Consider Knowles’ A Separate Peace. Separate indeed. It’s set at a boys’ boarding school. The boys are obsessed with jumping out of a tree. This involves considerable risk of crippling injury. And yet they do it, for no other reason than ‘to prove themselves’. Now my question is ‘What are they proving themselves to be – other than complete idiots?’ We don’t get it.

They are also obsessed with going off to war. While this again involves risk of injury, it could, at least, be done for some lofty and heroic reason. But the reasons for the war are not once discussed. So it seems to be just another peer pressured ego thing: ‘My dick’s as big as yours.’ Again, we don’t get it.

Consider also Golding’s Lord of the Flies and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. In all three, a major theme is the loss of innocence – not through the discovery of evil in the world, but through the discovery of evil within. The boys discover their heart of darkness, their capacity for cruelty. Well, we can’t identify with that – after all, we didn’t spend our childhoods tearing the legs off harmless flies and putting fish hooks through live frogs.

We especially can’t identify with the feelings of pride, which lie just beneath the pretensions of horror, that accompany this discovery. For make no mistake, in forests and on farms, and on foreign battlefields, killing is still the rite of passage, the test of maturity, for boys to real men. Hands up, does anyone else see this as sick?

Let’s go back to Lord of the Flies for a minute. Again, all boys. Plane-crashed on an island, their task is simple: co-exist. They must figure out how to live with each other. They can’t do this. Instead, they figure out how to kill each other.

Would girls have done any better? Well, yes, I think they would have. Would they have splintered into rival groups? Probably. Would they have picked on the fat ugly girl? Sigh. Probably. But they would not have killed the pig, especially like that, laughing about its squeals of pain. (Especially not with all that fruit around.) And the little ‘uns would’ve had lots of mommies to look after them. And at the end, they would not have been discovered smeared with blood and war paint. Instead, they probably would have been found on the beach singing and doing the Macarena. (And the really horrible thing is that many men reading this won’t see that as unquestionably better.)

So don’t tell me these novels are universal. They’re not. They’re boy books. By boys about boys. And I’m a girl. Was a girl. I can’t tell you the effect Lord of the Flies had on me. First of all, I had to change sex to even be a part of the world. Read that sentence again. Then I saw myself as seven parts Simon, two parts Ralph, and one part Piggy. And I saw my options: insanity or death. Quite the education.

But even when the theme is universal, we get boy books. Consider Richler’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. Duddy wants to buy some land. As a person, I can identify with that. Unlike much of the previously-mentioned novels, this is not a boy thing. But still, Duddy is a boy. Very much a boy. So there’s not much else I can identify with.

However, also unlike the previously-mentioned novels, this one has a few female characters in it. Actually, so does A Separate Peace: one is Leper’s mother and she is just that – Leper’s mother; the other is Hazel Brewster – the ‘town belle’, a mere object to be observed and perhaps used by the boys. Yvette, in Duddy Kravitz, is seen, by both Richler and Duddy, as either sexual or secretarial. Am I supposed to identify with that?

Consider Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Now I can really identify with saving books, with perpetuating the intellectual heritage of civilization. But the five men Montag meets at the end who are doing just that are just that – five men. So are the thousands of others: “Each man had a book he wanted to remember…” Where am I? What was I supposed to be wanting? (Another television wall – recall Mildred, Montag’s wife.)

I’m so thankful for Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. For Scout. She’s one of the two main kid characters. She’s a girl. A spunky girl. A girl who runs, and thinks, and feels. There I am!

(But, alas, she doesn’t have a mom. She has a father and a brother; if she had a mom, if there were an adult woman like her, like her dad, that would even it up a bit – Scout wouldn’t be the female minority in her world. But that would be too much, I guess. Equal representation is going too far.)

And I’m thankful for Laurence’s The Stone Angel. It’s about a woman. An old woman. A feisty, sarcastic old woman who embraces her inner bitch. I wanna be Hagar when I grow old.

But what do I want to be when I grow up? There’s this huge void between Scout and Hagar. Why? What the hell happens to girls when they turn thirteen? I’m an adolescent, was an adolescent, presumably discovering and creating my identity. If I stay within the boundaries of the familiar, the apparently possible, I – Where are the girl books? Where are the books set at girls’ boarding schools? Where are the books about ‘girls only’ islands?

And what would happen if boys read them – what would happen if adolescent boys experienced Gilman’s Herland and Tepper’s The Gate to Woman’s Country instead of Golding’s Lord of the Flies? (and Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy, and Newman’s A Share of the World and McCarthy’s The Group and…)

Maybe, eventually, instead of boys and girls, we could have kids, and then people; kids, and people, would read kids’ books, and people’s books.

I mean, consider the similarities: both the military world and the sports world are nothing but teams of hyper-emotional men who are fixated on winning at any cost.

Men hyper-emotional? Haven’t you got that backwards? It’s women who are the emotional ones. Yeah right. Anyone who says men aren’t emotional hasn’t seen a game. Or a fight. What do you think motivates the players, the soldiers – the calm, cool voice of reason? Thinking for oneself, should this be possible, is openly discouraged on both the playing field and the killing field; success of the team depends on uncritical obedience.

The very structure of the league/legion is irrational: ‘the enemy’, the guys you are expected to beat, have never done anything to you and there’s little proof they ever will. Hell, the enemy changes at the flick of a hat – excuse me, a dollar: players are traded like the performing commodities they are, today’s good buddy is tomorrow’s target; and lest we forgot, the Gulf War reminded us that any nation’s soldiers are really just mercenaries. (Hell no, we won’t go, we won’t fight for Texaco! Did you notice when announcers started saying Molson Leaf Hockey?) Given such a vacuum of rationality, no wonder the men are in emotional overdrive most of the time.

Oh but I can hear the coaches protesting: ‘We always say winning isn’t everything, it’s how you play the game!’ Well, coach, actions speak louder than words: who gets the applause, who gets the trophy, who gets the money – the loser?

And how do they play the game? Like the real men they’re taunted to be – with all the aggression they’ve got. And if testosterone, and ten years of Ninja Turtles and big-boys-don’t-cry, and another ten years of how-far-d’ya-get isn’t enough, then put back a coupla six packs and pump some steroids to bring out the beast in you.

Oh sure, there are rules – don’t forget fouls and the Geneva Convention. Yeah right. Let’s get serious. The only rule is Don’t-Get-Caught.

So why the surprise when the players do exactly what they’ve been trained to do: hate and hurt (and kill), for no real reason, and not care about it.

I mean, what do you expect at a cockfight?

What I find so extremely odd is that even though well over 90% of all people in the USA and Canada get married, almost none of them read the terms of the contract before they sign. (Most people find out about these terms only when they want to break the contract.) Probably because the contract isn’t presented when their signatures are required.

Although this begs the question ‘Is the contract, therefore, still binding?’, the more interesting question is ‘Why isn’t it presented?’

If women are graceful, then to be graceful is feminine. A graceful man is effeminate. A real man is not graceful. He’s not necessarily clumsy, he’s just not-graceful.

If women like flowers, then men do not.

If women like pink and orange and mauve, then men do not.

And when women change their abilities, their desires, the men also change. For example, as soon as women became banktellers, suddenly men (real men) did not become banktellers. As soon as women were typists, men were not-typists. Et cetera.

I pity a whole sex that is so dependent. Living in a rut of reaction, they are simply incapable of such a proactive move as defining themselves for themselves. They didn’t even know they didn’t like quiche until we said we liked it.

Frankly, I fear for their future. At the rate women are doing, well, doing whatever they please, men will soon be, well, not.

This linguistic reform became called, I suggest, ‘political correctness’ – perhaps by people (men?) who couldn’t say (let alone be considered) ‘sensitive’.

From there, ‘politically correct’ became ‘expedient’, and the terms were used not out of sensitivity to those being identified but out of sensitivity to those doing the identifying: ‘which term will make me seem most like what people want, so that I’ll get what I’m after?’ People unaccustomed to treating others as ends in themselves (as people with interests that could be violated by an insensitive insult), but familiar with treating them as means to an end (as people who could serve one’s own interests if one simply pushed the right buttons, used the right words), turned linguistic reform into a matter of linguistic usefulness.

If we’d just stayed with ‘sensitive’, perhaps we could’ve kept the sensitivity. Then again, if enough people pretended to be sensitive just because it was expedient, the term ‘sensitive’ would’ve become stained – better that ‘politically correct’ got stained.

But hey, what’s in a word? Well, a lot. Our language determines, indeed limits, our thought as much as it reflects it. There are lots of things we don’t have words for. Read Douglas Adams’ and John Lloyd’s The Meaning of Liff and The Deeper Meaning of Liff for examples. One of my favourites is ‘abilene’, an adjective to describe ‘the pleasing coolness on the reverse side of the pillow’. And the thing is, if we don’t have a word for it, we can’t easily talk about it. We don’t have a word for the woman’s active role in sexual intercourse – no surprise then that we usually talk about her role as passive. And if we can’t easily talk about it, we don’t often think about it – could well be why so many women are passive in sex: we still think, most often think, that women are fucked, penetrated, taken (not that men aren’t engulfed, enclosed, taken in).

Sometimes linguistic reform alone can bring about an attitudinal change: changing our habits sometimes changes our selves. Calling myself non-Black rather than Caucasian has made me think less of white as the norm.

But sometimes changing a word is just superficial and not the result, or even accompaniment, of attitudinal change – nothing really changes. And we’ve seen that with the politically correct replacement terms: ‘physically challenged’ and ‘mentally challenged’ have themselves now picked up negative connotations, have become insults; so yet another new pair of terms must be found. But unless the attitude changes too, unless there are truly no negative connotations to be picked up, what’s in a new word? (Nigger, Negro, Black, person of colour – )

But ‘politically correct’ doesn’t refer only to words; it also refers to attitudes and actions. It’s politically correct to have a person of colour on your Board of Directors, for example. What does that mean? That it’s expedient to do so, because then you’ll look like a non-racist organization. Who really buys that? Soon after ‘politically correct’ entered common discourse, the term ‘token’ also showed up. And no wonder. The hypocrisy was pretty obvious. Repackaging something that’s sour doesn’t make it sweet. Which is why ‘politically correct’ now means not ‘sensitive’, nor even ‘expedient’, but ‘hypocrite’.

Ironic, isn’t it? The very thing that’s happened to politically correct terms has happened to the term ‘politically correct’ itself: it’s become tarnished, with negative connotations. But unlike terms like ‘physically challenged’ and ‘mentally challenged’, rightly so.

But, my friend says, her son, and all of his friends, will make a gun out of any old thing. The problem isn’t the toys.

Okay, so it’s the boys. Seems they’re hardwired with a propensity toward killing. Why is this not a problem? A stand-up-and-scream problem. Not a sweep-it-under-the-carpet boys-will-be-boys problem.

Why does it not bother parents that their son considers pretending to kill to be fun (that is, that he derives psychological pleasure from pretending to kill)?

Why does it not bother them that their son considers killing a game (that is, an appropriate activity for make-believe)?

Anticipating ‘It’s just the noise and the chasing that’s fun, he doesn’t associate the action with killing’ – is that supposed to make it better? That he pulls a trigger on a gun and doesn’t associate the action with killing? Maybe you should take him to an ER and let him see what a bullet does to a body. He might think twi – he might think then before so casually making that pulling-a-trigger motion.

I wonder whether parents would be as blasé if he as repeatedly put his arm around someone’s throat and swiped a piece of stiff cardboard across it? Is it just that people have become desensitized to the shooting-a-gun action?

Further, I am puzzled by the ‘doesn’t bother me’ response not only because of the psychological and philosophical implications, but also because of the practical ones: first, once he’s fourteen or sixteen, the action becomes illegal (at least in the States). (Then again, it might be illegal at all ages and maybe it’s just when a kid points a fake gun, no one presses charges.) (Because boys will be boys?) (So the men who do so are also boys?)

And, second, such an action may well get him killed. ‘Cuz I have to tell ya, since real kids have access to real guns these days, if I were walking down a city street and a kid jumped out at me pointing a gun, I’d shoot first and ask questions later. If I had a gun.

Which I don’t. So instead I’d just break out into a cold sweat and try to raise my arms. And then when the kid laughed and lowered his arm, telling me it’s just a toy, I’d haul him off to his parents and give all three of you a huge piece of mind. What right do you have to let your kid terrorize me like that? What the hell is wrong with you??

It’s an interesting idea, but as a reincarnation of the autobiographical school of writing – according to which one must have actually experienced what one is writing about – it is also a poor idea.

Taken to its logical extreme, any poem about a child must have been written by a child. Well no, one could say, you were at one time a child, so that’s okay. Hm. So memory is okay but imagination is not? I suggest that often the one is as accurate as the other.

But perhaps accuracy is not the point. Perhaps it’s a matter of “I can speak for myself, thank you” – a reaction against previous patronizing attitudes to the contrary. And if that’s the case, if you can speak for yourself, then by all means do so. But that shouldn’t stop me from also doing so if I want to. And if the editor or publisher selects only and always my speaking, then take that up with the editor or publisher, not the writer. Let’s be inclusive rather than reactionarily exclusive.

Further, there is a difference between speaking for and speaking about. Speaking for does entail the suggestion of advocacy – patronizing if unrequested, and possibly unnecessary. Speaking about entails no such suggestion. And actually, there’s a third option, the one that I thought I was doing – speaking with.

Think, for a moment, of all the literature that would not exist if writers had to restrict themselves to what they have personally experienced. Entire genres would disappear: science fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, probably most adventure and mystery too. Oh, and romance.

Also, to be consistent, this perspective should extend to non-fiction writing as well. So there goes most of the news – most stories are not first-hand accounts. But at least, you’ll say, the third person accounts remain third person – there is no saying ‘I’ when you really mean ‘he/she’. True. And this is one important difference between fiction and non-fiction – the leap of the imagination, the projection of oneself into the other.

But let’s not pretend for even one second that news reports are bereft of this very same imagination. If they were, they’d have to be written in a purely phenomenological fashion, bereft of all ascriptions of emotion, for starters. To say ‘the demonstrators were angry’ instead of ‘the demonstrators were shouting’ is as much a leap of imagination – unless the reporter spoke to the demonstrators (all of them) and they said they were angry. (Even then, strict accuracy requires you to report ‘they said they were angry’ rather than ‘they were angry’.) To merely assume anger on the basis of their behaviour is to project, to imagine, to fictionalize. Chances are, you’re quite correct, they were angry. If you know about human behaviour and if you know about the context, you can probably come up with a very accurate story without actually experiencing it yourself. The same goes for the fiction writer. (But then again, I suspect accuracy is not the issue.)

The ‘no appropriation’ perspective doesn’t seem to recognize that there are people whose awareness doesn’t go very deep. They live in and for the moment, they are not reflective, they are not analytic. Or they may be all that but not very articulate. And there are others whose research is thorough, whose imagination is rich, and who are articulate to boot. Which is why Brian Moore can write a better novel about a woman with PMS than a woman who has it but doesn’t even know it. And which is why I can write a better poem about being Black or Native than some Blacks or Natives can. In short, one’s imagination can exceed another’s awareness.

But it’s not really ‘just’ imagination, it’s informed imagination – it’s empathy. So not only does the ‘no appropriation’ perspective discourage imagination, it discourages empathy. But surely to limit ourselves to ourselves is sad. Oh, and dangerous.

Why is it that women are told, are expected, to smile a lot? (Or at least a lot more than men?)

Could it be that there are (still) some men who believe women are their responsibility, theirs to look after, care for, and protect (these are the men who call us ‘dear’) – and so for them, an unsmiling woman is a reproach, an indication of the man’s failure? ‘Smile!’ means ‘Tell me I’m a success!’

Could it be that women are (still) perceived to be the species’ emotional barometers? Men are not allowed to be emotionally expressive (forget for a moment every hockey game and every soccer game you’ve ever seen men watch – I never said our society was logically consistent); a smiling man, especially, is effeminate. So when men feel happy, the women have to smile.

Could it be that women are (still) perceived as having the responsibility for the emotional health of the relationship, the family, and well, the world. And men want to think (not necessarily to know – different things) that all is well. They want us to smile.
Well, for someone to smile that much, they’d have to be in denial about cancer rates, ethnic cleansing, teenage violence, political corruption, big business subsidies, population growth rates, the nuclear industry, and well, the world. They’d have to be pretty sick, psychologically, to be able to smile with all that.

Or they’d have to be hypocrites.

Or they’d have to just not know about all that – they’d have to be pretty ignorant. Or children.

Ah, maybe that’s it. Men, when they tell us, expect us, to smile all the time, are telling us, expecting us, to be childish.

Next time a man tells me to smile, I’m going to tell him to fuck off.

Consider this situation. A subordinate (say, an assistant) prepares and distributes advertisements for a position; she interviews various applicants, selects one and notifies him of his success, then trains the new person, and periodically checks his work performance. One might think the subordinate’s job description would include “recruit, hire, train, and supervise”.

One would be wrong. Subordinates can’t hire. Only superordinates (supervisors) can hire. Subordinates can’t supervise. Only superordinates can supervise. Say what? But the subordinate did hire and supervise, so obviously she can hire and supervise. Nope.

And apparently this set-up is common: the subordinate actually does X, but the superordinate is responsible for X. If there’s a problem, he’s the one who’ll be held accountable.

First, there’s a substantial incoherence here. If indeed the subordinate is not responsible, why is she reprimanded and sometimes even fired for making a mistake or doing a poor job? The notion of penalty implies the notion of responsibility. Why blame A for X if A isn’t responsible? Shouldn’t we blame whoever’s responsible? Shouldn’t the superordinate, then, be fired if the subordinate messes up? (Yeah right. That’ll happen. When pigs fly.)

Second, this conception of responsibility infantilizes the subordinate. A sign of maturity is that one takes responsibility for one’s actions. Only with children (and the mentally incompetent) is another held responsible. Denying the subordinate that responsibility is, then, insisting on juvenile (or incompetent) status.

Third, it puts a great deal of strain on the superordinate. It is very stressful to be responsible for someone else’s behaviour. One has the responsibility, but not the control. No wonder they develop ulcers.

And no wonder they develop into control freaks – a fourth problem. If one is responsible for something, one is surely going to try to have some control over that something. And so superordinates try to control their subordinates: they give orders, they criticize, they reprimand, etc. The greater the subordinate’s autonomy (insistence on maturity), the more antagonistic the relationship will become.

Fifth, there’s an ethical problem. It’s simply not fair to hold people responsible for something over which they have no control. This moral principle is even threaded throughout our legal system.

This conception of responsibility is unfair in another way as well, and this is a sixth problem. Usually, one of the relevant aspects of a job description that determines the salary for that position is degree of responsibility. So the subordinate does X, and is awarded, say, 10 points on the salary scale. But the superordinate is responsible for X, and is awarded 100 points. Not fair.

This logical sleight-of-hand makes the superordinate’s job look so much more demanding – after all, they’re responsible for so very much: if they supervise ten people, they’re responsible for ten whole jobs! No wonder they should get paid ten times as much! But, of course, there’s something wrong here – the meaning of the term ‘responsible’ gets changed half way through: in the first case, ‘responsible for it’ means ‘doing it’, but in the second case, ‘responsible for it’ means ‘seeing that it gets done’.

Let me suggest that supervisory responsibility was instituted as a checks-and-balance sort of thing, as a quality control mechanism. And this is a good thing. But having someone be responsible for making sure another person does his/her job is quite different than having that someone be responsible for the other person’s job.

And the first kind of responsibility need not have a great deal more status and salary attached to it. In fact, it need not have any more status and salary attached to it. A doing X, B doing Y, C doing Z, and D double-checking A, B, and C doing X, Y, and Z – why shouldn’t all four people be considered equal in terms of status and salary? In fact, one could argue that A, B, and C should have more status and salary than D. It usually takes more skill and effort to do X, Y, and Z, to a standard than to see whether they got done to that standard. And if B messes up, why can’t B be held responsible for not doing Y, and D held responsible for not checking B’s work (which is different from D being held responsible for not doing Y)? And why can’t B have control over how to do Y, and D have control over how to check B doing Y (which is different from D having control over B)? There would be a need for B’s work to be accessible to D, but accessible is not the same as controllable. This way, both responsibility and control are kept in their proper spheres. And both B and D are treated like adults. And neither is put on a fast track to an ulcer.

So why does the corporate world maintain the problematic view of responsibility? Well, it sure keeps the hierarchy cemented in place. The very terms ‘subordinate’ and ‘superordinate’ mean ‘inferior’ and ‘superior’ (in fact, one often hears references to ‘one’s superiors’ rather than, as is more accurate, ‘one’s organizational superiors’). So my guess is that the desire to control is not necessarily linked to responsibility; more often, it’s linked to ego.

And Steven Goldberg got it right in Why Men Rule when he explained that men are genetically predisposed to hierarchy (fetal masculinization of the central nervous system renders males more sensitive to the dominance-related properties of testosterone) – but he presented that as an explanation for why men rule and not also for why men kill.

And Arthur Koestler got it right in The Call Girls when, recognizing that the survival of the human species is unlikely, a select group of geniuses meet at a special ‘Approaches to Survival’ symposium (and fail to agree on a survival plan) – but I’m not sure he realized (oh of course he did) that one of his character’s early reference to a previous symposium on ‘Hierarchic Order in Primate Societies’ was foreshadowing.

The reason the human species will not survive is simple: the males can’t help playing King of the Castle – all the time, everywhere, with everyone.  Talk about aggression and violence, greed, or competition is all very good, but these things are secondary: aggression and violence are means to the end of becoming King of the Castle; it’s not really that men are greedy, they just want more than the next guy, they want to be better, higher than the next guy, then the next, and the next, until they get to the top; and competition, well, competition is just another word for trying to become King of the Castle.

And once they become King of the Castle, they see, from up there, that there’s another castle to become King of.  Once they’ve got the one-bedroom apartment, they go for the two-bedroom.  Then the duplex, then the single-family dwelling.  Once they get a house, they need a cottage too.  And once they get the cottage, then they need a summer home.  Then a yacht.  They can’t stop adding and upgrading.  Whether it’s homes or cars, stereo systems or computers – nothing is ever (good) enough.  Nothing satisfies.  Sold one million?  Let’s aim for two million.  This year’s profit is X?  Let’s set a target of double X for next year.  Consider the business graph of success – more, more, more…  They cannot ‘say when’.  Contentment forever eludes them. The only joy in their lives is that associated with achievement, with getting a toehold a little higher on the hill, winning an extra inch.  They can’t play without keeping score.  They can’t go canoeing without a destination and an arrival time.  They cannot concede, surrender, or lose without shame.

It’s not about the pursuit of excellence, don’t let them kid you: there’s no standard of intrinsic quality involved; comparison is all.  And it’s not about self-improvement: being King of the Castle seldom improves the self.

The end result to this deadly game they play will be the same, whether it’s achieved by genocidal war, environmental destruction, or the global marketplace: loss of diversity.  It’s the kiss of death for any, for every, species.  (Unless, of course, some Nero goes nuclear first.)