Wax Banks

French parents are superior? But then what exactly do French parents produce?

2012-02-04T22:23:05-05:00

My wonderful wife forwarded me this WSJ excerpt from Pamela Druckerman's forthcoming anti-Chua text, Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting. The broad argument: French parents are more comfortable setting boundaries for their children, so everything is better there.

Except, of course, it's not. From the article:

Rest assured, I certainly don't suffer from a pro-France bias. Au contraire, I'm not even sure that I like living here. I certainly don't want my kids growing up to become sniffy Parisians.

There are a lot of things wrong with Druckerman's article: the bourgeois myopia, the cheesy stereotyping of American parents, the pathetic cod-Gladwellian namechecking (she brings on Walter Mischel, inventor of the 'marshmallow test,' to assert that he's never studied French children but his 'impression' is the same as hers(!!)), and especially Druckerman's dead stupid one-sentence dismissal of the deeply entrenched differences in governmental support of childrearing families between France and the U.S.

She even talks (elsewhere in the book) about how awesome it is that French women put on less weight when pregnant than American women do. Of all the tired-ass clichés...

But the deepest problem with the piece is in the paragraph I quoted -- or rather, the question it raises and doesn't even try to answer: if Druckerman doesn't want to raise French kids who turn someday into Frenchmen, why does she have such a hard-on for French parenting? Where does she think Frenchmen come from, exactly?

Turns out the answer is hidden at the end of the piece, and it's got precious little to do with her children:

After about 10 minutes, Leo stopped trying to leave altogether. He seemed to forget about the gate and just played in the sandbox with the other kids. Soon Frédérique and I were chatting, with our legs stretched out in front of us. I was shocked that Leo suddenly viewed me as an authority figure.

What Druckerman wants, of course, is just this: to be seen differently; to sit around chatting her legs stretched out in front of her. To not be 'just' a mom. The real Pamela Druckerman is the woman having a chat at the playground, after all.

What she envies is that French parents -- the ones she sits around chatting with at playgrounds, anyhow -- feel no guilt about putting themselves first.

How do you say 'Fuck off, Seymour, mommy needs her merlot now' in French, I wonder?

One key difference between God and King Lear...

2012-02-03T15:50:28-05:00

...is that outside of the imaginative world of King Lear -- outside of the contract with Shakespeare and his performers which guides our experience of the play and the events it depicts -- no one actually thinks King Lear is a factual account of being in the world. It feels that way for a while, but as spectators at a drama we maintain a dual awareness that the events are both real-to-us and factually-incorrect, strictly speaking; the status of Jewish/Christian Scripture is such that readers/listeners accord it radically different ontological status.

That said, the Biblical God is a lot like a 'literary character,' and it's good to appreciate the ways believers relate to him both literarily and historically, all at once, complexly, with their full humanity intact. It's OK to think wrong things. It's good to feel deeply, even about nonsense.

But still: 'this kind of thing happens, it feels this way' is one good thing. 'This happened exactly this way so join our church' is straight bullshit.

Why don't geeks seem happy during/after arguments?

2012-01-30T21:35:34-05:00

Here's part of a theory I'm working up. It is incomplete, provisional, and probably totally screwy somehow. THAT SAID:

'Geek culture' is built to facilitate social interaction between folks who have (certain) problems with emotional understanding and communication. Structured socializing (RPGs, cons, (video) game culture) is big here.

You'll note that geeks famously argue angrily 'til they're blue in the face about the pettiest pop-culture bullshit on earth -- which edition of D&D or Star Trek is the best, did Han shoot first, what exactly is Joyce's 'word known to all men,' is Tony Soprano dead, who's the metalest metal band of all, do Harry and Snape belong together forever, etc. One possible explanation for this annoying phenomenon is that geeks line up this way (w/r/t such irrelevant questions) so they can have the experience of being on a team without the trauma of being picked (last). In other words: affinity groups consisting solely of sharing an opinion.

That's part of why you hear so much affectless bickering in your local nerd store (or online forum): the point isn't to win, the point is to assert membership in a group when other forms of assertion are inaccessible.

NOW OK, BUT LOOK: 'neurotypical' folks do the same thing, right? NOT QUITE. The key difference is that people in/of the social mainstream are able to maintain memberships in social groups whose binding material is vulnerability, empathy, and/or public affection. (Let's leave the weird formalism of organized polyamory alone for the time being.)

People who for some reason have been impeded in their attempts to join groups who actually share and risk things -- by internal or external forces/circumstances -- will associate themselves compensatorily along 'ideological' lines.

Hence: Team Edward. (14-year-olds are socially-maladapted by definition, because our society can't handle puberty.) Hence: down-the-ticket voters. Hence: soccer hooligans.

If someone's in an affinity group whose main characteristic seems to be that the members are constantly at each other's throats (rather than that largely-irrelevant official business draws people together to agree broadly, and then to share experiences/feelings, e.g. the MLA or the NRA) then something is being compensated for, and some social fact is being avoided (or going unrecognized).

(I count myself among the uglies, here, and I have juuuuuust enough wit to hate it, but no more.)

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, radio series (LP reissue), by Douglas Adams et al.: a quick review and a general point.

2012-01-29T22:53:09-05:00

I first read the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books in elementary school, on my friend Scott’s recommendation. I think he’d heard about the books from his older brother Sean; over the few years of our friendship I got a lot of my cultural learnin’ from Scott/Sean. (Good stuff too: Depeche Mode, Zork, Talisman, the Avalon Hill Civilization, Paul Simon’s Graceland, early Chili Peppers…)

Over the years I reread the first three volumes of the increasingly inaccurately named Guide trilogy many, many times. (I read So Long and Thanks for All the Fish only twice, and Mostly Harmless just once, though I imagine I’d think more of its daddy-anxiety material now.) I also listened many, many, many, manymanymany times to a cassette of the Restaurant radio series – or rather, its LP rerelease, which abbreviates the radio show’s second storyline into an hourlong, headlong Magrathea > Milliway’s > sunship > B-Ark story of unusual-for-Adams structural cleanliness and utterly-typical-for-Adams comic density. The LP rerelease is actually a brand-new performance by the cast, from a revised version of the original radio scripts.

The performance is better by far than the original, with much stronger production, and I heartily recommend it to any DNA fan. For aforementioned personal reasons I’ll always consider it the definitive Restaurant recording, though like any right-thinking person I dearly love Zaphod’s trip to the Frogstar and Marvin’s duel to the death with the battle tank at Guide HQ, and have read those sections of the Restaurant novel more times than I can count.

God I love these stories. ~~God~~ Gosh I miss Douglas Adams.

* * *

Anyhow I just want to make a quick point about the Hitchhiker’s Guide stories: the remarkable business of Adams’s fictional universe – its crowded urban vibe, the way Adams piles up incidental details through Guide entries and interpolated vignettes, always with a dead eye for his ongoing satirical project – invariably gives way, at peak narrative moments, to a powerful sparseness which not only serves his original narrative form (linked comic sketches for a handful of actors) but reflects Adams’s deeper concerns, which would find clearest expression in Last Chance to See.

Think of the moments of unexpected (but always totally earned) emotional seriousness and weight in the Guide trilogy: the songs of Krikkit, Ford’s look at the bartender near Arthur’s house, Marvin’s death, the factory floor on Magrathea, Ford and Arthur and the Scrabble pieces, Arthur and Fenchurch on the airplane’s wing, Arthur and Thor, Marvin’s hilariously sad monologue in the Milliway’s carpark (‘After that I went into a bit of a decline…’ is perfect), Zaphod on the Frogstar(!), and – of course – Zaphod, Trillian, and Zarniwoop visiting the man with the cat.

Almost without exception, they’re moments of stillness and isolation amidst a great deal of very effective background bustle. At these peak moments, the characters are afforded a sense of their own smallness, which less crushing than freeing – these are moments of taking responsibility. (The Total Perspective Vortex is a literalization of this two-sided revelation, though with Zaphod around you have to play for laffs, of course.) Indeed, one of the lovelier narrative arcs in the trilogy is Arthur’s slow journey from unhappy connectedness to melancholy contentment – learning to accept the immensity of the universe and his own essential aloneness in it. (By the end he’s done with all the other characters, isn’t he? Except Random, I suppose.)

The end of the Restaurant radio show has Ford and Arthur accepting, with characteristic good humour, the futility of trying to help prehistoric Earth’s cavemen: they’ve lost the evolutionary race, and humanity will evolve thereafter from the useless bloody loonies on the Golgafrincham B Ark, the telephone sanitizers and management executives and hairdressers and documentary filmmakers and insurance salesmen. The moderns. In one of the radio show’s deft little running gags, Ford relates a wild story (billiards this time); Arthur asks where he heard it, and Ford says it’s from the Guide. Arthur is totally underwhelmed. ‘Oh, that thing,’ I think he says. Nothing special. Just a travel book, after all, and the real human race is slowly, sadly wiped out all around them.

And Louis Armstrong sings ‘What a Wonderful World.’

Gets me every time. A moment of perfect love for all living things, turned sideways a bit, with a ‘comic’ story of planetary genocide nested within another ‘comic’ story of planetary genocide (and ecocide, per the colonists’ mad tree-burning deflationary fiscal policy), sung with a sigh rather than a belly laugh. Ultimately the Guide isn’t about hijinks in a crowded galaxy that’s a merciless riff on the awfulness of modern ‘civilized’ life – or not just that, anyway. Not really. Deep down it’s about escaping, not even into space, but into the feeling that space affords. The matter is distance, and smallness.

Our yellow sun is close enough, important enough, to beat down on us, to beam, to burn. A ball of angry light with no mystery to it. Other stars must be content to hide during the day and be (barely) visible only at night – and to us they seem like tiny pinpoints, formless. Kind of pathetic, really.

But they twinkle.

What a wonderful world.

Miss you Adams.

A moment for Sasha Laxton.

2012-01-28T14:52:46-05:00

'Gender-neutral' parenting -- i.e. a posture and policy of nonintervention in a child's experiments with social roles -- is a reasonable practice, or set of practices; at the minimum it can serve as a counterweight to the pathological limitations on sex roles found in (American) adult society. I have no great problem with gender roles as such; insofar as they're social/cultural conventions which amplify sex-linked traits and behaviours, I feel I should act neutrally toward them too. And defend against any intrusion on what I see as best practices, of course -- even if I surrender in the end.

I have a replica WWII GI's map case in olive canvas with a stiff cardboard back; it's the most convenient shoulder bag I've ever had. I refer to it as my purse, and get the occasional strange look for doing so. But it's a pretty butch bag all the same. I take this as a very very very small example of acknowledging the usual boundaries, tweaking them a bit, and going about my business such that my own convenience and comfort are kept high, even if productivity remains at a minimum. I also acknowledge that I get a giggle out of calling it a purse -- but I also explain, more often than is necessary, the super-masculine origins of the bag. Perhaps this is overcompensation in two opposing directions: an unstable equilibrium. Well, I'm not perfect. You?

Sasha Laxton is a five-year-old male. His parents claim to have kept his sex secret for five years. Now he's entered school, and they've publicly revealed that 'he's a boy.'

Here's a picture. Here's a TIME story about some backlash. Here's a quote from Sasha's mother:

“Stereotypes seem fundamentally stupid. Why would you want to slot people into boxes?” Laxton told her local news outlet, Cambridge News. “It affects what they wear and what they can play with, and that shapes the kind of person that they become.”

I'm sure Laxton has done a lot of thinking about the nature of her/their experiment. I don't wish to engage in amateur psychology. And I do understand the progressive passion for replacement gender norms which are more just, or perhaps just differently unjust, than the ones we've got going today. So I want to point out two small things:

This is not 'gender-free' or indeed 'gender-neutral' parenting. It is indeed explicitly interventionist in a ploddingly conventional way:
Sasha dresses in clothes he likes -- be it a hand-me-downs from his sister or his brother. The big no-no's are hyper-masculine outfits like skull-print shirts and cargo pants. In one photo, sent to friends and family, Sasha's dressed in a shiny pink girl's swimsuit. "Children like sparkly things," says Beck. "And if someone thought Sasha was a girl because he was wearing a pink swimming costume, then what effect would that have?"

Good idea, bad idea, doesn't matter: whatever her experiment was meant to accomplish in the beginning, she's cocked it up. Sasha knows what 'hyper-masculine' clothes are -- 'skull-print shirts and cargo pants.' Which of course 'affects what [he wears] and what [he] can play with, and that shapes the kind of person that [he becomes.' His parents -- by all press accounts his mom -- gave him a totally run-of-the-mill gender stereotype as a reference point and said YOU MAY NOT BE THAT. Good choice, bad choice, doesn't matter: now the kid thinks 'avoiding stereotypes' means not wearing traditional boys' clothing.

The hypocrisy is important. The kid won't be five forever, and someday he'll learn about stereotypes and gender roles and the nature of sexual difference from someone other than his mom and dad. He'll still carry big lessons about the joy of not worrying whether you're doing what everyone else is -- but he'll also carry a lesson, bigger than it may seem at first, about choosing the right stereotypes to please the grownups who made him think he could choose freely...

Look here:

So is she hoping that dressing Sasha in pink will change anything? “Yes. If it just made one person think: ‘No, I won’t put that frilly dress on her because it’s a bit silly’ or: ‘Yeah, if he really likes that doll, then that’s OK,’ then that would be really brilliant.
“All I want to do is make people think a bit.”

And will she mind if Sasha grows up to be a butch rugby player or, indeed, a hairdresser?

“I just want him to fulfil his potential, and I wouldn’t push him in any direction,” says Beck.

“As long as he has good relationships and good friends, then nothing else matters, does it? What’s more important than being happy, and making other people happy? It’s all that matters.” [my emphasis --wa]

Whatever sentiments Beck is trying to express, these quotes make me...uneasy, to say the very least. I hope you see why: the emphasis on (other) people 'think[ing] a bit,' the weird equation of not pushing a child with 'fulfilling his potential,' the silly idea that frilly dresses are themselves inherently silly -- like cargo pants and skull shirts, presumably, only Sasha seems to be encouraged to wear the dresses and forbidden from wearing the other stuff. (I'll note too that the not-so-faintly condescending tone of the interview just pisses me off.)

The interview isn't about Sasha, it's about Beck Laxton -- just as the furor over Amy Chua's frankly abusive parenting style (like her contemptibly self-serving bestselling account of it) was all about Amy Chua. Fine, fine, that's the media for you.

But consider: if Beck Laxton had taken any other approach to gender norms, and been this self-righteous about it, and given such incoherent justification to the press, and picked such weirdly specific issues to take a stand about ('ruched sleeves and scalloped collar?' seriously?), but not in the name of 'gender stereotypes' -- how would you receive the article? Would her politics be more interesting and important than, say, her hypocrisy?

That said: why is the media covering the story? Whose side are the news media always on?

Lost some steam here, sorry.

Seeing without seeing.

2012-01-28T14:50:49-05:00

Fixating: not fixing one's attention, but rather fixing the object of our attention, making it a center for our perception and conception, unmoving. Dead. We can no longer relate to it dynamically. To fixate on a person is to turn him or her into an abstract category or cluster of qualities: make another into an Other.

'Take a step back' is one of the most important pieces of advice one human can give to another; it's nearly impossible to follow when it matters most. If you're not fixating on a person as a feature of your private narrative, you're responding to a being-in-full. You're living for real, in other words. Wouldn't that be nice?