On the Having of Standards

About six weeks ago, my mother, my sister, and I drove halfway across the U.S. to drop the aforementioned sister off at her new Institute of Higher Learning. We had rules about driving, snacking, and the putting on of tunes -- namely that the tunes were under control of the driver at all times, unless one of the passengers was so unhappy with the choice that a head explosion was imminent.

And it had to be a real head explosion, which is how my sister got away with putting on the new Vampire Weekend album no fewer than four times in the first three days. I finally did plead imminent burstability on that, and she switched to Taylor Swift.

I was wary. I have nothing against Ms. Swift as a person, but I'd heard a lot about her songs and none of it sounded appetizing. I listened to the lyrics with particular attention. "That's rubbish," I said, more than once. "How can she say that? She's speaking for girls and she's inviting abuse." Or if not abuse, nastiness, or shame, or some other unfortunate thing. "Sure they're catchy," I said, "and some are sweet. But how can you ignore the messages?"

"You always go right for the rape," my sister said wearily.

My sister has long been confused about why I read feminist news blogs. She thinks I just make myself unhappy, since it's not like I'm doing anything about what I read. (That is, I'm not an activist.) My mom and I sometimes quarrel in the second wave/third wave divide, which is also about standards. (I don't want to quote her here, since I don't want to misrepresent her views online, and as her daughter I have a genetic predisposition to misinterpret anything she says that I more easily may disagree with her.)

The question is, of course, how high should the standards to which we to hold ourselves be? How about the standard to which we hold our friends? Our pop culture?

If the standards are too low, you move into the territory of victim-blaming, excuses, and privilege. Nothing changes, because shouldn't we just understand where our bigots are coming from? Aren't there two sides to every issue? Don't both sides deserve to be heard? You can't hate someone (or distrust them, or refuse to listen to their music, or, or, or) just because of one poorly chosen remark, can you?

That place is one that people who fight for any equal right have had to reject out of hand, thoroughly, before their campaigns can begin to make any sort of impact. And yet -- go too far on the other side, and you can't really have a conversation with anyone. No one agrees with you 100%, not even about the "important stuff." You'd have to stop consuming pop culture entirely, I should think, since all of it is tainted by the culture in which it's made.

(The other danger of this extreme is hard to articulate, because most of the people who complain about it are too far the other way. That is, you become so obsessed with the way people say things that you forget to look at their actions and your own. This is known as becoming too PC and you usually see complaints about it from people who claim they didn't realize their language was offensive and will now proceed to whine about how you deleted their comment. Ninety percent of the time I have no sympathy, but every once in awhile I think people become so obsessed with changing language that they forget about changing actions.)

I've seen this question a lot, posted to feminist weblogs. (Some of the ones I read are on a list on the right, you can search through their archives to find examples.) A new "born-again" feminist will ask -- God(dess), what do I do now? My senses are on high alert. Every single one of my friends has already offended me at least once. Help. And the author will start talking about finding an individual balance.

Of course you have to find an individual balance. Somewhere between "Sure, I mean, I guess that's all right, I mean, the victim existing probably provoked it, or something," and "You're a bigot, and not easily distinguishable from a Nazi."

But there is something confusing about facing the fact that your balance is not exactly like anyone else's. I honestly believe it's the same feeling of confusion you get when you realize your religion is not exactly the same as anyone else's (a feeling I remember from my youth, when I was religious myself). Because, especially when you've invested thought and/or time, and/or argument into your convictions, be they cultural or religious, you of necessity become invested in their inherent correctness.

And then, before you know it, you're back where you started. Other people have different standards! How should you react to that?

Maybe the having a solution to this dilemma is just another meta-layer that traps you in the same way. Balance may only be able to exist as something ever-shifting, ever-accommodating. (But not too accommodating. Too accommodating and you get stuck at the accommodating end.) Certainly the only gauge I have for my balance is trying to look at results. Will fighting this misogynist joke have the results I want? What about fighting this rape joke? Will I alienate and offend, or clue in and wake up?

I don't know if it's a good balance. I often feel that it isn't. Plenty of people see me as too hard-ass, but I still feel like in order to be a "real" feminist I should be much more hardass. (Never feeling like you're legitimate is a whole section of cultural misogyny that deserves another blog post.) I can try to stay consistent, and I can try to stay true to myself and my golden rules. But trusting myself on this is both the most natural impulse and the one I doubt the most.

POP QUIZ:
Where do you stand on this?

No Judgment

Is it just me, or is “no judgment” kind of like the “no homo” of enlightened liberal feminists?  It’s what we say when we think someone is stupid for liking something, but don’t want to come across as a self-righteous prick because probably our own tastes are not above reproach. “She’s the kind of person who likes Twilight – I mean, no judgment, but it just shows you what I’m talking about.” In the same way that “no homo” comes after a statement that could be interpreted – either by a twelve-year-old or by everyone ever, with no in-between – of suggesting homosexuality, “no judgment” comes when we are feeling quite judge-y, but don't wish to be called on it.

Maybe it is just me, just my world – but I have heard myself say something like that dozens of times. (Dozens of times in the last month.)

And on another note, not unrelated -- there are dozens and dozens of my likes that I feel the need to apologize for or over-explain. Yeah, I ... sometimes read romance novels. In fact, I'd rather read a Jennifer Crusie than a Malcolm Gladwell. (By a long shot.) Every Friday morning, I go on Hulu and catch the latest episode of The Vampire Diaries. I'm totally jonesing to see Easy A. When I'm feeling tired and stressed, I reread the entire Tamora Pierce oeuvre, and when I'm doing dishes, I sing along to Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. 

And none of that makes me stupid, any more than liking Shakespeare, and Racine, and Plato, and owning Citizen Kane, and browsing around Overthinkingit.com make me smart. 

That's what I'm really trying to get at here. We judge other people based on what they do and don't do, what they say and don't say, and what they like and don't like. None of those are invalid, and I am certainly not saying that we should stop judging others. (I don't think I'd be allowed to talk if I weren't allowed to be judgmental.) But I do think that the way we think that smart people only like smart things and dumb people only like dumb things does a disservice to pretty much everyone in the entire world, including us, the judges.

I once read a quotation that epitomized that idea: "Great minds discuss ideas; mediocre minds discuss events; shallow minds discuss people." I call bullshit. I never met a person in my life who didn't enjoy discussing all three. Especially if they got to be judgmental about it.

The other myth is that some things are just too dumb to have intelligent conversations about, and I call bullshit on that one too. Isn't that why uni is fun?  Didn't anyone else sit around discussing how James Bond uses humorous tropes first introduced by Aristophanes? (Actually, he probably ripped someone else off, if we're being honest.)

Then there's the feminist element in all this: I start feeling guilty if my likes are too girly. Girl stuff is dumb! It's just stupid and pink! Boy stuff all the way!  But if you like boy stuff too much (I should know, I grew up on Star Trek) that's not okay either. That means you're trying to trap some poor boy into being your boyfriend by being a tomboy. You couldn't actually like that stuff, because if you did, you'd be unfeminine. You just want the attention.

Now, I don't think those attitudes are really out in the open anymore, but I do see them swimming around below the surface, ready to eat teenagers in a vicious way. (Yeah, I'm not kidding.) I say screw that. (I know, I'm such a radical.)  

Can we talk about what we think about what we like? Why we like the things we do? What need we might have that those things meet? I know at least two smart, feminist women, who read the whole Twilight saga and enjoyed it, because something about the Bella/Edward/Jacob thing jived with the way they thought about love, or at least entertainment. They also do and think and say a million things to the effect that women are people and not clever monkeys.

My mom likes to say that you just like the things you like, and if you try to give reasons for liking them, someone somewhere will be able to come up with something that has all the same characteristics -- something that you should like -- but it doesn't speak to you in the same way, and you dismiss it out of hand. I definitely can't prove her wrong. But I still think discussing why we like something is a lot more legitimate than discussing what you like. People like a million things. Judge them when they say they like Bella because she has such a great backbone.