. By the time my son is in college, in all likelihood, 66 percent of all educated people will be women. What will it be like when the category man is synonymous with the category uneducated, which will be synonymous with the category failure?

  The time of warning has passed. The results are in: worse education leads to worse employment outcomes. The traditionally male fields are in decline or are highly vulnerable to recession, and women dominate thirteen of the fifteen largest growth fields. And all of it leads to a dramatic spike in despair, as evidenced by the dramatic spike in male suicide rates. You don’t have to read the statistics. The world is filling up with lost boys; you can see them if you care to look. They hang out in the parking lots of small towns. They squat on corners or under bridges in big cities. They drift in the hills, warming themselves on fires that sometimes spread out of control. They are threatening insofar as they are purposeless. Their danger is in proportion to their uselessness.

  The boys’ crisis is morphing into a men’s crisis.

  * * *

  Sarah remembers pushing our toddler son in a grocery cart while he entertained himself with a banana pointed like a gun, shooting a procession of bad guys as they emerged from behind the vegetable aisle. A female shopper winced as they passed. “They’re all like that, aren’t they?” she said. “All like what?” Sarah wanted to ask, but didn’t because she’s Canadian. They’re all natural-born killers? Or they all want to play with fruit?