That Man is Not Your Maker

It's a mistake to think Robin Thicke spoke the first word of patriarchy. I explain why below...


For some time I have been saying facetiously that not everyone should go to college. Or, put another way, college should not be the prerequisite for entering such a wide array of jobs.


I am not alone in having a moral objection to the ways that college serves as an economic gatekeeper, imposing debt as a precondition for entering the workforce. But I also have a more petty objection to college as a universal.


Because college also serves as a cultural gatekeeper, even when it does not guarantee employment, it tends to produce a certain smugness that comes from believing one holds the key to decoding all of the meanings in life. Witness the student who, after taking an introduction to women's studies or ethnic studies, becomes the resident expert on what is *really* sexist or racist. Note that this phenomenon can occur whether the student accepts or staunchly opposes the definition offered in the course.


This smug certainty is not unique to the humanities, as one might expect. Indeed, if I may be forgiven a gross generalization, those who believe that what they practice is a science (from physicists to Marxists) tend to be serious table-pounders. That is, while most of the rest of us must declare a position that might be assailed from the beginning as tainting, they get to pass as unbiased observers without much care for how their evidence is produced, gathered, framed, and interpreted.


However, rather than re-fighting the science wars, I would like to turn to the response to Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines" as promoting rape culture. The primary culprit is its red-flag line "I know you want it." Reading any number of posts or comments will lead you to people flagging this line as "rapey." First, I would hope we can agree that rape is a term that doesn't need a cute diminutive. Rape would seem to be an absolute. But perhaps "rapey" conveys a certain discomfort with forcing Thicke into the role of Grand Marshal in the Sexism Parade.





Let me be clear. I have never liked Robin Thicke. Furthermore, I do believe the song has sexist elements. My problem is with suggesting that in removing the phrase "I know you want it" from our repertoire, we can quarantine rape culture. That solution conjures for me a game of whack-a-mole with an expanding list of newly banned phrases. However, proceeding in that way grants patriarchy more power than it could ever have. Patriarchy's arrogant gestures are not proof positive of men's absolute dominance.


What many seem to have forgotten, temporarily, is that cocky quips do not exist in a vacuum. They respond to and anticipate dismissive responses. That is, the pushy come-ons are a sign of weakness, of need. The issue, then, is not that Robin Thicke sings "I know you want it." The issue is not the speech, it's when one has the situational power to turn that speech (or unspoken thought) into the law of someone's workplace--or, in fact, the last words they hear before they are assaulted or killed.


I am not arguing here for "nuance." It's just that the lyrics are contradictory. For instance, "that man is not your maker" tends to empower the woman who has submitted to "that man's" attempts to "domesticate" her. If I were to take issue with a lyric in Thicke's infernal, ubiquitous song, it would actually be "just let me liberate you"--because the line suggests that the male singer--and not the woman herself--will be the agent of her liberation. In positioning himself as the person who can free her, he sets up a savior story, starring his power and not hers.


Of course, all of these lines include fairly clever rhyming. And sometimes the logic of the song is driven as much by a patriarchal agenda as by outrageous wordplay.


OK now he was close, tried to domesticate you
But you're an animal, baby, it's in your nature
Just let me liberate you
You don't need no papers

That man is not your maker


I never thought of domesticate-cha/your nature/liberate-cha/papers/maker as a potential quintet of rhymes. I must tip my hat to the ingenuity. And, it's hard for me not to think the lyrics are also making a clever reference to ex-slaves' freedom papers and even subverting (at least one) man's patriarchal rule. So, while I can see (and make) a withering, sex-negative critique of the song lyrics, I can also see that wordplay may have been a source that produced the problematic lyrics--and not just the inexhaustible well of misogyny.


But I'm even more skeptical of the harping on "I know you want it." Of course, tone matters a great deal, and Thicke has insisted that tongue was in cheek. But, be that as it may, it's important not to think of any statement in isolation. Statements are sequential; they always follow previous statements and anticipate or provoke new statements. Thus, "I know you want it" doesn't exist apart from, say, "I do want it, but you ain't got it" or any number of other retorts.


Let's not forget, Janet Jackson also had a song with a similar title: "I Know You Want This." The self-assured lover is a mainstay of song but, then again, so are the songs puncturing the balloon. Carly Simon's "You're So Vain" is the obvious example. But Tina Turner's lyrics to "Funkier Than a Mosquito's Tweeter" also come to mind: "You wanna be a graduated lover / but in reality you're just another brother.... You think you're slick but you could stand a little greasing / The things you do ain't never really pleasing."


It's only in taking male statements out of the context of an ongoing conversation that one can produce them as pure, unconquerable sexism. In reality, they are responses to a number of public questions ricocheting silently in the dude psyche: "Do you like me? Will my boys be impressed if I can talk to or bed you? How can I protect myself from the feeling of being shut down? Do I have enough money for someone that looks that high maintenance? What will I say if you shut me down? What will I do If you don't?"


A boast like "I know you want it" responds to or anticipates all of these statements. It is not a statement unto itself, the first word spoken over the vast deep, like the God of Genesis. He says "I know you want it" and then "you" are immediately a sex object in his patriarchal world? Not necessarily.


Keeping in mind this lack of God-like power, patriarchy emerges as a very real state of affairs, but one that has never been and could never be a place in which women have no power. While it is true that a rapist might say or think "I know you want it," he might just as easily not care at all what "you" want. He might enjoy the fact that he knows "you" don't want it.


Policing the language, then, seems less about effectively reducing rape than about promoting polite society. I suppose that eliminating phrases that might make a Barbara Bush clutch her pearls is a fine goal, but it's not the same as producing a society without rape. And if "polite society" relies upon a notion that women don't or can't respond effectively to boorish propositions, then no thank you. Frankly, it would seem that such a focus could even pose a problem as the better-heeled rapist--the one who has polished his language and his shoes--would seem not to pose a threat. And the true rape culture is the one that views the rapist as egregious, antisocial, aberrant--an outlier. If we make participating in rape culture about uttering forbidden phrases, we make rape the province of the dangerous stranger, poor and unschooled. If we cannot recognize sexual force in its middle- and upper-class versions--with or without indecorous language--we need to reconsider how we measure the presence of rape culture.


We should, I think, be less concerned with what men say than with addressing what they can do in particular situations--and with ensuring that women have the tools and the confidence to respond as they see fit without sex shame or fear of reprisal:


Yes, I want it.

No, I don't want what you've got.

Take it somewhere else, or I'll give you the beating you seem to want.*

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* These last lines are not meant to place the responsibility on women for preventing rape. Surely, those who say that that responsibility belongs to rapists are correct. It is to say that the women should have every confidence in responding to the language of sexual proposition. Social responsibility pertains to the situations in which proposition overtakes request or consent.

The Visible Hand of the Market: Public Inequality and Private Violence

Dear Readers,

Pardon the hiatus, if you would be so kind. I can't say that I won't go away again, but instead I will promise to post some of the thoughts I've begun but not completed over the last six months. It seems that, now, this is how I blog.

The following are notes I took while trying to think of something to move the discussion about the Supreme Court hearings on DOMA from where it got stuck--namely, in simple assertions that gay marriage is the new interracial marriage, and denials thereof.

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Drawing these equations is fraught, I know. We know about the similar objections: opponents have variously asserted that gay marriage and interracial marriage are unnatural, antisocial, and confusing or outright damaging to children. Advocates for a liberalizing gesture argue that unrestricted choice in the marital arena is as much a hallmark of a free person as the ability to select any new model of cell phone.

I'd like to come at these from a different angle and talk about the shared status of both interracial and same-sex trysts as open secrets. In the spirit of the tried-and-true feminist dictum that "the personal is political," I'd like to sketch out some ways that the open secret of widely-known private affairs connects with the official world of law and economics.

I Didn't Know Lincoln Was Jesus, and Other Things I Learned at the Movies

I may not bring 400 hundred years of slavery and  oppression to Lincoln--I'm not that old. But I do bring two films worth of acid reflux to this latest attempt by le Spielberg to deal with the Negro question. So, in addition to *SPOILING THE PLOT* of Lincoln, I fear this post may also spoil the cheering over the national reunification the film wants to praise and call forth again.

My first disappointment with Spielberg's colored people was in The Color Purple. To keep this part brief, suffice it to say that I don't mind films differing from books. I do mind when they veer from the womanist politics of the novel by having the one female character who is independent of the story's violent men turn 180 degrees for no reason to cry out "Papa, I'se married!" That's not a difference; that's a violation of the whole spirit of the enterprise.

More recently, in the days of Amistad, Speilberg said (on Oprah, with Debbie Allen near him for backup) that he wanted to create a story so that his adopted black children could be proud of their country. I kept thinking that there is another option: help create a country your adopted black children can be proud of. In any case, this desire to exculpate the nation led him to the absolutely false courtroom climax in which John Quincy Adams wins the freedom of the Amistad mutineers through an impassioned Abolitionist speech when, in fact, JQA argued that, as they revolted at sea and were not yet the property of a slaveholder in the Americas, they should be free to return home. JQA was an unlikely hero for a story of the triumph of colorblindness anyway, he who withheld his sympathy from Desdemona in a review of Othello, because he believed that nature would always punish such outrages as sex across the color line.

So I come to Lincoln not primed to be pleased.

Phrases to Consider Retiring in 2013: 1. (White) Privilege

Nothing lasts forever. Gum loses its flavor. Welcomes are worn out. In the hopes of keeping critical edges honed, AintStudyingYou is sponsoring a discussion of which phrases, memes, habits, and tendencies to consider retiring for the 1-3. Please submit your suggestions (serious and humorous, personal and public) to the comments section and we'll see what kind of series we can come up with. 

My first nominee for forced retirement: (white) privilege...

This month, I have fallen down the rabbit-hole of privilege memes. Some (like this one on literacy) I found illuminating and forceful. Still, I find myself doubting that privilege is the most accurate or useful way of approaching social inequalities. In fact, I have lost faith in these exercises of cataloging privileged groups (whites, Christians, first-worlders, citizens, thin people, straights, cis-genders) and enumerating their ever-expanding privileges.

Therefore, be it hereby stated that I, AintStudyingYou, am perfectly willing to consider retiring  all variations on the term "privilege" (white, male, cis-gender, thin, etc), if certain stipulations are met.

White-on-White Crime: Domestic Terrorism Widens its Reach

Preface: I haven't had time to verify statistics on whether, in fact, white-on-white crime as a form of massacre is new in the US. In this case, I'm trying to think of what it would mean to add that to our repertoire of signs of social illness. 

In the days since Newtown, I have been looking for understanding about the apparent link between white males and mass violence in recent US history. Circa 1994, when Newt Gingrich helmed the Republican Revolution that gave the party control of Congress for the first time in decades, pundits described "angry white males" as the voting bloc responsible for the shift.  At the time, portraits of this constituency focused on their fire-breathing resentment.

At present, the mood seems elegiac. In the grips of this lament for the passing of what Fox News describes as "your father's America," a strange consensus is appearing across the political spectrum. (Follow this link to read David Brooks and Gail Collins of the New York Times in agreement that the "white working class" bears the brunt of economic inequality--an accord that emerges in spite of the fact that unemployment rates for blacks and Latinos are in many regions, including their own, as much as double that of whites).

If my previous post was about our practiced exercise of sympathy on behalf of white boys, this outpouring of feeling across lines of region, income, and region would seem to confirm my observations.

One comment in particular struck me while searching the internet. I find it a straightforward explanation of why gun sales spike when Democrats (not least President Obama) take the White House. I would prefer not to reduce a complex political and economic project to the emotion of "race hatred." After all, race hatred without voting power and firearms wouldn't concern me much. Besides, almost no one white admits to "hating" nonwhite Americans anymore. So, to get away from sanctimonious condemnations of hate-filled racists (always imagined in the South and the Midwest), let's call it the marriage of anti-federalism and white national masculinity. Said one commenter on Daily Kos (notable for his lack of inflammatory language):

"I think the extreme emotions worked up by the fear of gun restrictions plays into a sense of powerlessness felt by most working class guys I know. (I'm a blue collar gun owning hunter, and I even have a diesel pickup). Our wages have gone down our whole lives, a doctor's visit could mean losing our houses, ethnicities and languages we don't understand are mainstream." 

The writer's gesture toward "ethnicities and languages we don't understand" strongly suggests the "working class guys" he imagines are white Americans. If one really stretches, the group might include non-immigrant blacks and English-speaking Latinos. The way he makes "working class" identical to "white citizen" is something I've addressed elsewhere. In the process of this relatively mild and seemingly innocuous exercise in nativism, he makes two moves I find confounding. First, he insists that national and linguistic Others have become "mainstream." Outside of the most major cities, where can one use any language other than English to sell or obtain goods and services? For that matter, when was the last major film or weekly television program that featured a cast that wasn't predominantly white and that didn't speak in English? The writer's sense of loss is notably disproportionate to the actual loss.

Second, there are those amazing commas in the last sentence, linking economic issues of wages and health care to the aforementioned sense of lost dominance in the realm of culture and representation. It would seem as if, for this frustrated white male figure, the loss of cultural power is connected, in some inarticulable but deeply felt way, to depressed wages and soaring health care costs. From within this logic, two solutions present themselves: 1) oppose immigration, affirmative action, welfare and other expenditures allegedly earmarked for non-natives; 2) stock up on guns to prevent the federal government from extracting property for redistributive purposes.

It barely requires saying that the image of federal imposition in mind relates to those two great impositions on white property: emancipation and desegregation, both implemented with the conspicuous intervention of federal troops.

A New Age of Sympathy?

I had not intended to reintroduce Ain't Studying You with this post, but I've been doing so much writing and thinking on gun violence in the US that it seemed appropriate.

I nearly typed that I'd been doing thinking "in the wake of Newtown." I hesitate there because I am disturbed by the tendency to disconnect Newtown from Kansas City, Jacksonville, Sanford, not to mention the number of fatalities by guns or drones that remain untold and publicly unmourned.

It seems important to think about the injunction to feel worse about this loss of life than about others. (I'm drawing here on Fred Moten's crystalline explanation of the demand on the so-called Left for "more feeling" for the dead of 9/11 than those innocent dead of US strikes before or after it.) The distribution of sympathy--as much as that of wealth, rights, and guns--remains a life or death matter. What follows is, quite simply, a call to feel more often about more people.

I'll believe the Republicans want to return to a Christian nation...

when candidates tackle what I consider to be one of the most egregious lapses in faith, morals, and religious observance in contemporary America. If they are serious about re-establishing Christian parameters for conduct in this nation, they should insist that there be no professional sports -- or any other business, for that matter -- conducted on Sundays. It is the Sabbath, after all. The whole network of athletes and coaches, announcers and camera crew, stadium employees, bar owners, bookies, and more are, in fact, working on the day when we are not to toil but to give thanks to God.

When I was a child in the 1980s, many businesses were still closed on Sundays -- and not just Mom and Pop stores, either. As a Catholic schoolboy, I took the third commandment quite seriously: even when I did not attend Church, I knew that I was supposed to and felt appropriately guilty about it. The situation in 2011 could not be more different -- not just for me but across the nation. The NFL is its own Sunday ritual, one that requires almost no physical or moral effort but that does include continual solicitations. Call commercials the television version of passing the collection plate. The NFL-goer's duty, then, is not tithing to enable the work of the Church. Instead the imagined male viewer now has a moral duty to buy basic cable and the NFL channel--not to mention team paraphernalia and sponsors' products. What's most disturbing is that the collection plate is no mere analogy: Christianity has actually been hired to add its moral force to market culture.