Because here’s the really wild thing: how do (fertile cis-) women get pregnant? Get on back to sex ed, sixth-grade style: remember that bit about the union of the sperm and the egg? Because what struck a lot of us when we contemplated the new CDC infographic is that it avoids reference to how women get pregnant. Pregnancy results when particular subsets of men and women get together in particular ways. No man, no pregnancy. If that language is too strong for you, then just say that women become pregnant when a bit of male genetic material is introduced by a male organ (no one becomes unintentionally pregnant by the other methods of introducing sperm or fertilized eggs to uteruses). Oh, and I should mention that that male organ is pretty much always attached to a male person.
A woman can be fertile as the Tigris Valley in the time of Abraham and she’s not going to get pregnant absent consort with a seed-bearing man. But if you listened to the way it’s often framed, you might believe that women get pregnant on their own. Conservatives assert this when they excoriate women for having “fatherless” children or having sex for pleasure. The antiabortion narrative is often about depraved women having sex for the hell of it and devil take the consequences; the fact that they cannot be having this risk-of-pregnancy type sex in the absence of men is the freaky part of it, a freakiness that is covered up by its familiarity.
A few election cycles ago politician Todd Akin claimed that women did not get pregnant from “legitimate rape.” He said that women’s bodies had ways of “shutting that thing down,” as though uteruses had some sort of remote-controlled door on them. Sometimes overlooked in all the attention to the craziness of his idea was that his comment was in the service of denying even rape victims abortion rights. In the current extremes of antiabortion advocacy and enforcement (like the cases of women prosecuted for trying to induce miscarriages), women have no value in relation to the fetuses in their wombs, though about half those fetuses will turn into women who will, in turn, be assessed as having no value in relation to the next potential generation of fetuses. Women may be worthless containers of containers of containers of things of value, namely men. Embryonic men. Or perhaps children have value until they turn out to be women. I don’t know. It’s a mystery to me how these people think.
Meanwhile, the mechanisms of pregnancy are assiduously avoided in this mystification-of-reproduction story. First, there is what we could call the mystery of the missing man: it absents guys from reproduction and absolves fathers from what is called fatherlessness, as though their absence from the life of a child somehow had nothing to do with them. (And, yeah, there are bad women who shut out nice men from contact with their kids, though from personal experience I know of more cases of dads missing in action and moms on the run from violent creeps.) Seriously, we know why men are absented from these narratives: it absolves them from responsibility for pregnancies, including the unfortunate and accidental variety, and then it absolves them from producing that phenomenon for which so many poor women have been excoriated for so long: fatherless children. The fathers of the fatherless are legion.
You can imagine a parallel universe of non-misogyny, in which men are told that they carry around this dangerous stuff that can blow a woman up into nine months of pregnancy and the production of other human beings, and that they are irresponsible, immoral, and lacking in something or other—what is it that women are lacking?—when they go around putting that stuff in impregnatable people without consent, planning, or care for long-term consequences. There is not much scolding along those lines, outside of warnings about women entrapping men with pregnancy, which is often a way of describing male withdrawal of responsibility but not of sperm.
Recommendations for women around the Zika virus have been similar to these alcohol guidelines for women: the responsibility for preventing pregnancy in the presence of a disease that causes birth defects has been portrayed as entirely up to women, even in countries like El Salvador, where abortion is illegal in all circumstances, birth control is not readily accessible, and (like pretty much everywhere else) women do not always have a safe and easy time saying no to sex. Seventeen women accused of having abortions (which is sometimes how a miscarriage is interpreted in El Salvador) are in prison for homicide. It’s arguable whom their bodies are thought to belong to, but it is clear their bodies are not regarded as belonging to them. Brazil did get around to telling men to use condoms during sex with pregnant women (but not with women at risk of being impregnated).
This mystification of reproduction is full of missing men and missing access to resources. The CDC’s highlighting of unintended pregnancy in the United States raises the questions of how maybe better access to reproductive rights and education and health care might do more to reduce unintended pregnancies than the assertion that all reproductive-age women not on birth control should not drink alcohol (a mandate that ignores how many women get pregnant unintentionally while actually on birth control).
I wish all this telling women alcohol is dangerous was a manifestation of a country that loves babies so much it’s all over lead contamination from New Orleans to Baltimore to Flint and the lousy nitrate-contaminated water of Iowa and carcinogenic pesticides and the links between sugary junk food and juvenile diabetes and the need for universal access to health care and daycare and good and adequate food. You know it’s not. It’s just about hating on women. Hating on women requires narratives that make men vanish and make women magicians, producing babies out of thin air and dissolute habits. This is an interesting narrative for the power it accords women, but I would rather have an accurate one. And maybe a broader one talking about all the ecological and economic factors that impact the well-being of children. But then the guilty party becomes us, not them.
Language matters. We’ve had a big struggle over the language about rape so that people would stop blaming victims. The epithet that put it concisely is: rapists cause rape. Not what women wear or consume, where they go, and the rest, because when you regard women as at fault you enter into another one of our anti-detective novels or another chapter of the mystery of the missing protagonist. Rape is a willful act: the actor is a rapist. And yet you’d think that young women on college campuses in particular were raping themselves, so absent have young men on campuses been from the mystificational narratives. Men are abstracted into a sort of weather, an ambient natural force, an inevitability that cannot be governed or held accountable. Individual men disappear in this narrative, and rape, assault, pregnancy just become weather conditions to which women have to adapt. If those things happen to them, the failure is theirs.
We have a lot of stories like this in this country, stories that, if you believe them, make you stupid. Stories that are not expositions but cover-ups of things like the causes of poverty and the consequences of racism. Stories that unhitch cause from effect and shunt meaning aside. The CDC extends the absence of perpetrators from crimes by telling women, in their simple orange-and-green chart about why women shouldn’t drink, that drinking too much carries the risks of “injuries/violence.” Now, falling over and breaking something is a risk of being drunk as a skunk, but since injuries here is coupled with violence, and tripping over a chair is not commonly regarded as violence, it’s clear that what’s meant is: someone might hurt and injure you. In sane worlds and grammatically coherent narratives, violence has a cause, and that cause has agency and consciousness: it has to be another living entity. Alcohol cannot be that entity, since alcohol doesn’t have agency and consciousness. A tree that falls on you is not violent, though a landlord might be responsible if your ill-maintained house collapses on you.
You drink, you get injured, but who injures you must not be mentioned. It’s as though there’s only women and alcohol in the room. Even when that someone is the person being addressed: the CDC guidelines telling men that they, too, should watch their drinking notes that “Excessive alcohol use is commonly involved in sexual assault.” It’s as though there’s a person named “excessive alcohol use,” or, rather, Excessive Al
cohol Use, whose shirts or maybe hip flasks would be monogrammed EAU. We have all met EAU. He is often involved in sexual assault. But here’s the point: he never acts alone. Because the CDC is twisting itself into baroque knots to avoid saying “you” or “men” or “drunk guys” or “perpetrators.” They seem less worried that someone might get hurt in the sense of beat up or raped than that someone’s feelings might get hurt. But people get hurt in part because we don’t want to talk about who does the hurting.
Excessive Alcohol Use has a brother named Excessive Alcohol Consumption on this list, and he’s trouble, too: “Excessive alcohol consumption increases aggression and, as a result, can increase the risk of physically assaulting another person.” EAC apparently acts alone, too, in this narrative, which is a sentence in search of a subject. Whose aggression? Who will assault? Maybe the CDC should jump to the chase and issue warnings about men. After all, men are the main source of violence against women (and, for that matter, the main source of violence against men). Imagine the language! “Use of a man may result in pregnancy or injury; men should be used with caution. Assess each man carefully for potential risks. Be careful about using men with alcohol.” Maybe they should come with warning labels? But that, too, would exonerate men from responsibility for their acts, and I think a world in which we don’t perform that exoneration so often would be a better one. Domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to women ages fifteen to forty-four in the United States.
The “she made me do it” kind of reasoning is a secondary cause; the passive tense and active violence often go together. A policeman on trial in San Francisco for killing an unarmed man who posed no threat said, “It was tragic. But unfortunately I was forced,” though nothing forced him except his own misjudgment. Georgia Black, a victim advocate for more than twenty years, remarked to me, “I can’t tell you how many sentencings or parole hearings I’ve attended in which the perpetrator refers to ‘the horrible thing that happened.’ Even apology letters to the victim or victim’s family state ‘I am sorry for what has happened to you.’” It’s as though the simplicity of self plus action equals consequence is a math problem they cannot solve, a sequence they cannot face; language, loose language, vague language, becomes an out. Things happen.
In the wildlife sanctuaries of literature, we study the species of speech, the flight patterns of individual words, the herd behavior of words together, and we learn what language does and why it matters. This is excellent training for going out into the world and looking at all the unhallowed speech of political statements and news headlines and CDC instructions and seeing how it makes the world or, in this case, makes a mess of it. It is the truest, highest purpose of language to make things clear and help us see; when words are used to do the opposite you know you’re in trouble and maybe that there’s a cover-up.
Detective work and the habits of perception it generates can save us from believing lies and sometimes show us who’s being protected when a lie is also an alibi. The CDC is right to warn about the dangers of misusing alcohol, if not in how it did so. For my part, I am trying to warn about the misuses of language. We are all language detectives, and if we pay enough attention we can figure out what statements mean even when those don’t mean to tell us, and we can even tell when stories are lying to us. So many of them do.
Giantess
(2016)
The radical is so often imagined as the marginal that sometimes something truly subversive escapes detection just by showing up in a tuxedo rather than a T-shirt or a ski mask. Take Giant, the 1956 film directed by George Stevens. It’s an epic, a saga, a sweeping family story, a capsule history of Texas’s economic transition from cattle to oil, a post-Western Western, and also an incendiary device. At a little over three hours, it has room to stuff in everything from scenes of a marriage to interventions on race, class, and gender.
It stars Elizabeth Taylor and three gay men, Rock Hudson, James Dean, and Sal Mineo, who orbit around each other uneasily in ways that seem only partly about their cinematic roles. I noticed this fact the first time I watched Giant, at a thirtieth-anniversary screening at San Francisco’s Castro Theatre. Watching films at the great 1,400-seat dream palace from my mid-teens on, I learned from the sighs and groans and snickers of the gay men with me in the dark to notice homoerotic subtexts, to delight in women with verve, and to appreciate camp and bitchiness and cliché. Giant had all those things.
While a lot of my peers memorized cult films such as The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and the Castro still offers sing-along screenings for people who can chime in on The Little Mermaid or The Sound of Music, I can now recite along with Taylor some of her best lines from Giant. Taylor is that rarest of joys, a woman who breaks rules and triumphs and enjoys herself rather than winding up dead or deserted or defeated, as too many female rebels have in too many patriarchal plots. The year before my first viewing, Hudson had died of AIDS and Taylor had begun standing up for those with the then untreatable and horrifically stigmatized disease. Her outspoken heroics as an advocate and fundraiser made her in real life a little like the unconquered heroine she’d played thirty years before.
Whenever I see a woman like that on screen, I get revved up in a way that men who identify with Hollywood’s endless supply of action heroes must be all the time. Just watching Jennifer Lawrence walk down a Texas street like a classic gunslinger to confront an enemy in the 2015 biopic Joy gave me a thrill I get maybe once a year or so. Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen was the hard drugs, as were a series of Hong Kong action heroines and La Femme Nikita long before. Beyoncé’s recent videos offer some of the same joy, of a woman who slays and doesn’t stay down. Distaff invictus, lady with agency.
The second time I saw Giant on the Castro’s huge screen, for its fortieth anniversary, I brought my own superb source of low-volume commentary, the performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña. He was dressed all in black leather and slumped down in his seat with a hangover. He kept murmuring, almost from the outset, “Rebecca, I do not believe what I am seeing.” Early in the film, the young Maryland debutante Leslie Lynnton, played by a radiant, self-possessed young Taylor, both captivates and annoys West Texas rancher Rock Hudson, the former by being a flirtatious and lovely woman, the latter by speaking her mind. Freudian motif alert: he’s come to buy a stallion—a gleaming black horse she rides magnificently in the opening scene—from Lynnton’s father. Taylor comes down the morning after they’ve met to remark to him that she’s been reading all night about Texas, and he prepares to be flattered when she remarks, “We really stole Texas! I mean away from Mexico.”
It’s a demurely outrageous scene, complicated by the handsome Black butler whose nonplussed facial expression gets some camera attention along with Hudson’s choke on his toast. The film, made the year after Brown v. Board of Education and its little-remembered parallel case, Hernandez v. Texas, is going to take on race in Texas, a white-and-brown affair, though it leaves out the politics of being Black in the South. It’s not a perfect polemic, and it falls in the large genre of racial justice as seen from the perspective of a white ally, not the affected population, but it’s nevertheless extraordinary for a blockbuster filmed while Martin Luther King was finishing graduate school and Rosa Parks was still giving up her seat.
We really stole Texas. It’s an amazing thing to say even now, and as an observation Elizabeth Taylor offers at breakfast to a cattle baron besotted with his homeland, it’s an astonishment. It’s still a good reminder. The year that Guillermo and I watched Giant turn forty at the Castro—1996—we were in the midst of an era of immigrant-bashing in California, driven by various myths about economic impact that shifted the burden of a brutal new economy from its lords and masters to its underclasses. That year was also the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the United States’s war on Mexico, the war that ended two years later with seizure of Mexico’s northern half, the rich expanse from New Mexico to California that, had it remained in Mexican hands, would have led to a wildly
different global geopolitics and, perhaps, poor Yankees sneaking across the border for jobs in the superpower to the southwest. (Texas, of course, had been stolen earlier.) Amnesia has been an important component of the ideology of politicians demonizing Latino immigrants and residents, from the Gold Rush to California governor Pete Wilson in the 1990s to the Republican presidential nominee in 2016.
Hudson’s character, rancher Jordan Benedict II, survives the truth in the mouth of a beautiful woman, and a scene or two later they’re newlyweds speeding home in his private railcar. First seen riding to hounds across the rolling green countryside of the southeast, she is shocked to find she’s signed on to life on the scorched grasslands of arid West Texas. But she adjusts to her surroundings. And makes adjustments to them: she starts meddling with how the Latinos on the half-million-acre ranch are treated, having found herself not only in an arid country but an apartheid one. There her husband rules like Abraham in the land of Canaan. Mighty are his herds, vast his lands. Among other things, the film seems to propose that the great division in the United States is not necessarily the famous Civil War configuration of North/South, but East/West, with differences of manners, histories, ecologies, and scale. It’s clear that Leslie thinks meeting people who speak Spanish and not English means she’s arrived in another country.
The Mother of All Questions Page 14