Kicking and Spanking
This is an odd piece – a mix of harsh but possibly true observations and macho unpleasantness. Of course the one so often does slop over into the other. I do that slopping often myself, at least so I’m told (and I’m sure it’s true). That’s what’s usually going on in disagreements over Richard Dawkins (and Christopher Hitchens, too: he attracts such Necker cube-like clashes of perception the way chocolate attracts, er, me). Many people think Dawkins is being rude, tactless, brutal, self-satisfied and the like, while others think he is being honest and fog-dispelling. I tend to the latter view, but then I’m an atheist myself, so what he says doesn’t get up my nose at the outset.
But this guy who doesn’t admire Susan Sontag…
The reverential tone of the obituaries served to confirm that self-proclaimed intellectuals, no matter how deluded or preposterous, exert a strange, intimidating power over non-intellectuals – especially if they employ that infuriating literary device, the epigram.
Well, yeah. One does know what he means – though actually I would say that it’s (some) intellectuals that the intimidating power is really exerted over, rather than non-intellectuals. It’s hard not to suspect that some version of that is what’s going on with the cult of Derrida. (I say ‘suspect’ because as I’ve mentioned several times, I haven’t read Derrida [apart from a few late articles], so I’m talking about the way his followers [and they are followers, all too often, rather than merely admirers or readers] talk and write about him, not what he said and wrote himself.) The admiration seems to be so out of proportion to anything anyone manages to articulate that one has to wonder – are they simply snowed by rhetoric? If they were snowed by substance, wouldn’t they do a better job of convincing skeptics?
But even though one knows what he means, one also wishes he had kept some thoughts to himself – or better yet not had them at all (in a perfect world).
But would that someone had treated Sontag in life as Dr Johnson had disposed of Bishop Berkeley’s contention that objects only exist because we see them: kicking a stone till he bounced off it, he snarled, “I refute it thus.”
To take the trivial point first, it’s well known that Johnson didn’t ‘dispose’ of anything, that idealism is not disposed of that easily, that Berkeley was not such a fool that he didn’t know what a stone was. But that aside – Johnson kicked a stone, not Berkeley. Here’s this columnist guy (an intellectual of some sort, presumably, or he wouldn’t have the gig) apparently wanting to kick Sontag herself. Or perhaps not – perhaps simply wanting someone to ‘dispose of’ her contentions by kicking stones with energy. But he phrases it so vaguely and ambiguously that we can’t really tell, and I suspect that’s deliberate. Especially given the way he follows it up.
If memory serves – and possibly it doesn’t, no doubt clouded by guilt that I failed to put the wretched woman over my knee and give her a sound spanking…
Oh please. Come on. Isn’t it time to wake up now? Time to get a clue? Time to, you know, not let one’s threatened guy syndrome hang out quite so blatantly? Don’t men realize what they sound like when they slaver over fantasies of beating up women? Well who knows – I suppose in their view and that of their fans they are doing what I take people like Dawkins to be doing: brushing away clouds of sentimentality and obfuscation and appeasment (as Salman Rushdie put it) to tell the plain truth. Being blunt, irreverent, disrespectful, amusing, and honest. But threats of violence (however ‘jokey’) don’t work that way. Except clearly some people think they do. Oh well.
Sometimes when a person is joking, it doesn’t show up as well in print as when live. I couldn’t RTFA because I got the old Page Cannot Be Displayed, so I don’t know whether this is the case here–let alone whether he wanted to kick a rock in front of Sontag to refute something she said, and hoped she hadn’t read the Johnson anecdote, or whether he wanted to kick Sontag herself, or what. Maybe he would have said the exact same things if Sontag had been a man, maybe not. But it can’t hurt for folks to examine this sort of thing, and think on how they themselves will write.
I had some co-workers, they and I were always flipping each other…stuff, and we knew it was only in fun, but it took me a little while to be sure of that. So I can understand you or anyone else being a little disgusted with this guy’s blustering…Is talking about spanking someone you don’t agree with worse or better than talking about, say, shooting them [however jokingly you put it]? If so, is it because it sounds like you don’t do them the honor of regarding them as a real threat, something like that?
For what it’s worth, I have heard (and read) some women talking much the same way about men. It got old fast. Especially the one who wasn’t joking.
Even if this fellow was just kidding, it’s a good thing you got us thinking about this.
Sorry about Page Cannot thing – it still works on mine, so maybe temporary.
I know, I asked myself whether he would have said the same thing if Sontag had been a man – but I have to doubt it. Men don’t usually talk about turning other men over their knees and spanking them. Hardly ever, in fact. There’s a real edge of superiority and contempt there, which is all the more repellent in that it’s probably unconscious. It’s depressing if men who are clever enough to write for the broadsheets are not clever enough to be aware of such obvious sex-related contempt – aware of the possibility that it is in fact sex-related.
I run into this kind of thing a fair amount. I try to be fair, to think maybe this guy or these guys would have said exactly the same thing if I’d had a male name. But somehow when they say I’ve castrated them merely because I’ve disagreed with them, I sorta kinda doubt it. Calling me Madame de Farge is kind of a giveaway, and so is repetition of words like ‘hysterical.’ I could be wrong, of course, I could be seeing sexism where there’s only the normal rough and tumble of disagreement…but I have my suspicions, she said darkly.
Kevin Myers, without comment, last January:
http://opinion.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2004/01/18/do1807.xml
Thanks, onymous – I’m not familiar with Myers and haven’t looked him up yet. Amusing stuff, in a way.
“Then the thundering ice-breaker of the 1960s ploughed through the great sheets of inherited wisdom about human nature: to be sure, new and rewarding discoveries were made, but ancient truths were lost in the turmoil, as the steel bows of change shattered the floes of old moralities. One of these lost truths was that socially, men need women far more than the other way round.”
Oh right – before the 60s everyone knew that men were desperate to find a woman while women were much more ambivalent. That was the conventional wisdom, yup. That explains all those movies where Rock Hudson and Cary Grant keep trying to get some babe to marry them while she keeps just trying to get them to put out and skip the marriage thing. Yup, he got that bit of cultural history on the nose, all right all right.
“I could be wrong, of course, I could be seeing sexism where there’s only the normal rough and tumble of disagreement…but I have my suspicions – OB”
If anything I think you let people off the hook too easily. I mean, I diagree with an awful lot of what you say, but I can’t help but notice the patronising sexism you draw. Its not just you of course, and that “spanking” quote is simply unbelievable as an attempt to infantilise and sexually humiliate. There is absolutely no way I can imagine a man being on the receiving end of that rhetorical flourish.
Well, if I do let people off the hook too easily, it must be the first time I’ve ever done such a thing in my life!
snicker
No, but I have been informed that I’m playing the victim card, whining, hallucinating, etc, so I’m cautious. But yeah – I can’t help noticing it too. I’m glad someone else does.
Whilst the bit about kicking SS might have been ambiguous (although I didn’t think so) the bit about calling in the Serbian artillery clearly wasn’t.
Which is a shame, really, because, as you start out by saying, a lot of what he says is spot on, not just about SS but in general terms (I’d mention Judith Butler but don’t want to endanger your blood pressure…) about what leads to some academics/intellectuals becoming ‘gurus’, ‘shamans’ or whatever. Interesting that Samuel Johnson should be mentioned; you probably know that one of his early jobs was doing parliamentary reports and, like everyone else at that time, he wrote up the speeches of his side to be better than those of the opposition. But when he found out that people were quoting what he’d written as fact, he quit the job.
I am disappointed in you, OB.
“Time to get a clue? Time to, you know, not let one’s threatened guy syndrome hang out quite so blatantly? Don’t men realize what they sound like when they slaver over fantasies of beating up women?”
You don’t know much about the man, do you? Nor do I, and therefore I would not dare to suggest that he has ‘threatened guy syndrome’ or that he fantasises about beating up women. In fact, I would, and do, assume that he is a decent human being. I assume that he is of an age and culture in which spanking naughty children was considered appropriate and that he considers the rhetorical device, of advocating such treatment of an adult as a metaphor for strong disapproval, to be legitimate. In fact, Kevin Myers takes great care not to impugn Susan Sonntag’s intelligence. He disapproves of some very specific actions and utterances.
I found the piece, from my middle aged male caucasian vantage point, both thought provoking and amusing. You do not really believe that every newspaper column should be deconstructed to reveal its supposed cultural biases and power relationships do you? Please tell me that you are not morphing into some feminism obsessed neo-Derridean.
(I pondered whether that last line might be too cruel, but I know you can take it.)
Claiming that objections to sexist comments are hysterical or attempts at castration is hardly a refutation of the objection. It seems to imply that only men can ‘reasonably’ decide when a comment is offensive.
As Julian Baggini says in an article in the Guardian ‘A woman can make a point incessantly, but not until a man says it is it taken seriously. Like away goals, men’s opinions count double. And if you don’t get the football reference of that last line, tough.’
So anyway I think the spanking comment was inappropriate and sexist. But don’t believe me just because I’m a man.
Chris, yeah, I did know that about Johnson. I find him a fascinating character in myriad ways. A prime example of intellectual as guru in many ways – but in many other ways an underminer of such things. A Tory who was far more opposed to slavery than the generality of Whigs were. A great rebuker of the Scots, and also a great defender of underdogs, including in the most practical of ways, e.g. housing and supporting several. The Great Cham, and yet so non-orthodox in so many unpredictable ways.
Sorry about disappointment, Mike. But after all, I did qualify what I said in some of the very ways you seem to indicate. But all the same – do you really think he would have said the turning over knee and spanking thing about, oh, Edward Said or Terry Eagleton? Of course that’s a speculative question, but I just don’t think men do talk that way about other men. They talk about thumping them, instead. They don’t verbally turn them into toddlers.
“that he considers the rhetorical device, of advocating such treatment of an adult as a metaphor for strong disapproval, to be legitimate.”
Of course; I know; but that’s the point. I’m suggesting that it’s rather unthinking of him to consider such a device legitimate especially if he just happens to apply it to a woman. I would say the same if he just happened to apply it to, say, a black person or a gay or any other traditionally subordinated group.
“You do not really believe that every newspaper column should be deconstructed to reveal its supposed cultural biases and power relationships do you?”
Uh – hell yes! And always have. That ain’t no morph.
No worse than some of Germaine Greer’s comments about men though, which of course, doesn’t make it right…
Well, Oph, maybe men do have fantasies about spanking women; but a large — perhaps equal — number have fantasies about women spanking them. Check Nighttown, in Ulysses, for a 20th-century perspective. Most important, though, is the truth that Dawkins’s view of Ms. Sontag’s Big Ideas is surely justified — if not by something as dumb as spanking, then by somebody saying “Oh, shut the hell up, Sontag, or talk sense, not Intelligentsian!”
I did RTFA, and the guy’s got some issues all right…still not sure how much of it is gender…but he has now helped me understand more clearly what he himself seems to miss, that silly [?]epigrams are perhaps not intended to be taken literally but to make us think, laugh or both…
True enough, Paul – Nannies, Big Nurses, kittens with whips, teachers with huge threatening blackboard erasers. Kinky. The condescension did strike me as gender-specific, but that’s merely a subjective hunch, which will stand up neither in court nor in laboratory. “Oh, shut the hell up, Sontag, or talk sense, not Intelligentsian!” – by all means! Stern rebuke between equals as opposed to parental paddling.