When people tell me how I feel

Maybe there's such a thing as too much understanding?

I love reading because in a great book, you get to essentially live inside the head of someone else. But sometimes I wonder if I too often see the world through someone else’s eyes, someone else’s gaze that is. The Male Gaze. I've been so well-trained to see the world through men’s eyes, I don’t even notice when I'm doing it. 

The worst moviegoer in the world

I really liked “The Worst Person in the World,” a Norwegian film about a young woman finding her way in Oslo. After I watched it, however, I read a peevish review by the New Yorker’s Richard Brody where he pointed out that she has no life beyond her relationship to men, and I gave myself an imaginary smack to the forehead. Why didn’t I notice that? 

Here’s his quote:

“The odd, dismissive emphasis away from the professional and the intellectual toward the sexual and the personal is the dominant note of the film, which isolates Julie’s personality from any public or professional activity, any intellectual pursuit, any point of view on anything happening in the wider world, any politics (whether international or local), any cultural interest, any awareness or curiosity about anything beside her romantic life.”

Yes, it’s a crabby line, but still. This movie was about her. It opens with her in med school, and talking about her career ambitions, but then she’s seemingly ok with her hourly-wage job at a bookstore. Also, she has no friends, or if she does the filmmaker decided her friends didn’t really merit inclusion in a movie about her. The only thing that mattered was her boyfriends.

She does say at one point that she worries she’s a supporting actor in her own story. And yes, love is the most important thing. And of course it was entirely the male filmmaker’s prerogative to put what he wants in the movie. But would the story of a young woman be so single-mindedly about the men in her life if a woman made it?

Brainwashed

My sexism-blindness goes way back; I'm a Gen Xer. I was inculcated with James Bond movies and Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders. I loved Sidney Sheldon novels, “Smokey and the Bandit,” and Charlie’s Angels. We visited art museums filled with paintings of women but no paintings by women. I never wanted to be a cheerleader, and I almost always had to be Sabrina, yet I still find myself woefully unable to shed dopey male-centric sensibilities. Some of that shit just sticks. 

Brett Kavanagh’s Senate confirmation hearings were a jolt for a lot of women in my generation–it inspired so many of us to literally look back in anger. To finally realize how offensively date rapey our favorite teen movies were (RIP “Sixteen Candles”) and share stories about the atrocious dicks we put up with in high school and college. I think maybe we were all so under the thumb of the patriarchy it was easier to just ignore how very wrong so much of what was happening was rather than address it. Plus, I grew up in the midwest where even in college attitudes were more conservative. Saying something as seemingly innocuous now as “I’m a feminist” felt radical in 1987. 

I love seeing younger women and girls call out sexist crap and generally not give a fuck what men think. I feel no defensiveness, only enthusiasm for the change in attitudes, even when I’m a little confused and out of step. I’m game to struggle with my discomfort when shopping online and the photos show normal-sized women modeling the clothes. I do weirdly prefer to see the jeans on the willowy-possibly-anorexic lady, not on the gal who is actually demonstrating what they’d look like on my pudgy bod. Yes, I realize this is stupidly part of the problem. I’m still working on it. Cut me some slack.

She’s like the world’s greatest cowboy, but hot

I’m a sucker for almost any Old West story¹, so when Taylor Sheridan, the creator of the schlocky hit “Yellowstone,” announced he was making a gritty, realistic prequel about the family’s 19th century journey to Montana, I told Jeff to plug in the VCR. For a few weeks this winter, “1883” was appointment viewing for us. It was a beautiful and violent depiction of a journey from Ft. Worth toward the Oregon Trail. The legendary Sam Elliot plays a poor man’s Gus Macrae² leading a band of German immigrants who I think were exiled from their homeland as punishment for their unfortunate taste in hatwear. Country superstars/happily-married-in-real-life multimillionaires Faith Hill and Tim McGraw play the parents of an American family who hitch on to Sam Elliot’s wagon train.

Faith Hill looks fantastic in her long skirts and tight-fitting bodices. The episode where she gets sauced with Rita Wilson (aka Mrs. Tom Hanks) makes you want to get sauced with Faith Hill and Rita Wilson. The scenery is breathtaking and nearly everybody dies in all the ways I like to see people die in stories of the Old West—snake bites, river drownings, skeezy white horse thieves, gross diseases, Native American ambush. That said, the show’s actually pretty corny and many of the lead performances are cringey.

The whole thing centers on Elsa, Faith Hill and Tim McGraw’s daughter, who’s a sassy adventurous free spirit. We quickly learn she’s the best rider of the bunch, a crack shot, and even a brave warrior. She does it all looking gorgeous in tight-fitting costumes with charming dimples and long golden hair trailing down her back.

To be fair, her character annoyed me from the very start. She narrates each episode in these maudlin voiceovers, her bravery and expertise with wrangling cattle defies explanation, and so much about her is irritatingly anachronistic. Plus, when she falls for a skanky fellow cowboy and declares her intention to sleep with him that very night, all her mom has to say is “I envy you.” Really? First of all, ew, why? Second of all, what mother in any century says that in response to her teenage daughter embarking on a sexual relationship with an older man she just met? So much for cinema verité, Taylor Sheridan.

So I’m not completely oblivious to the show’s weaknesses. Then I found a review in The Hollywood Reporter by Daniel Fienberg and had to once again do the imaginary forehead smack. Here’s what the (again, male) writer pointed out to me: 

“Elsa’s segments of the show (are) plagued by Sheridan’s tendency to build drama around women exclusively by putting them in physical jeopardy and to build respect for women exclusively by having characters appreciate their manly attributes.”

Yes! That’s what I wish I said! My imaginary forehead is getting sore.

We all need some time with Joan

The creators of these female characters need to meet Joan of Joan is Okay, by Weike Wang.  It's a quick read and strangely hard to put down even though it's not exactly a thriller. Joan is a workaholic ICU doctor with zero life outside of the office. She dreads time off, volunteers for extra shifts, and has no qualms about this stark existence. She's an excellent doctor but chose the ICU because she prefers the machines to the humans she’s trying to heal. She's not unkind or unfeeling, she’s just Joan. 

Joan is an oddball, but partly as a result of a hard childhood as one of the only Chinese girls wherever the family lived, to be called “different” makes her skin crawl. She has almost no personal life, and she’s fine with it. Her apartment is so sparse and ascetic, upon seeing it for the first time her neighbor asks if she’d been robbed. 

That neighbor is a perfect example of why I bring this book up here. When he first appears in the story I thought, “hmm, maybe he’s the romantic lead” (note male gaze–Joan needs a love interest or her life is incomplete). Then I realized the author had more up her sleeve. Joan is this guy’s “project” and she tolerates it for as long as she can but ultimately escapes his clutches. The moment when she reveals her true feelings about him and everything he’s done took my breath away–her fury, her grace to endure it all, her understanding at how arrogantly presumptuous he was, and ultimately her choice to not explain her feelings to him because it would be an exhausting and pointless endeavor. Talk about getting a glimpse of another person’s perspective. I’ve been her, but worse, I’ve been him; arrogantly assuming someone wants my opinion or my “help” when really it’s all just my ego.

Joan is flouting everyone's expectations in a way that made me root for her like I do the younger women calling me out on my shit. She has no fucks to give. Even if it doesn’t seem that way to me or anyone else, Joan is Okay. 

I am not Joan and I don’t aspire to be. Maybe my capacity to code switch with the male gaze is one of my soft skills. As long as I don’t lose sight of my own perspective, maybe I can call it understanding. Maybe it’s a coping mechanism. After all, If a man can throw a hissy fit and yell and cry about how he likes beer in a Senate confirmation hearing and still be named to the Supreme Court, while a woman with an impeccable record has to defend herself from bizarre accusations that the school whose board she sits on is … anti-racist³? Maybe not noticing every incidence of sexism is just how I keep from spontaneously exploding. 

#Goals

1. There is definitely a Western-themed blog in my future. Stay tuned.

2. Gus Macrae is one of the heroes of Lonesome Dove, played by Robert Duvall in the TV show. There is definitely a dog-eared copy of this great novel somewhere in Sheridan’s office.

3. Yes, apparently now being “anti-racist” is bad. I’m so confused. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, (R-Loonytunes), said Monday that she was concerned that Judge Jackson sat on the board of a school that Ms. Blackburn claimed taught 5-year-olds that they could choose their gender and educated them about what she branded “so-called white privilege.”

“This school has hosted an organization called ‘Woke Kindergarten’ and pushes an antiracist education program for white families,” Ms. Blackburn said, calling it “progressive indoctrination of children” that raised concerns about how Judge Jackson might rule in cases involving parental rights.