Except when they’re conducted by people with Islamic origins, in which case the shootings are called terrorism and assumed to be political statements in league with political movements—though in the case of US-born Omar Mateen, who killed more than fifty people in a queer nightclub in Orlando this June, that was just an aspirational idea or an excuse in a miserable life whose idealization of violence and inability to connect resemble that of most of the other mass killers we produce here.
We don’t even have a word, let alone a conversation, for the most common kind of mass homicide, which could be called familicide, the furious man who takes out children and other family members or sometimes coworkers or bystanders, as well as the woman who’s the main focus of his ire, and sometimes himself. The lack of a category means the lack of terms to describe a common phenomenon and thus to recognize its parameters and their commonness. If categories cage, this is a phenomenon overdue for containment.
If there were an epidemic of mass shootings by, say, Native Americans or by lesbians, the particulars of the shooters would be noted, nervous jokes would be made, and the consideration that the whole category should be locked up or shut out would likely be raised. “It is an increasingly horrific fact of life and death in the United States that easily available guns offer troubled Americans the power to act out their grievances in public,” wrote the New York Times editorial board after one such massacre, as though we couldn’t narrow down past the citizenship thing who’s doing this. I’d like to see that done not as an accusation but as a diagnosis that could lead to some kind of treatment; if you acknowledge that women are far more immune to the desire to massacre and are less violent overall (with some spectacular exceptions, of course), maybe you can address the causes of extreme violence with more precision. Or at least describe who’s scary.
In contrast, every crime by a Black person is taken, by some, to indict the whole category of Blackness. The rise of Black Lives Matter was accompanied by embarrassing white people demanding that any Black person explain the unruly uprisings in Ferguson or Baltimore or apologize for them, or for incidents like them, as though any Black person they might encounter were responsible for all Black people. It isn’t possible to be racist without holding an unexamined faith in categories.
Not seeing category can also be a form of insight. There’s a story told by a Taoist master I first encountered when I was very young and return to still: Duke Mu of Chin sends out a wise man to find a superlative horse. The man returns with what he describes as a dun-colored mare, but the creature turns out to be a black stallion—and superlative as promised. The horse buyer’s friend notes that “intent on the inward qualities, he loses sight of the external. . . . He looks at the things he ought to look at, and neglects those that need not be looked at.” In not seeing surfaces, the wise man sees depths. One St. Patrick’s Day, when my Irish-American mother was at the state of Alzheimer’s where what she saw was not being reliably processed by her brain, she asked a Black man if he was Irish too. He was delighted, because he in fact was part Irish, but people seldom think to ask about the European ancestry of a dark-skinned person.
This is not the same thing as pretending that we can be colorblind in a society where our color affects our status, experience, opportunities, and chances of being shot by the police. Really, what I’m arguing for is the possibility of an art of using and not using category, of being deft and supple and imaginative or maybe just fully awake in how we imagine and describe the world and our experiences of it. Not too tight, not too loose, as a Zen master once put it. Categories are necessary to speech, especially to political and social speech, in which we discuss general tendencies. They’re fundamental to language; if language is categories—rain, dreams, jails—then speech is about learning how to conduct the orchestra of words into something precise and maybe even beautiful. Or at least to describe your world well and address others fairly.
Part of the art is learning to recognize exceptions. A doctor I know cites a useful aphorism he learned when he was being trained. It went something like this: “When you see hoofprints, you think horse, but sometimes it’s a zebra.” That is, the familiar symptoms usually mean the familiar disease but are sometimes evidence of something completely different. A category is a set of assumptions; the aphorism reminds you that sometimes your assumptions are wrong; that the particular doesn’t always fit into the general. But the fact that it’s sometimes a zebra doesn’t undermine the pattern that it’s usually horses.
Some of the most furious debates of our time come when opposing sides insist that everything in a given category correspond only to their version of the phenomenon. In recent debates about prostitution, one position at its most dogmatic insists that prostitutes—apparently, all prostitutes—are free agents whose lifestyle and labor choices should be respected and left alone. I’ve been acquainted with a few middle-class white sex workers. They retained control over what they did and with whom, along with the option of quitting when it stopped being what they wanted to do.
Of course that experience of being a sex worker with agency exists. So do sex trafficking and the forcing of children, immigrants, and other categories of the socially and economically vulnerable into prostitution. Prostitution is not a category of the enslaved or the free, but of both. And undoubtedly there are blurry areas in between. How do you even speak of, let alone propose regulation of, a category as full of internal contradictions? Maybe, like so many other things, it is a language problem, and we need different terms to talk about different categories of people engaged in sex for money.
In 2014, when women wanted to talk about sexual violence, they were often confronted with men who wanted to focus on the fact that not all men are rapists. That subset of men even started a hashtag, #notallmen, as though the central subject ought to be them and their comfort and reputation, not this scourge upon the land. It’s a language-and-logic problem: far, far from all men are rapists; we assumed everyone understood, but nearly all rapists are men, and so it’s useful to be able to say men rape (and men and boys also get raped, but in much lower numbers than women and girls).
According to Kate Harding’s excellent history of rape, Asking for It, 98 percent of rapists are men. There are exceptions. I had a male student at an Ivy League school demand to know why I insisted on talking about gender when I talked about rape. Another student there noted that my ideas of gender were “so binary.” I speak about gender in binaries because people often operate on that basis. Rape is, among other things, a rite affirming these categories of who has rights and who lacks them, and is often an act of hostility against a gender. None of the fraternity rapists seems to be interested in looking beyond gender, though perhaps doing so is going to be crucial to undoing rape culture. That is, making it possible to see a shared category of humanity that overrides unshared categories of genitals and gender roles.
That we imagine the two main genders as opposite or opposing tightens up the categories and the ways they define each other. The idea that gender is a false binary is a useful one, yet gender is also an inescapably useful thing in talking about who does what to whom and has done over the ages. If, for example, we couldn’t note that all of our presidents to date have been male, we could not suggest that the situation should be rectified at some point. Male and female, men and women, are how people have organized a lot of their social thinking for a very long time. “Male and female he created them,” as the Old Testament says, and its very firm ideas about what men and women are still with us, in case you haven’t heard a conservative Christian talk about marriage lately.
We must speak, and in speaking we must use categories such as Black and white, male and female. We must also understand the limits of these categories, their leakiness, and that male and female modify Black and white and vice versa. The categorical exceptions are important, both of those who were born with anomalous anatomy and those who have an anomalous relationship to their anatomy and the identity assigned on that basis. The I
ntersex Society of North America notes, “If you ask experts at medical centers how often a child is born so noticeably atypical in terms of genitalia that a specialist in sex differentiation is called in, the number comes out to about 1 in 1500 to 1 in 2000 births. But a lot more people than that are born with subtler forms of sex anatomy variations, some of which won’t show up until later in life.” They estimate that at 1 in 100. Which means that millions of people in this country do not, even biologically, quite correspond to our categories.
The writers of the text on that website advocate for intersex not as a category but rather as a term that allows us to acknowledge that categories are porous and some of us are not contained by them:
“Intersex” is a general term used for a variety of conditions in which a person is born with a reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn’t seem to fit the typical definitions of female or male. For example, a person might be born appearing to be female on the outside, but having mostly male-typical anatomy on the inside. Or a person may be born with genitals that seem to be in between the usual male and female types—for example, a girl may be born with a noticeably large clitoris, or lacking a vaginal opening, or a boy may be born with a notably small penis, or with a scrotum that is divided so that it has formed more like labia. Or a person may be born with mosaic genetics, so that some of her cells have XX chromosomes and some of them have XY.
In contemporary parlance, sex is biological and gender is socially constructed; the first is in your pants and your genes, the second in your mind. Perhaps this will change if people are less confined by all the activities and outfits that goes with their assigned gender: the young are going further in dismantling this system that queers and feminists have taken on for decades, both in how they identify and who they desire. (In a recent study, 46 percent of eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds identified as totally straight, 6 percent as totally queer, and almost half as somewhere in between.) Some refuse to let gender define them.
My hometown, San Francisco, is where the first man gave birth to a child (that we know of). We tend to think that bearing children is women’s work, but a trans man in my town who’d kept his uterus had a child before the much more widely publicized case of Thomas Beatie in 2008. A nice thing about the Beatie case is that the man carried and gave birth to three children because his wife was infertile and he was not. Categories are leaky, and some categories are prone to revision. I never thought I’d get to write “his uterus.” Sometimes, not always, the leaks in categories are cause for celebration.
80 Books No Woman Should Read
(2015)
A few years ago, Esquire put together a list that keeps rising from the dead like a zombie to haunt the Internet. “The 80 Best Books Every Man Should Read” is a reminder that the magazine is for men, and that if many young people now disavow the binaries of gender, they are revolting against much more established people building up gender like an Iron Curtain across humanity.
Of course, women’s magazines like Cosmopolitan have provided decades of equally troubling instructions on how to be a woman. Maybe it says a lot about the fragility of gender that instructions on being the two main ones have been issued monthly for so long. Should men read different books than women? In this list they shouldn’t even read books by women, except for one by Flannery O’Connor among seventy-nine books by men.
The author annotates O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories with a quote: “She would of been a good woman . . . if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” Shoot her. Which goes nicely with the comment for John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath: “Because it’s all about the titty.” In other words, books are instructions; you read them to be a man, and that’s why men need their own list. And what is a man? The comment on Jack London’s Call of the Wild tells us, “A book about dogs is equally a book about men.” Bitches be crazy men, I guess.
Scanning the list, which is full of all the manliest books ever, lots of war books, only one book by an out gay man, I was reminded that though it’s hard to be a woman it’s harder in many ways to be a man, that gender that’s supposed to be incessantly defended and demonstrated through acts of manliness. I looked at that list and all unbidden the thought arose, No wonder there are so many mass murders. Which are the extreme expression of being a man when the job is framed this way, though, happily, many men have more graceful, empathic ways of being in the world.
The list made me think there should be another, with some of the same books, called “80 Books No Woman Should Read,” though of course I believe everyone should read anything they want. I just think some books are instructions on why women are dirt or hardly exist at all except as accessories or are inherently evil and empty. Or they’re instructions in the version of masculinity that means being unkind and unaware, that set of values that expands out into violence at home, in war, and by economic means. Let me prove that I’m not a misandrist by starting my own list with Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, because any book Congressman Paul Ryan loves that much bears some responsibility for the misery he’s dying to create.
Speaking of instructions on women as nonpersons, when I first read On the Road (which isn’t on this list, though The Dharma Bums is), I realized that the book assumed you identified with the protagonist, who is convinced he’s sensitive and deep even as he leaves the young Latina farmworker he got involved with to whatever trouble he’s created for her. It assumes that you do not identify with the woman herself, who is not on the road and not treated very much like anything other than a discardable depository.
I identified with her, as I did with Lolita (and Lolita, that masterpiece of Humbert Humbert’s failure of empathy, is on the Esquire list with a coy description). I forgave Kerouac eventually, just as I forgave Jim Harrison his objectifying lecherousness on the page, because they have redeeming qualities. And there’s a wholesome midwesternness about Harrison’s lechery, unlike Charles Bukowski’s and Henry Miller’s.
Of course all three are on the Esquire list. As n + 1 editor Dayna Tortorici said, “I will never forget reading Bukowski’s Post Office and feeling so horrible, the way that the narrator describes the thickness of ugly women’s legs. I think it was the first time I felt like a book that I was trying to identify with rejected me. Though I did absorb it, and of course it made me hate my body or whatever.” Writer Emily Gould described Bellow, Roth, Updike, and Mailer as the “midcentury misogynists” a few years back, and it’s a handy term for those four guys on the Esquire list who’d also go on my list.
Ernest Hemingway is also in my no-read zone, because if you learn a lot from Gertrude Stein you shouldn’t be a homophobic, anti-Semitic misogynist, and because shooting large animals should never be equated with masculinity. The gun-penis-death thing is so sad as well as ugly. And because the terse, repressed prose style is, in his hands, mannered and pretentious and sentimental. Manly sentimental is the worst kind of sentimental, because it’s deluded about itself in a way that, say, honestly emotional Dickens never was.
Also, the way Hemingway said shit about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s penis size was pathetic and kind of transparent, back when Fitzgerald was a far more successful writer. He’s still far better too, with sentences as supple as silk whereas Hemingway’s prose is Lego blocks, and with a shapeshifter’s empathy for Daisy Buchanan and Nicole Diver as well as his male characters. (Tender Is the Night can be read as, among other things, an investigation of the far-reaching consequences of incest and child abuse.)
Norman Mailer and William Burroughs would go high up on my no-list, because there are so many writers we can read who didn’t stab or shoot their wives (and because one writer everyone should read, Luc Sante, wrote an astonishingly good piece about Burroughs’s appalling gender politics thirty years ago that was a big influence on me). All those novels by men that seem to believe that size is everything, the nine-hundred-page monsters that, had a woman written them, would be called overweight and told to go on a diet.
All those prurient books about violent crimes against women, especially the Black Dahlia murder case, which is a horrible reminder of how much violence against women is eroticized by some men, for other men, and how it makes women internalize the hatred. As Jacqueline Rose noted recently in the London Review of Books, “Patriarchy thrives by encouraging women to feel contempt for themselves.” Also, I understand that there is a writer named Jonathan Franzen, but I have not read him, except for his recurrent attacks on Jennifer Weiner in interviews.
There are good and great books on the Esquire list, though even Moby-Dick, which I love, reminds me that a book without women is often said to be about humanity, but a book with women in the foreground is a woman’s book. And that list would have you learn about women from James M. Cain and Philip Roth, who just aren’t the experts you should go to, not when the great oeuvres of Doris Lessing and Louise Erdrich and Elena Ferrante exist. I look over at my hero shelf and see Philip Levine, Rainer Maria Rilke, Virginia Woolf, Shunryu Suzuki, Adrienne Rich, Pablo Neruda, Subcomandante Marcos, Eduardo Galeano, James Baldwin. These books are, if they are instructions at all, instructions in extending our identities out into the world, human and nonhuman, in imagination as a great act of empathy that lifts you out of yourself, not locks you down into your gender.
Postscript: This article first appeared at Lithub.com, where it got a lot of online attention, prompting Esquire to respond: “What can we say? We messed up. Our list of “80 Books Every Man Should Read,” published several years ago, was rightfully called out for its lack of diversity in both authors and titles. So we invited eight female literary powerhouses, from Michiko Kakutani to Anna Holmes to Roxane Gay, to help us create a new list.”
The Mother of All Questions Page 12