Monday, June 29, 2009

Trois Sourires (Three Smiles)

You know what I'm sick of? I'm sick of listening to people complain. Since I'm visiting Paris just now, I'm particularly sick of listening to people complain about Paris: waah, it's crowded; waah the bathroom's dirty; it's hot; the line is too long, waah waah waah. But it's not just Paris I'm sick of hearing about; it's everything.

The worst part of it is, the person I'm most sick of listening to is ME. Complain complain complain.

So in the interest of shutting up about everything I don't like in the world just now, I thought I'd write about three things I saw in Paris today that made me smile.

First: the Solferino metro sign.

I have a soft spot for all the metro signs in Paris: they're big and blue with nice bold white letters. But the ones I love best are the old ones. They're ceramic tile, and the letters are really big and really blocky. When I see these signs, instead of a soft voice saying "You're now at the Solferino station," I hear a voice like James Earl Jones's booming out, "SOLFERINO." Isn't this sign just so pretty?

Second: some weird art.

I love the Pompidou museum, and I often go to the cafe there. The Pompidou isn't just an art collection; it's a whole complex commitment to public space. There's a huge open area in front outside that anyone can use -- and there are performers and homeless people and little kids and everybody all hanging out there. There's free wireless access for anyone. There's a spacious and low-key cafe. There's even a place to buy stamps and mail letters. It's like a tiny tiny town all in itself.

Anyway, I went today and there was this crazy funny work of art that is a giant gold plant holder. I don't know why I like this so much but I do.

Third: plastic ants in a window display.

This is the window display of a little pharmacy near my house. I don't know what the point of the ants is exactly, except maybe it's to say, Hey Guys!! It's Summertime!

Monday, June 22, 2009

The Examined Life: Not So Great Either

There was cute post on one of the Times blogs last week in which a guy -- a food writer -- reflects on marathon running. And there's a great moment in his recounting of past marathons where he describes getting to the middle of some race, and thinking to himself, "Why am I doing this?" As he says, it's a question you should never ask yourself while running a marathon. After he thinks of it, he simply gives up, quits the race, and goes to the park.

This story really resonated with me, because that's a feeling I have a lot. I always think it would be cool to be really into some sports team, or have an interesting hobby, or get all into crafts. I'd love to know all about current opera singers, or exotic mushrooms; I'd love to be able to whip up some really great pasta sauce, or grow fresh vegetables in a garden, or ride a horse. But the truth is, about one minute into most of those activities, I'm already thinking, "Why am I doing this?" And that's it, game over.

I'm sure you've heard that idea, attributed to Socrates, that the unexamined life is not worth living. I suppose there's a sense in which, as a person who both philosophizes and teaches other people to do so, I'm professionally committed to a certain amount of faith in this idea.

But the truth is I regard philosophical reflection with a certain amount of ambivalence and wariness. While of course it would be stupid to live without ever thinking about how you live, it's also undeniable, as the marathon story suggests, sometimes the Why question isn't the question to ask.

Some of the great things in life are just impossible to engage in without a heavy dose of real unthinkingness. Would you ever make a lego illustrated story of the bible, or learn Esperanto, or make a super gigantic astronomical complex, if you were closely focused on the question of "Why am I doing this?" I know I wouldn't.

Eventually the marathon guy's daughter says she wants to run a marathon, too, and when he asks her, "Why a marathon?" she says, "It seems like the right thing to do now," which he says is "as good an answer as any."

I envy her this answer, just as I envy most people who have manias for things like marathon running, or amateur astronomy, or whatever. But instead of nursing a grudge, I'm going to take a page from this woman's playbook. Now I've got the words, if not the music, and I'm going to practice. Next time I find myself thinking, "Why am I doing this?" I'm going to tell myself, "It seems like the right thing to do now. . . So stop bothering me with all these pointless questions, and let me get back to my Puttanesca sauce!

Monday, June 15, 2009

Objectification: It's Quantity Not Just Quality

So as it happens I am in Paris, visiting. Two things always strike me immediately on arriving here. One, everyone is better dressed than I am. Two, I encounter far fewer images of women that are 1) scantily-clad and 2) being used to sell me something.

This second thing tends to take me by surprise. You tend to think, well, Paris, a city of romance and fashion, in a country of topless sunbathing; there must be a lot of images of women around, right? But there aren't really. There are some, for sure, but there are also images of men and children, and of buildings, and of landscapes, and so on and so forth. The main thing is that there aren't that many images around with women in them, and in the ones there are, the women are usually beautifully dressed, engaged, intelligent-looking, or at least presented in a dramatic and interesting way.

My main response to this is Ah, how relaxing! Indeed, I tend not to notice how stressful and anxiety-producing it is to be constantly bombarded with images of women's bodies to sell diet products, images of women's bodies to sell cars, images of women's bodies to sell consumer electronics, and images of women's bodies to sell a whole kind of cultural narrative of women-as-decorator-items, but only-if-they-look-just-right.

The usual line on this sort of thing is that what's wrong with using images of women's bodies to sell things is that the women in question are objectified, and that this is inherently wrong.

But as it stands, I don't think this line of thought can be quite right. Because people use other people -- and their bodies -- for all sorts of things all the time in ways that are just fine. We have sex with people; we watch them play sports; we pay them to cook for us; we enjoy looking at the curve of a stranger's neck or a rippling set of abdominal muscles. When we do these things respectfully and kindly, none of them seems to me bad in itself.

Furthermore, it doesn't seem that the more objectifying the worse it is, necessarily. If an artist creates a sculpture of a headless woman from a model, and puts it in a gallery, this strikes me as a much better form of objectification than when a Maxim editor pastes a photo of some girl who looks 16 next to a caption about how she's an aspiring model and speaks several languages. This despite the fact that in absolute terms, the sculpture shows an objectified woman in a more extreme, literal sense.

But I think the usual line of thought is almost right. What's missing are two ideas. First, being treated as an object is always bad when it's something you can't opt out of, when you're treated just as an object whether you like it or not. Second, one way conditions arise under which a woman can't help but be treated as an object is when women, in general, are just generally treated as objects, all the time.

Now this second item rests essentially on quantity, not quality. That is, it's not the details of some particular act of objectification that make it bad; it's whether there are so many acts of objectification of that type around that they create the effect that women are, in a sense, objects -- objects we may use to sell things.

Basically, the idea is that when women are frequently and relentlessly objectified, this creates a tendency for people to regard them as objects whether they like it or not; since they can't opt out they can't be treated as fully human with full agency. But when particular people are occasionally objectified in particular and uncommon ways, no such danger arises.

If I am right this explains why the Maxim pictorial seems worse than the sculpture, even though the Maxim story "humanizes" the woman depicted and the sculpture does not: objectifications like those in "lad magazines" are relentless, and present a kind of objectification that is very pervasive already.

If I am right this also explains why the same sort of objectification -- in, say, pornography -- is more of a problem when it depicts women than when it depicts men. Because women really are in far greater danger, in our society, of being regarded as less than fully human.

Of course, if I am right this also explains why I find Paris so relaxing in this regard. Sure, women may be objectified on the catwalks of the great fashion houses, when it is their bodies we want to use and look at. But there it's not too relentless, or too pervasive about it, and therefore, in itself, it feeds less pernicious effects than the ubiquitous girls-in-ads of North America.

So . . . how do you create a culture that doesn't constantly use images of women's bodies to sell crap? I wish I knew.

Monday, June 8, 2009

Assume Your Vices!

Maybe you remember the classic scene from the movie "As Good As It Gets," where Carol (Helen Hunt) has completely lost patience with the shenanigans of Melvin (!) (Jack Nicholson) who is both genuinely obsessive-compulsive and also just sort of a pain in the ass kind of guy. It's a-do-or-die moment, and she's maybe going to leave forever, unless he can say something nice. Say something really nice, she demands. There's a long pause and then he says, "You make me want to be a better man."

It's a total success as a reply (indeed, when says says it's the best compliment she's ever gotten, he says maybe he overshot a little). And we know basically what he means. There are things you want, and there are things you think are worth wanting, and they're not always the same. Melvin wants to wash his hands with a new bar of soap every five minutes but he doesn't regard this as a worthy desire to have. He doesn't want to be the kind of person who wants to wash his hands every five minutes; he just can't help it.

This is a common feeling. In lots of ordinary cases it seems like what we want to want and what we find worth wanting aren't the same. Maybe you want to eat a whole bag or Doritos while you watch "I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!" but you wish you wanted to snack on mineral water while watching PBS. Maybe you want to be snippy with your sister in retaliation for some hurtful thing she said, but you wish you wanted to have a warm friendly chat about it. Maybe you want to have sex with your neighbor's spouse, but you wish you wanted only to have sex with your own.

It's a common feeling, but I'm here to tell you it's maybe a little too common. That is, we say it, but we don't really mean it. It's often just an excuse. Because we are, generally, way more attached to our bad qualities than we are willing to let on.

Imagine some future time and some other place, in which mood-drugs are highly specialized. Imagine you're told: "You have a problem with junk food and bad TV? Here, take these "Eau de Sante" and "Masterpiece Theater" pills; you'll only want to watch Brideshead Revisited and drink Perrier from now on. You have a problem with your temper? Here, take the "Can't We All Get Along" pill; you'll be transformed immediately into a mild, even-tempered type person who never loses her cool. You have a problem with desiring people who are not your spouse? Here, take the "Hi-Fidelity" pill; you'll only feel sexual desire for your spouse.

Would you take these pills? I'm guessing not only would most people not want to take these pills; but they wouldn't even want their loved ones taking them. Living with someone transformed this way would be like living with a zombie.

Of course, this isn't Melvin's situation at all; he really would take a pill to stop wanting to wash his hands. That's not a pretend-vice; it's something he really wishes he didn't have. There are such things, for sure. I'm just saying a lot of what masquerades as real helplessness in the face of a bad impulse actually reflects qualities we're not so unhappy with after all. If you wouldn't take the pill to get rid of the desire, how can you say you want not to have it? You can't.

The moral of this story is that we might not be so alienated from our vices as we like to think. That's OK; but if you're not alienated from your vices, why think of them as vices at all? Why not, as the French say, assumer your vice, acknowledge it, stand behind it, take it on as part of you? After all, as long as you're not mean, or violent, dishonest, or incredibly intemperate, desiring junk food, bad TV, snippiness, and sex isn't so bad.

It's desires like these that make us the humans we are. Might as well give them a little respect now and then.

Monday, June 1, 2009

This Week I Was An Angry Feminist

This week I got mad about some stuff. You'd think being mad would be the perfect state of mind for blogging -- and I think, for some people it is -- but not for me. I get mad about stuff, I just want to go home, get under a blanket with a novel and a glass of wine, and sulk.

At first I was just a little mad. I went to see Star Trek, and while the movie is delightful, I got mad about the whole Bechdel-test-failure problem. Maybe you've heard about Allison Bechdel's famous comic strip, where one woman says to another that she only sees movies in which one woman talks to another woman about something other than a man? The punch line is that the last movie she was able to see was "Alien," because two women talk about the monster.

OK so that was a while ago, but how many movies have you seen lately that would pass the test? The Devil Wears Prada. Sunshine Cleaners. Um ...?

The thing with Star Trek is it's not like it's just in violation of the letter of the law; it's in violation of the spirit. The women in this movie are either 1) giving birth 2) symbolizing "motherhood" or 3) Lt. Uhura. Uhura starts off OK, but immedately becomes just a source of love, support, and sexual intrigue for Kirk and Spock. And did you notice how many women were on council of elders or whatever that was on Vulcan, or on the board that administers the hearing for Starfleet? Oh yeah, its ZERO. And of course, all women in the movie obey the cardinal rule of being an accomplished woman: it only counts if you can look super-cute while you're doing it. Why else are all the female cadets in mini skirts and boots?

But I got madder later in the week when I made the mistake of clicking on Ross Douthat's piece in the The New York Times, "Liberated and Unhappy." Douthat discusses the "paradox" of declining female happiness: women are more liberated and yet less happy. How can this be?

While some of Douthat's conclusions are reasonable (we need to think about work-parenthood balance issues), the title and frame of his ideas are enraging. Isn't it obvious that the point of liberation is not happiness, but freedom, autonomy, and self-directedness? It is offsensively patronizing to suggest of any group of people that they're "better off " when someone else looks after their interests and tells them what to do. People want rights not -- or not only -- because the happiness they might expect to enjoy, but because freedom and autonomy are good in themselves.

And anyway, lots of thing worth doing don't necessarily increase happiness. Research suggests parents are less happy than non-parents. Does this undermine the good of having children? Of course not. Likewise, it's not a "paradox of parenting" that people want to have kids and value parenting and yet are less happy than non-parents. It's just part of the obvious fact of life that some things worth doing are difficult.

So I was pretty mad about those things, and then Dr. George Tiller, provider of late-term abortions that saved women's lives and protected their health, was shot and killed at church on Sunday morning.

A good blogger would some interesting thoughts and news analysis, but me, I'm just mad.