Orthodox Feminism or Back to the 1950s

I was just shown a brochure for a women's baalat tshuvah (newly religious) yeshiva called Shirat Devorah. I have never been to the place, I am not affiliated with it nor do I even know anyone who is. Perhaps it is a wonderful program, but some things in the brochure struck me as troubling.

For example:

Shirat Devorah engages each student's intellect, heart, body, and soul in her education. We honor the intelligence of all these aspects and use them as tools for integration. For example, the laws of Kashrut [kosher] and Shabbat can be learned from a book, but are best absorbed and understood through hands on application. In our Kitchen Laboratory, students apply these laws by cooking nutritious meals to experience what it means to live Jewishly. 

I am certainly not opposed to hands on education, but this suspiciously sounds like good old fashioned home economics. If you are making this the center of your school system as opposed to "mere book learning" then forgive me if I suspect you of simply training girls to pull in a man, one of few tasks in life in which being able to cook as opposed to being able to produce an independent thought and argue for it can be an advantage.

The school's non-interest in book learning show up again.

At Shirat Devorah, we use women's connection to intuition, creativity, community, and processing to create a holistic environment. During hikes, Lab, and workshops students practice the Jewish women's tradition of imparting meaning through focused intention. We thus create tangible memories that students can draw upon in the future.

How do you run a lab with a "women's intuition?" I guess the same way you gain an education through hiking. It is a mystical sort of learning beyond the understanding of non-intuitive people like me.

For a school claiming to be about using Judaism to empower women, there is surprisingly nothing about sitting down and critically interpreting texts. Instead what I hear is that women are special; since they have this intuition they do not need a solid background in in critical thinking honed through reading books and analyzing texts. I would accuse them of being sexist except that historically I know the real conclusion of this sort of thinking; women are little more than children, beautiful to behold (as well as do other things to) and can be trained to do useful tasks around the house like cooking and cleaning, but never to be taken seriously as a social and intellectual equal.  

Why Nobody Wants to be a Feminist: My Response to Clarissa

Clarissa did an excellent post a few days ago, Why Nobody Wants to be a Feminist where she challenges women to accept the full consequences of being liberated from patriarchy.

Feminism has given women a lot in the last several decades. However, new rights always come accompanied with new responsibilities and obligations. While feminism was in the process of granting women rights, they were happy to accept it. As soon as the time came to “pay the bills” and assume new obligations that came with being accepted as fully human, women abandoned the movement in droves. Unless we accept this very unpleasant truth and start doing something about it, it is my profound conviction that no amount of ethnic-specific feminisms and happy bondings between second, third and fourth generations of feminists will help attract more women to feminism. The problem does not lie within the movement. It is located outside, in people who don’t want to belong to it, who cringe when they hear the word “feminism”, or who have abandoned it.


Unless we accept that the patriarchy victimizes and rewards both women and men, we will never move on from this stalemate. Many women are standing in the way of feminism today because they are unwilling to let go of the benefits the patriarchy offered them, even as they keep enjoying the removal of constraints it used to place on their lives. In my culture, we call this “sitting on two chairs.” And that, my friends, is always a dangerous activity to engage in.


I agree with Clarissa, though I would take it a step further. At its heart, feminism has never been about a principled defense of equal rights, but simply a grab for arbitrary special privileges. If feminism was actually about equal rights then the very term "women's rights" would be dropped and everything would be framed in terms of human rights. For example, abortion would have nothing to do with a woman's "right to choose" or "control her own body;" it would simply be a plausible extension of the premise that individual human beings are the ones best suited for evaluating their own good and must be left as the sole arbitrators of matters relating to their own bodies. This leads to the conclusion that individuals should be allowed to use drugs, sell themselves as prostitutes, their own organs and possibly to have abortions. (See "The Libertarian Case Against Abortion.")
   
Closer to Clarissa's point, feminists themselves have proven unwilling to abandon distinctions of gender when such distinctions are beneficial to women. We see this when it comes to sports and acting awards, but more importantly the draft, which women are still protected from. (It would be worth bringing the draft back just to see men in mass refusing to serve unless women did so as well or agreed to give up the equal right to vote and hold down a job.) Either gender is rendered politically or socially meaningless like race and religion across the board or we admit that it is meaningful and negotiate where and how on the assumption that any special privilege will be paid for by accepting a form of discrimination on a different front. For example, it may be that if women desire special protection in terms of maternal leave they may have to pay for it by surrendering reproductive freedoms. The logic being that if the bearing of children is of some value to society at large so that companies should make special allowances for it then women, in turn, should submit themselves to the needs of society and fashion their reproductive lives in a way that best serves those needs.

Naturally, if the privilege is merely social then the discrimination, in turn, should also only be social. To make my own position clear. I oppose political distinctions based on gender (including women being exempted from the draft). That being said, and this is the Burkean conservative in me, I accept that, at a social level, there will for the foreseeable future continue to be social distinctions based on gender. It is my hope that, as a society, we can figure out a way to negotiate through these distinctions, men and women talking as equals.

There are consequences for this feminist unwillingness to take a principled stand on equal rights. If feminists are seen as trying to sit on two chairs with one rear end, then non-ideologically committed women can naturally only be expected to follow suit and not ask themselves the hard questions about being courted in marriage and becoming stay at home moms. Furthermore, this opens feminists to attack from different sides. Minority group feminists will attack establishment feminism as "white" feminism. If women are simply an arbitrary group grabbing for arbitrary special privileges then other arbitrary groups can arise within this already arbitrary group accuse others of wanting arbitrary special privileges and demand arbitrary special privileges of their own.

The greatest concern to any honest liberal should be how this plays into the hands of conservatives. If the people who claim to be liberals and supporters of equal rights behave like conservatives, creating arbitrary groups and handing out privileges and discriminating against at will, then we can only expect the true conservatives out there to throw away any pretext of supporting equal rights now that they no longer need to feel ashamed in the face of an honest principled liberalism.

Feminists in Burqas: A Response to Clarissa

Clarissa has a post up about a Gender Studies series of lectures on "Liberating Potential of the Burqa." Clarissa laments the fact that this is not a sign of the feminist movement gaining a sense of humor, but is meant in full earnestness as a study of how the burqa might be used to "liberate women from being constantly victimized by the desire implicit in a male gaze." As to this notion of the male gaze, Clarissa notes:

I never got this whole drama about people being demeaned or "objectified" (what a silly word!) by another person's gaze. If somebody looks at you and finds you attractive, it isn't something they can control. Whether they act on their desire for you can be controlled, of course. But the feeling of desire cannot. Only a very puritanical world-view believes that desire is inherently evil and has to be feared. As for objectification, other people are always objects of our actions. That's implicit in the rules of grammar. "I see you, I like you, I help you, I respect you, I support you" - in all of these sentences "I" is the only subject, while "you" is always an object. Other people are always objects of our feelings, actions, thoughts, etc. Being an object of somebody else's actions can be both good and bad, depending on the content of the action.


Every day, as I walk around, people see me and form attitudes towards me on the basis of what they see. Even if these attitudes are negative, why should I care? Why should I hide myself behind a bulky piece of covering? Why should I grant others such a huge power over my life? Instead of spending our lives fearing the judgment we believe is present in the gaze of other people, shouldn't we concentrate on our own desires, thoughts, and experiences? Who cares what some unknown man who sees me on the bus thinks of me? If he thinks I'm attractive, that's his right. If he sits there thinking, "Oh, Jeez, what an ugly woman," that's his right too.


I suspect that I differ from Clarissa in that I have no deep-seated objection to the burqa, seeing it as something, in of itself, neutral in terms of women's empowerment. A burqa could mean a mean trying to gain control over a woman by making her ashamed of her body and to feel guilty for "leading men astray." A burqa could equally be a woman's way of empowering herself and engaging in a critic of a male-dominated culture which objectifies women. The fact that historically the burqa has tended to more often serve the former function does not mean it cannot be made to serve the latter. I would even argue that our best hope in defeating the patriarchal implications of the burqa is not by head-on eliminating the burqa, but in embracing the burqa while subverting it.

Ultimately my willingness to not oppose the burqa is rooted in my willingness to only recognize the validity of physical harm. Like Clarissa, I see nothing intrinsically wrong with the male gaze, but again only because it does not cause physical harm. A man might have all the patriarchal intentions in the world, but that has no effect on the person being observed, who is free to interpret the gaze and feel about as desired. Since the observed person is as such free it carries the full responsibility for how it reacts to being observed, an objectively neutral action.

If there is one thing that Clarissa and I agree on here, it is, I believe, a concern that the self-proclaimed liberal activism of those in Gender Studies departments might become an exercise in going far enough to the left and ending up on the right. Who is going to inherit the benefits of feminist attempts to liberate women from patriarchy? The historical law of unintended consequences leads one to wonder if it might not be patriarchal men armed with new academic jargon to back their biblical truths. As long as individuals can be subjected to the non-physical concerns of others there can be no secure rights for women or any men.   

Ungodly Words: Toward a Political Philosophy of Heresy (Part I)

A cardinal principle of liberal society is that there is no such thing as heresy or heretics; that the notion of a thought crime is a contradiction in terms. That being said the issue of heresy remains a potent one even in the West, though its implications may be somewhat different than in earlier epochs. In the past, when people spoke about heretics, they generally were referring to one whose beliefs lie outside of a given framework and as such is brought into opposition with those whose beliefs lie within that framework. In the modern-day situation, more and more we see that people can come under fire, not just for their lack of belief, but merely because they are open to an idea and take it seriously enough to raise it as a legitimate question. The sin here is not that they do not believe in a doctrine but that they choose to view it as a doctrine in the first place instead of as a necessary truth.

This conception of heresy is useful to explain the unfortunate fate of Lawrence Summers, the President of Harvard. He was attacked not for his belief that there are intrinsic genetic differences between men and women, but because he raised the issue as a question. In the eyes of the feminists who attacked Summers, his sin was not his lack of belief in the doctrine of the non-existence of intrinsic differences between men and women. His sin was that he failed to see this doctrine as an obvious and necessary truth in the first place.

At the same time this was going on, half a world away, there was the parallel story of Rabbi Natan Slifkin, who was attacked by the Haredi rabbinical establishment for being pro-evolution and for reading rabbinic texts allegorically. What was interesting about the whole Slifkin affair was that the main thrust of his opponents' attacks was not against the truth of evolution, though they definitely viewed it as a falsehood. Rabbi Slifkin was not trying to convince anyone to accept the theory of evolution, who was not already persuaded by the scientific evidence. All he was doing was suggesting a method with which to deal with evolution within an orthodox framework. The real issue was whether or not there existed, as Rabbi Slifkin claimed, legitimate trends within rabbinic tradition that can be seen as being friendly to evolution. In essence, the issue was whether one could, in the first place, take the notion that the theory of evolution is true seriously.

One is reminded of the Catholic Church's prosecution of Galileo in the seventeenth century. Contrary to common perception Galileo was put on trial less for his beliefs in heliocentrism than for his attempt to justify heliocentrism on biblical grounds (as well as some remarkably poor political judgment on his part). The Counter-Reformation Church was not particularly concerned with science; it was, though, at war with Protestantism. Holding beliefs about the natural world that went against Church teaching was a venial sin; attempting to support a belief contrary to Church teaching through an unorthodox interpretation of scripture was Protestantism. I might go so far as to suggest that Galileo's trial was not a remnant of medieval thinking, but the Catholic Church leading the way for a modern understanding of heresy.

I do not raise these issues in order to engage in pious liberal proclamations against the ever-existing threats to the cause of free thought; though I personally would rather deal with heathens, who openly proclaim themselves as enemies of free thought as opposed to apostates, who have betrayed the tradition. I raise this issue because I believe that the notion of heresy is and will continue to be an important part of our political discourse. As long as groups are going to be formed around ideas then the paradigm of Us, who believe, versus that Other, who does not believe, will exist to some extent and as such there will be Believers and Heretics. As such I believe that it is prudent to come to an understanding as to the nature of heresy and its role in society. I am not interested in defining heresy; rather I would like to engage in an exploration of the underlying rationale that allows one to go from saying, on a theoretical level, that if a text were to advocate ideas that contradicted dogma then that text would be heretical to saying, on a practical level, that such and such a text actually does contradict statements of dogma and is therefore heretical. While in doing this I will be dealing with this issue within a Jewish context, though what I say should, in theory, apply to any system of thought.

(To be continued …)

My Feminist Response to the Haredi Marriage Crisis

With all of my opposition to modern feminism, it is easy to lose track of the fact that I am a feminist if of a nineteenth-century John Stuart Mill School. I believe that human beings can better themselves through reason, as they pursue their own good in their own way. It helps if they are left to themselves and are not shackled by tyrannical governments and societies. Since women make up a little more than fifty percent of the human race, this applies to women as well. Women need to be brought in as equal partners in society and government and this can most effectively be done through education and suffrage. I do not recognize the concept of "women's rights," only human rights. Also, since I deal with rights solely within the context of protection from direct physical harm, I have no interest in waging war against "patriarchy" or deconstructing "male" modes of thinking. Feminists would be correct in criticizing me for employing a distinctively Enlightenment/male discourse and attempting to shove women into it, thus making it impossible for women to ever truly be "equal" in its most extreme sense. I do not care; what I offer is a logically consistent system and if women do not wish to take it they are free to try their luck with traditional patriarchy.

My nineteenth-century feminism was awakened by a recent article I saw on the Haredi website Cross Currents, "Avoiding Corruption in Shidduchim," by Rabbi Jonathan Rosenblum, which attacked the current manifestation of marriage dowries within the Haredi world. Rabbi Rosenblum argues that the practice of insisting that the prospective in-laws of Haredi men be expected to support their future sons-law while they sit and study in order to gain their daughters a respectable match creates its own back-door materialism, as marrying the girl from the wealthiest possible family becomes a status symbol. I thought it was a very good article. That being said, I was struck by the fact that the article and subsequent comments all focused on the boys vs. in-laws dynamics. Lost in the shuffle was the fact that there are young women involved here, being asked to make life-altering decisions in support of a system that relegates them to if not second class status then at least to secondary roles. So I put up the following comment:

Something should be said here about the situation of women. I think that it is interesting that women remain passive figures even at your hands, Rabbi Rosenblum. I was just talking to a married a Haredi woman about her decision to become a speech therapist and asked her what her goals were in growing up. She responded that her goal in life was "to be a Mommy." A very wonderful girl, but there are lots of people who want to be mommies and many who might even make good mommies. Why should any bochur [young man] take someone simply because they will make a good mommy, unless this woman can support him by becoming a speech therapist or has a father who can support him? Change has to start with women valuing themselves as individuals, beings with unique talents who cannot simply be replaced like a spare part.

You can say that I was channeling Mary Wollstonecraft in seeing women's equality as starting with women taking control over their lives. To be fair, there is even here a bit of the modern feminist in that I am asking a modern question; what does it mean when one party is the activist initiator and the other remains passive to be acted upon? One can also pick up from my comment that, however I may like individual Haredi women as people, I have little respect for them as beings capable and deserving of the sort respect and equal treatment that the Haredi world is not giving them.

Cross Currents took down my comment. I guess suggesting that women need to come forth as individuals in control of their own lives is too radical for some people. I can get used to the idea. Mothers lock up your daughters for I am coming with my radical feminist doctrines. I offer them the chance to be people and even to be respected for it.

Am I a Misogynist Teacher? (Maybe a Little)

My previous post on the issue of bodily functions and its role in civil rights generated some very good comments. It was a risky piece in that I was almost asking to be misunderstood and accused of being a misogynist who believes that women should be sent "back to the kitchen." I am particularly heartened that Clarissa and Miss S. gave me a pass. I see them as my guiding lights when it comes to feminism. If they decide not to kill me then I feel that I can rest easy, knowing that I have lived up to my responsibilities as a gender aware male. In a sense though, the charge of sexism has some validity in that a basic argument of modern feminism does apply to me. My subconscious model of normalcy is male. The student in my head whom I prepare to teach is male. Even my approach to teaching can be regarded as very "male." I work within a very top-down model where I lecture and ask questions. My goal is to critically analyze historical texts through the rubric of clearly established rules, much as a lawyer cross-examines a witness. I am not naturally inclined to focus on forming a personal relationship with students nor am I apt to ask my students how they "feel" about a text. Obviously, I am aware that many of the students, even usually my best students, are women. As a liberally inclined person, women are welcome into my classroom and I will treat them as "one of the guys." This, though, does not solve the problem.


Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, in the Home We Build Together, criticizes the Enlightenment model of tolerance in that it treats minorities like guests in a hotel. Even when the West chooses to be "tolerant," it does not change the fact that this is a white European Christian system. Other people are allowed to take part in this system that was not created by them or with them in mind. They are just welcome to reside in it. Rabbi Sacks poses the challenge of how do we create a home in which everyone is allowed to take an active role in creating the system.

To apply Rabbi Sacks, my approach to teaching does create a very real problem for women since it creates a situation where they become "guests" being fit into the situation. This is a problem with our society in general. 150 years of women's rights have not changed the fact that we are still a male culture attempting to fit women in. Because I recognize the situation that women are in I go out of my way to make the effort to try to help female students feel comfortable in my class. This is particularly the case in terms of getting to talk in class; I consciously am on the lookout to make sure that girls in my class are not getting shouted down by some of the louder boys in class. This in of itself, though, only exacerbates the trap we are in. By the very act of attempting to compensate for my subconscious biases I am still placing them as an "other" to be brought into a system not designed for them; in essence as "guests."

I relate to this personally on two levels, as a Jew and an Asperger. For example, growing up as an American Jew, living outside Jewish enclaves such as Brooklyn NY, every holiday season I had to come to terms with the fact that I stood outside of Christmas and thus American society as a whole. The Christmas ads and the television specials were not made with me in mind. I was simply an inconvenient reality to be tolerated and worked into the system. Because of this, I developed a split perception of myself and my place in American culture. I am an American even to the extent that I have an easier time relating to American non-Jews than I do with Israeli Jews. Yet I am an American who stands outside the Christmas window display. Standing apart from American society as it celebrates Christmas becomes my part in American society and what makes me truly American. Similarly with Asperger syndrome; our society has constructed itself around the assumption that everyone is neurotypical. Of course, it is undeniable that not everyone is a neurotypical and we are in the process of working out the full implications of this. I am stuck as the outsider in society peering in and observing and even tolerated, but never truly a part of things. As an outsider, I welcome all other outsiders as allies and, may I say it, brothers.

Are Haredi Girls More Open Minded When it Comes to Intellectuals?

Michael Makovi has a post on his experiences with dating girls to the right and more modern girls. As someone whose religious views are still fairly liberal in many respects, one would expect that he would have an easier time dating more modern girls. Such girls would be expected to be more "open-minded" and accepting of him. Judging from his experiences with dating websites like Frumster, this is not the case:

Whenever I write to MO women, specifically ones whose profiles evince some basic compatibility with me in terms of both hashqafa (weltanschauung or ideology) and general intellectuality (she doesn't have to be a nerd like me, but she at least has to be intellectual enough to appreciate one), the response I usually get is quite negative. That is, if I get a response at all; about half of the women don't respond at all. (They have premium accounts, so that's not the problem.) Just earlier this week, one wrote back to me, saying, "relationships with high-maintenance, socially-unaware, overbearing people who suck me dry are exactly what I just cut out of my life." ...

By contrast, when I write to the more yeshivishe or Beit Ya'akov-ish women, I almost always get a very warm response. I don't know how many times the woman has said that if only my hashqafa were further to the right, that she'd be very willing to date me. In fact, several times, I've been told that even with my left-wing hashqafa, she'd love to be platonic friends, if only she were willing to have platonic friendships with the opposite sex.

I have had some similar experiences (one of the reasons why I am still gloriously single). I have used Frumster from time to time with little success. Like Makovi, I focused on trying to contact girls, who appeared to be well educated, open and having similar interests to mine; in essence Modern Orthodox girls. I rarely got a response back, and fewer still led to any meaningful contact. Contrary to expectations, I find that I have an easier time getting to conversations with Haredi girls. Even when they do not understand what I am trying to say, they will make the extra effort to ask and try to understand. Maybe this has to do with Haredi girls being actively trained to be polite and make the extra effort to be kind to strange creatures like me. It also might have been to my advantage that most of these situations were non-dating ones to begin with.

My theory is that Haredi girls, coming from a "patriarchal" mindset, expect a man who is smarter than they are and who can talk over their heads. Remember these girls are supposed to be looking for a "Talmud Chacham" and the "best boy in Lakewood." Girls from the Modern Orthodox camp are operating in an equality framework and expect someone who is their intellectual equal or even someone they can intellectually dominate. This is not to question the intelligence of any woman. The problem is that they are also very defensive about this intellectual parity. They will see any situation where you can out-talk them as you attempting to be a show-off, out to prove that you are their intellectual superior.

In her last email to me, my ex-girlfriend Dragon wrote: "I know you consider yourself an intellectual, however, that does not mean I am an idiot and have little knowledge on some subjects. You have in the past insulted my intelligence when having conversations with you."

I could swear on a stack of bibles, that I never called her an idiot or questioned her intelligence. She was a very smart person otherwise I would not have agreed to date her in the first place. What we did have was me speaking in my normal string of association fashion. One needs to be fairly well-read in the sorts of things that interest me (the sorts of things that I regularly discuss on this blog) to follow what I am saying. Some people do better at this than others. This, though, was transformed into a personal attack even if experience with me should have told her, on an intellectual level, that this was not the case. Dragon may have been a very smart person, but she emotionally needed to be clearly acknowledged as being the one on top. Anything less would mean accepting inferiority.

In my personal situation, there is also the Asperger syndrome element. I would argue that this merely plays into this model. My style of speaking is connected to my Asperger situation. Ironically enough, it is my attempt to relate to people within an Asperger context. The difficulty with Asperger syndrome is forming emotional relationships. I want someone I can talk to, that is what a relationship means to me. Modern girls can be expected to wish for some sort of emotional connection that is beyond my understanding and my ability to give, putting me in an unwinnable situation. With girls who are a little "less modern," I still have a chance. They are more likely to think in more pragmatic terms, the good man, the intelligent man. These are things that I can deliver.

I have no idea what the situation is like outside of Orthodox Judaism. I put the challenge out there to feminists of the Maureen Dowd school; is it really that men cannot bear to deal with intelligent women or is it the feminist women who cannot bear to deal with an intelligent man?

The Man in Black and My Favorite Sparkly Fairy Vampire Princess: In Defense of Comedic Romantic Heroes

Today I went to see New Moon. I would like to go officially on the record at this point to admit that Twilight is wearing a bit thin on me. This comes from Twilight becoming too popular too quickly and for all the wrong reasons. I think I am going to vomit if I see one more magazine cover with the "sexy stars of Twilight" on the front. Twilight was a brilliant comic horror romance starring Bella's motor mouth. She monologues her way through vampires and werewolves all the while being unfazed by any of it, but keeping her eyes focused on her normal teenage girl issues. Twilight would collapse into absurdity the moment it tried to actually be a real love story; the characters cannot stand up to the limelight of being judged by standard fiction logic. This sums up for me why New Moon was at best a mediocre film. The first film had the good sense not to take itself too seriously and could be taken simply for laughs. New Moon crosses that line into trying to be serious, leaving us with over the top acting and way too much angst. This is particularly unfortunate as, of all the books, New Moon is Bella's story; she is off on her own without Edward for most of the book except when she purposely puts herself at risk in order to summon up images of him telling her not to do whatever she is doing.

I went alone as the girl I am now seeing opposes Twilight. I managed to hook the last two women in my life onto Twilight, but no luck in this case. (I still think she is very cool anyway.) She says that Twilight is the one romance that she would never allow her daughter to read. Her reason for this is that she finds Edward Cullen to be emotionally abusive:

Bella is essentially interacting with Edward in a way that exposes her to emotional abuse.  She stays with him, even when he insists on making all her important life choices. And the only time that she disagrees with him is when she is making a foolish, short-sighted decision (e.g. wanting to be turned, not wanting to go to college, etc.).

I do not hold this against her. Firstly because at least she admits that Alice is a great character. Secondly, because I do not think she is all that far off. Considering all the teenage girls gushing over Edward and taking him seriously, I would have to admit that the risk of girls taking Edward as a romantic ideal and Bella as a model to follow may be too great. Edward's behavior is problematic and nowhere more so than in New Moon. He abandons her, leaving her in a fit of depression for months. Then, when he comes to believe that she is dead, he tries to commit suicide by angering the vampire mafia, the Volturi. No, I would not want my daughter dating Edward, angst-ridden sparkly emo vampire fairy princess or not. As a fictional, over the top romantic hero, though, this is fine. I would not want my daughter dating Romeo, with his panache for killing cousins in duels right after the wedding and general suicidal tendencies, either. The ending sequence of New Moon works fine if you are willing to take it for what it is; a spoof of Romeo and Juliet applied to this vampire universe.

I appeal to my favorite comic romance (and hers as well) The Princess Bride. (Many of you will have likely seen the brilliant film adaption of it. I urge you to read the even better novel from which it came. The novel makes fun of Lord of the Rings.) The story involves two lovers Buttercup and Westley. Westley leaves Buttercup to make his fortune, is captured by pirates and assumed dead, only to come to Buttercup's rescue several years later as the Dread Pirate Roberts. When he rescues her he is dressed in black and wearing a black mask. Buttercup does not recognize him but assumes that he is the man who killed her love. The man in black is rude to spiteful to Buttercup until she pushes him down a ravine and he calls out "as you wish," his old code phrase for "I love you." Buttercup then roles down the hill herself to smother him with kisses. So Westley manages to survive the pirates and become their leader, but he does not bother to send his love a message saying "I am alive and running a successful pirate business." (This is a variation on the classic question about Joseph, who becomes the Viceroy of Egypt and goes seven years without sending his father Jacob a note saying "I am fine dad, I was just sold into slavery by my brothers, but things are going pretty good now.") To top this off, Westley acts very coolly to her upon rescuing her, accusing her of abandoning him to marry Prince Humperdinck. We are never told what makes Buttercup so attractive. She spends the entire story in need of being rescued and whining. (Hardly a good feminist role model.) I would not consider this behavior the sort to be imitated. That being said I am willing to accept this as a spoof on the traditional romance, taking romantic troupes and pushing them to over the top extremes. If I wanted to get academic I would say that we are engaged in a feminist deconstruction of the traditional romance, bringing out the latent patriarchy of the genre by taking it to its reductio ad absurdum extreme.

I am willing to accept stories like Twilight and Princess Bride for what they are, comic romances that present over the top love stories with particularly domineering and moody male heroes with love-struck and submissive females with little in the way of actual personality, as long as they stay in their boundaries. The moment any future teenage daughter of mine takes any of this too seriously I think I would need to have a talk with her. (Note that memorizing the entire film of Princess Bride does not consist of taking things too seriously. Rather it is the mark of a healthy childhood and mature taste in movies.) There are fairy tales, fairy vampire princesses with sparkles and then there is real life. Fairy tales are useful as long as they are kept in their place.

The Return of Martin Guerre and the Feminist Fantasies of Natalie Davis

(Since, in my last post, I talked about Natalie Zemon Davis and her book, the Return of Martin Guerre, I thought to share with you a review I wrote a few years ago, while I was still an undergraduate at Yeshiva University, on the book. We were assigned the book in class and, as an assignment, had to write a review of it. To the professor's surprise most of the papers were very hostile; a good example of how different the Yeshiva University student body is from a normal college campus. My review was one of the more hostile ones. Back then I was much more the fighting conservative than I am today. If I were to rewrite this I would probably tone it down a bit. It definitely is a great book, despite its flaws, and I have every intention of using it when I have students of my own.)

The integrity of the field of history rests upon the assumption that the writing of history is a fundamentally different sort of undertaking than the writing of historical fiction. While even the most rigorous historian inevitably colors the facts with his own speculations, (Ranke is a prime example of this) history is supposed to about the interpretation of past events through the lens of documentary evidence. The writing of historical fiction on the other hand[1] is centered upon the attempts of an author to speculate upon the hidden stories and motivations that lie outside the realm of documentary evidence. While the art of historical fiction may be of value to the historian, it is not history. To blur this line is a disservice to the field in that it renders the study of history as mere partisan propaganda. This is so particularly when such writings are done in support of an ideology. If one is going to be a historian then one has to convince the reader that there has been a genuine attempt to check one’s ideology at the door.

An example of this issue can be seen in the Return of Martin Guerre by the noted feminist historian, Natalie Zemon Davis. To be sure, it should be noted, that whatever the book’s flaws, it is a fascinating and well-crafted bit of writing. The stated facts of the case which Davis discusses are these: In mid 16th century France, Martin Guerre, a peasant of Basque descent, abandoned his wife, Bertrande, and child, Sanxi, over a fight he had with his father over some grain. Eight years later a man named Arnaud du Tilh came around, claiming to be Martin Guerre, and was initially accepted as such by Bertrande, the rest of the family, along with everyone else in the village. Doubts began to rise however and Martin Guerre’s uncle, Pierre Guerre, along with Bertrande, come to accuse Arnaud of being a fake. The case was resolved when the true Martin Guerre, after twelve years, came home, minus a leg that had been shot off by a cannonball in Flanders. Arnaud was hanged, Martin Guerre resumed his proper place and Bertrande was absolved of having committed adultery, as the impression of the court was that she had been tricked into believing that Arnaud was her husband and was not a party to his fraud. These are the facts as the Parlement of Toulouse seemed to have understood them and according to the generally accepted rules of historical explanation, baring any evidence to the contrary, this version of events should stand; any attempt paint a different picture should carry the burden of proof upon it.

It would seem that Bertrande was a simple housewife, whose main concern in life was trying to keep body and soul together, who, tragically, was abandoned by her husband and tricked into living with an impostor for four years. This interpretation of events evidentially does not suit Davis, not because she has contradictory evidence, but because such a picture does not take into account the feminist conscience that Bertrande “must” have had. As such Davis offers an alternative reading of the events, one that takes into account the fact that Bertrande possessed “a concern for her reputation as a woman, a stubborn independence, and a shrewd realism about how she could maneuver within the constraints placed upon her sex.”[2]

This rewriting of events begins even before the departure of Martin. Bertrande and Martin did not have a child for the first eight years, or so, of their marriage and it was assumed that the couple was under some curse, which prevented Martin from impregnating his wife. This “curse” was lifted, if we are to take the written accounts at their word, when, at the advice of a “wise woman.” Martin and Bertrande “had four masses said by the priest and were given sacred hosts and special cakes to eat.”[3] This resulted in the birth of their son, Sanxi. To a historian still schooled in "outdated," "patriarchal," modes of study, it is not certain why Martin and Bertrande, unable to produce a child, still stayed together. This could have been for any number of plausible reasons; maybe the families would not have allowed it, Bertrande may have actually been in love with Martin or she might have been scared to death of what he would do to her if she left. For Davis the explanation for this is obvious; Bertrande, while not wanting to be married yet to Martin, did not wish to end up back under her father’s control. She thus, by allowing it to be claimed that Martin was cursed, manipulated the situation so she could be both outside of her father’s control and exempt from the normal duties of marriage. “Then when Bertrande was ready for it, the old woman ‘appeared suddenly as if from heaven’ and helped to lift the spell.”[4] (I.e. this was a scam worked out between Bertrande and the old woman.) Does Davis offer us a source that has someone, from that time, making the claim that Bertrande manipulated the situation? No. Does Davis even bother to bring down a case, from that time period, in which a woman played such a game and thus allow us to draw some sort of comparison? No.

Davis’ insinuations do not stop there. After Martin’s disappearance, Davis wonders if Bertrande was comforted in her solitude by that “wise woman who had counseled her during her bewitchment.”[5] This of course, makes perfect sense as it is well known that women, in 16th century France, were secretly organized under the banner of the female conscience and merely went “along with the system, passing it on through the deep tie and hidden complicity of mother and daughter.”[6] It would seem that the existence of such a secret system seems so obvious to Davis that she does not bother to offer us a single source as to the veracity of such a claim.
Davis’ most egregious claim is that, far from being duped by Arnaud, Bertrande was well aware, from the very beginning, that Arnaud was a fake and simply went along with the charade because she wanted a husband. Davis takes it as a given that “the obstinate and honorable Bertrande [was not] a woman so easily fooled, not even by a charmer like Pansette. By the time she had received him in her bed, she must have realized the difference.”[7] Now we know that Arnaud was slick enough to fool Martin’s own sisters, who knew Martin for longer than Bertrande did. The reason why it is unlikely that Arnaud fooled Bertrande, according to Davis, is that “as any wife of Artigat would have agreed, there is no mistaking ‘the touch of the man on the woman.’”[8] The most obvious problem with such claim is that it is not backed, as far as I can tell, by any sort of empirical data; I would love to see the study that a test group of blindfolded women could recognize a man based on how they were touched. Lacking that I can see no reason what so ever why this bit of folk wisdom would be relevant. (Imagine a conservative saying something like this and getting their book published by the Harvard University Press and being made the director of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Study at Princeton University.) What is even more amusing is that Davis’ source for this, which she only indicates in her end notes, is a 17th-century historical work[9] by Etienne Pasquier (1529-1615), titled Les Recherches de la France. I must say that there seems to me to be something just a bit disingenuous when someone, who has a consistent track record of treating folk wisdom about women, written by men, with absolute scorn, turns around and builds a thesis around such folk wisdom merely when it suits their purpose.

Davis crosses a certain line here where her writing ceases to be a matter of putting objective facts, tied together with the writer’s speculations, on the table and instead becomes a forum for the writer to give her speculations, tied together with some historical facts. The challenge for Davis is to explain why her telling of the Martin Guerre case is intrinsically more deserving of the title History than a top of the line work of historical fiction such as the Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara. Killer Angels chronicles the events, in the form of a novel, of the battle of Gettysburg. This is a book that won the Pulitzer Prize, in 1974, and is considered a classic of American literature. No one, as far as I can tell, has ever offered a sustained attack on Shaara’s presentation of the battle of Gettysburg. Nevertheless, no one would ever consider Killer Angels to be a history of the battle. The reason for this is that Michael Shaara, in the end, had the people involved in the battle say and do things that cannot be justified strictly in terms of documentary evidence. In truth, though, one could say that Shaara was simply trying to resurrect the style of historiography used in antiquity by Thucydides and Josephus.

In many respects Killer Angels is superior to Martin Guerre; it is demonstrably evident that Killer Angels is on far firmer grounds, factually, than Martin Guerre. By the standard of historical events, Gettysburg was a very well documented battle. We can track, down to the hour, what the major figures in this battle, such as Lee, Longstreet, Pickett, Hancock, Meade and Chamberlain, were doing. All of these people left numerous volumes in memoirs and correspondence discussing their actions and their motives, which Shaara put to good use; we can be fairly certain that whatever was really said at the battle of Gettysburg was not that far off from what Shaara had his characters say. This is in contrast to the events described in Martin Guerre. Neither Martin Guerre nor Beatrice nor Arnund actually left any written records. All that we have is a slim book written by the judge in that case, Jean de Coras, and also Gullaume Le Sueur’s Historia. We have little in the way of solid ground to portray their mindsets. As such anyone who would wish to tell their story is forced to rely on his or her own imagination.

To be fair to Davis, one could argue that unlike Killer Angels, Martin Guerre gives its sources and, unlike Shaara, Davis points out where historical evidence ends and her suppositions begin. My response would be that even if Shaara would have bothered to put out an annotated edition of his work, documenting his sources, pointing out to the reader where he had allowed his imagination to fill in the blanks and offering a defense of these intuitions, Killer Angels would still be considered historical fiction, albeit one that contained a useful “study guide” to the real events.

In the end, Martin Guerre, while it may not fit in as history, cannot merely be pushed aside as historical fiction. Davis may take too many liberties for it to be considered history yet Martin Guerre is not structured like a novel, it is too self-conscious; most of the work contains Davis’ surmises upon the events. Rather than either of these two categories, Martin Guerre should be viewed as a running commentary to a work of either history or historical fiction that unfortunately does not, as of yet, exist. In this sense, Davis has performed an admirable service for the student of history in that she has allowed the reader to get a glimpse into the thought processes of a genuinely talented historian and has offered an invaluable look at the thought processes, struggles and issues that go into writing genuine history.

[1] The type at least that honestly engages the issues instead of merely using real events as a background for the author’s fantasies.
[2] Davis pg. 28
[3] Davis pg. 21
[4] Davis pg. 28-29
[5] ibid pg. 34
[6] ibid pg. 31
[7] ibid pg. 44
[8] ibid
[9] Pasquier actually put out numerous editions of this work throughout his lifetime. The first edition was put out in 1560, this was followed by editions in 1596, 1607 and 1611, in which the author added large amounts of information to. The one Davis makes use of was published in 1621. (See http://www.historians.org/info/AHA_History/nzdavis.htm)

A Dastardly Plot to Get Me a Bride

As those who know me personally and those reading between the lines of my blog posts know, my recent attempts to get married have failed. Many months invested in wooing a girl have come to naught and I am now back to square one. An anecdote, I recently read, gives me hope of an alternative.

The prospective groom, ignorant of Hebrew, asked his friend to repeat the ritual formula (harei ‘ath mekuddesheth li = behold, you are sanctified unto me) at the ceremony. The friend did so and, taking advantage of the situation (and the young lady), claimed the woman as his legal wife. The community was dumbfounded, yet the woman remained his wife for many years and bore him a family. (Steven Bowman, the Jews of Byzantium pg. 123)

The gears turn in my brain and my fingers twirl in a Monty Burns sort of way. Excellent!


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All kidding aside, this story of a guy stealing his friend’s bride from under the wedding canopy is an example of where it may be appropriate to apply the Natalie Zemon Davis principle of history. While men are likely to portray women as passive figures in events, one cannot take this at face value. Davis' book, The Return of Martin Guerre, is about a man, Martin Guerre, who disappeared and abandoned his wife for twelve years. Eight years into his absence another man came and claimed to be Martin Guerre. This man, at least initially, was accepted by the family and by the wife, who bore him a daughter, as Martin Guerre. (Keep in mind that this story happened in sixteenth-century France. There were no photographs or dental records to go by.) Eventually, some people in the family started to question whether this man was who he claimed to be and took him to court. During the court case, all of a sudden, the real Martin Guerre came back. The imposter was executed and Martin Guerre resumed his position as husband and even became the father of the daughter of the fake him. The wife in the story seems to be a completely passive figure. She gets abandoned by her husband. She gets taken in by the imposter and, in the end, she gets taken back by her husband. Davis tries to argue that, in fact, the wife was more proactive than the sources, written by men, might suggest. Davis speculates that the wife was in on the imposture’s scheme and even helped him pull it off by providing him with the necessary information. While I think that Davis, feeling the need to push her feminist ideology, overstates her case, this book does raise valid methodological issues, which historians, no matter what their politics, need to consider.

As in the Martin Guerre story, the girl in our story seems to be completely passive. She is about to be married off to one man, but all of a sudden someone pulls this trick and claims her instead and she seems to go along with it. The fact that this girl, as far as we can tell, did not fight the issue is telling. She could have claimed that she did not attend to marry the friend. If that failed she could have fought for a divorce. She chose not to pursue these options. The fact that she made a choice makes her an active participant. Maybe she really wanted to marry the friend but was being pushed to marry the other person. So when she accepted she did so with the full intention of marrying the friend. She might have even been in on the scheme.

Abortion Rights Versus the Rights of Special Needs Children (and All Other Inconvenient Individuals)

Governor Sarah Palin, now John McCain’s vice presidential nominee, is the mother of a Down syndrome child, Trig. In keeping with her strong anti-abortion beliefs, she carried that child to term and did not get an abortion even though she knew she was carrying a child with Down syndrome. In her recent speech at the Republican National Convention, she spoke about her child and pledged herself to be an advocate for families of special needs children. One should not underestimate the value of such sentiments in terms of its crossover appeal. There are liberal parents out there with special needs children to whom Palin may hold an appeal.

The issues of abortion and the rights of people with special needs are connected in ways that are problematic for those who support abortion rights. (A group that I count myself as part of even if only as a very moderate member.) In the case of Down syndrome, it is now common practice to screen for it. As such future parents of Down syndrome children usually know beforehand and are left with a stark choice, to abort the fetus or take on a lifetime of special responsibilities. How many unborn children with Down syndrome are being aborted? I do not judge parents who make such a choice. That being said this sets a troubling precedent; it means that as a society we are willing to condone the removal of those who are inconvenient. To make matters more difficult, the more people decide to abort such inconveniences, the greater the burden will become for those who, like Palin, do not make such a choice. The fewer Down syndrome children out there the harder it will be to advocate for them. Also, the stigma attached to them and their families will increase. This creates a cycle; as the challenges of being a Down syndrome parent increases more parents will opt out and abort which will, in turn, increase the challenges for the remaining parents and cause them to also opt-out until there will be few to none willing to take on the burdens of being a parent of a Down syndrome child.

As technology advances, we are likely going to find genetic markers for other inconveniences. This will create similar scenarios. What will happen if a genetic marker for autism is found and fetuses could be tested for it before they are born? What about Asperger syndrome? On a purely emotional level, my reaction to the notion that unborn children would be aborted because they have Asperger syndrome is that I would want those responsible, both the doctor and the mother, to be frog-marched directly to jail to do hard time. There is no way I could allow myself to stand back and allow myself to commit personality trait suicide. If there is going to be a future for people with Asperger syndrome then those with Asperger syndrome are going to need to be protected not just from birth but also from conception.

What would happen if they found a way to screen for homosexuality? Could the gay community stand back and allow themselves to be destroyed? Clearly, they would have to fight back and this would put them up against feminists. So much for NOWs pretense that women’s rights and gay rights are one and the same thing.

Contrary to traditional pro-choice rhetoric, there is more to abortion than a woman having control over her own body. There are many different things at stake amongst them is how, as a society, we are going to deal with people deemed inconvenient. In the end, abortion has the potential to split apart the left and change liberalism as we know it.

The Democratic party has good reason to fear Sarah Palin.

To Whom May Quaker Women be Compared to?

Phyllis Mack’s book, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England, is a study of female prophets and visionaries in seventeenth century England. The majority of the book focuses on the early Quaker movement in which women, such as Margaret Fell, played highly public roles. Mack was one of the pioneers of the modern study of prophetic figures. She is not concerned with such issues as whether the individuals she deals with were fakers or insane. Her focus is on placing the people she studies within their given social context; how did such people fit into society and how do they shed light on the world that they lived in.

Mack is also not particularly concerned with issues of feminism. Her book is not about whether these women were fighting patriarchy or submitting to it. Mack eschews such rigid bifurcations. She recognizes that these operated within a very specific context and used it for their own purpose. As such there is a give and take here. We are dealing with a traditional patriarchal society, but the discourse of this same patriarchal society could also be used to suit the purposes of women.

Mack compares her Quaker women to Orthodox Jews. “Like the orthodox matron presiding over her Sabbath table, their [the Quakers’] religious expressiveness emanated from a female identity that was both personalized and traditional.” (pg. 238) Just as Orthodox Jewish women are capable of using the context of a patriarchal religion such as Orthodox Judaism to fashion their own unique identity, outside of masculine control, so too did women in the early Quaker movement use the context of Seventeenth Century Christian thought to fashion an identity that was outside of masculine control.

Sex and the City and Feminist Hypocrisy

As I mentioned in my last post, I, along with a significant proportion of the male population, have never seen the show Sex and the City. I, therefore, have no opinion, good or ill, of the show and, as such, will not be commenting on it. What I do find interesting is the show's status as a major cultural phenomenon. Not to take anything away from what Dr. Lipstadt said about the show's emphasis on friendship, but most of what I have read about the show has dealt with it from the perspective of female empowerment.

Sex and the City (See also here.) starred four beautiful women, dressed in the latest fashions, who, when it came to men, possessed the upper hand and dealt with them on their own terms. Carrie and her friends went out with men, invited men back to their flats, they slept with them as they wished and sent these men off as it suited their fancy. This was seen by feminists as a form of virtue, something to be praised. Even if the world of Sex and the City had little to do with the reality faced by ordinary women, it offered its female viewers a fantasy they could slip into for an hour.

Far be it from me to deny women such a fantasy. The male version of this fantasy, where immaculately dressed men get to sleep with beautiful women, who throw themselves at them, and leave these women as it suits their fancy, is a major pillar of western literature. This theme unites classical heroes, such as Odysseus and Aeneas, with modern action heroes, such as James Bond.

The problem, though, with this male fantasy is that, as modern feminism has taught us, it is sexist. Modern feminism teaches that such depictions of women as objects that can be used and tossed away at will are demeaning to women. It creates a social ideal in which women have no value outside of their bodies. These depictions of women encourage men, even subconsciously to view women as lesser beings. Worse, women themselves come to internalize such depictions of themselves and come to view themselves as lesser beings, without any intrinsic self-worth, fit only to be helpmates of their men. While I may gripe about this and think that the hunt for negative stereotypes throughout literature, at the heart of feminist deconstruction, is a bit of overkill, I am willing to concede that feminists have a valid point. As such I believe that I, as a classical liberal, committed to defending the intrinsic self-worth of all human beings, must do my part to uproot sexism wherever I see it even to search into my own heart and ask some tough questions about the nature of my own biases, even unconscious ones.

I would not object if women had embraced this show as a satire on male chauvinism, viewing it, in the spirit of Lysistrata, as a reversal of the traditional dynamics of male/female relationships. When I embraced J. S. Mill and the cause of women's equality I did not sign a blank check for anti-male sexism. One feels like the pious individual who followed the advice of his preacher and scaled back on his home improvements only to find his preacher moving into a multi-million dollar home in the suburbs; in other words, betrayed and played for a fool.

If ever men and women in this society are going to achieve a healthy state of affairs in their relationship to each other there is going to need to be an honest discourse about gender. We need to move beyond feminists browbeating men for their sexism and how they must atone for it. If men and women are going to be equal members of society then they have to take equal responsibility for that society and hold themselves to an equal standard. That means that women, as well as men, are going to have to examine their own biases and ask some difficult questions. Feminists are going to need to kneel at the altar of atonement and say: Forgive us Mother for we have sinned.

Deborah Lipstadt on Sex and the City and Friendship

Deborah Lipstadt is a personal hero of mine and a model for the sort of historian I want to be. Her book, History on Trial, chronicling her legal struggle with Holocaust denier David Irving is a must read for anyone who wants to understand what it means to be an objective historian. Recently, on her blog, she took a step away from her usual discussions of Holocaust denial, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism to comment about the recently released Sex and the City film. She counts herself as one amongst the show’s legions of female fans. In particular she admires the show for the strong friendships it depicts amongst its lead characters. Having never seen the show or the film, I am neither for nor against it; it may be a brilliant show and, even if it is not, Dr. Lipstadt is entitled to her frivolous fun.

What I found disturbing about Dr. Lipstadt’s comments was that she then turned it into a feminist attack on men. According to Dr. Lipstadt: “Most men don't have friends like that. They may have sports or poker buddies but they don't have friends who understand them to the depths of their hearts.” Dr. Lipstadt goes on to attack how the media portrayed Sen. Hillary Clinton in her recent presidential campaign. Dr. Lipstadt remarks:

Just as men don't get the essence of friendship. The men just don't get how mad so many women are about the treatment meted out to Hillary Clinton. The comments about her whining, her shrillness, her pantsuits, her ankles, her voice, her laugh.... None of the things we have heard about male candidates. Does anyone know how Obama, McCain, or any of the other close to a dozen men laugh? What their ankles look like?

I see this as a excellent example of how the hypocrisy of modern feminism can poison people, who are, in all other respects, rational individuals. Maybe I missed something, but, from my reading of feminist literature and the tolerance seminar I was forced to take before coming to Ohio State, I was under the impression that it would be sexist, and therefore wrong, of me to say something like: "Women do not get the essence of friendship. All they have are people to shop and gossip with." Why are Dr. Lipstadt’s words not sexist as well?

If anyone is interested in learning more about this strange concept of male friendship, I would suggest that you read C.S Lewis' essay on friendship in his book the Four Loves. While you are on the subject, may I also recommend Cicero's famous work, De Amicitia. Over the past few thousand years of Western Civilization, a fair amount has been written on the topic of close male friendship. As a man I can point to the models of Achilles and Patrolocus from the Iliad, Roland and Oliver of the Song of Roland and Lord of the Rings’ Sam and Frodo as models of male friendship. Dr. Lipstadt holds up Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte and seems to think that she has some sort of moral high ground. Something about that strikes me as off.

Just to be clear about this issue; the charge of sexism is not particularly important to me. What I care about are things like tribalism, to use Karl Popper’s term, and, most importantly, hypocrisy. Modern feminism, from what I have seen, seems to think that their standards only apply to men; there is no sense of self reflection. This is not very different from religious fundamentalists, who see themselves as the paragons of moral virtue sent to set the rest of the sinful society straight. At the very least our modern day Christian fundamentalists have the tradition of Paul, Augustine, Luther and Calvin to remind them of the utter sinfulness of all mankind, women as well, to keep them in line.

To turn the tables on Dr. Lipstadt, I would see her post is a good example of how many feminists seem to fail to understand what bothers so many men about Hillary and her campaign. As a man living in the early 21st century, I accept that sexism is wrong and that I need to think in larger terms than my male brotherhood. Not that men are perfect in this regard but at least they have a concept of not being sexist toward women.

John McCain and Barack Obama are not running as men. Hillary ran as a woman. Why should any man have trusted Hillary to think in larger terms than her female sisterhood? As long as women are not trained like men to avoid sexism and think outside of the tribalism of their female sisterhood than it is going to be very difficult to for women to be elected to public office.

A Suggested Reworking of the Magic Flute so not to Offend Feminist Ears (Part II)

(This concludes an earlier post. See here.)

Despite the Magic Flute's Enlightenment sentiments, it does not take a great leap of the imagination to see certain highly patriarchal themes within the story. The world of the Queen of the Night, consisting of women, is the evil side, while the very masculine side of Sarastro is considered to be good. In fact, the librettist, Emanuel Schikaneder, was actually quite explicit on this issue. Sarastro, numerous times, declares that the darkness represented by the Queen of the Night is the result of allowing a woman to rule without the oversight of a man. Having a woman rule is against nature and results in chaos and obscuration. What is needed is for a man to rule. Only then can law and reason be maintained.

The fact that such an Enlightenment piece could build itself around the concept that women need to be kept under the authority of men, should not be a shock to any reader of Rousseau. According to Rousseau, democratic rule necessitated that women be kept out of power. Women represent autocracy and the rule of the passions. Men represent democracy and the rule of reason. (See Sarah Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Celebres in Pre-Revolutionary France.)

Considering all this, I was thinking that we can redeem this “sexist” play simply by understanding it as a tragedy. Here is the real story that Mozart and his sexist cronies wanted to hide from us. The Queen of the Night rules over a happy feminist kingdom, in which men are not needed and are not allowed. Sarastro, though, tricks her daughter, Pamina to abandon her mother’s feminist paradise for his so-called Temple of Light, which is a seminary devoted to advancing the cause of patriarchal tyranny. He fills her head with thoughts of marriage and religion. He tells her that, by submitting to the patriarchal institution of marriage, she can find completion in this life. Also, he initiates her into the service of Isis and Osiris, which obviously represent the veneration of Mary and Jesus. Pamina learns that a woman should be like the Virgin Mary; she should submit herself to the whims of a patriarchal god and help bring forth the embodiment of patriarchal authority into the world. Next, she must stand idly by as the patriarchal values of blood, sacrifice and suffering are enshrined as unchallengeable religious dogmas.

The Queen of the Night, desperate to save her daughter, enlists the help of a Tamino, who, despite the fact that he is a man, seems to be an open-minded individual. He does not seek patriarchal rule but romantic love. Neither Tamino nor the Queen of the Night realize that romantic love is merely a cover for patriarchy; this is their tragic flaw. The audience is shown early on, through the character of Papageno, that romantic love necessarily leads to patriarchy. Papageno also sings of romantic love, but his idea of romance is catching women and putting them in cages.

Meanwhile, Sarastro’s Moorish servant, Monostatos, having rejected the patriarchal values of his master, who had enslaved him, and embraced the tolerance of Islam that he practiced in his youth, tries to open up Pamina’s eyes to the true nature of Sarastro’s patriarchy, but she will not listen. He tries to get her to love him, but, having absorbed racism as well as sexism from Sarastro, she turns him down.

When Tamino comes to rescue Pamina, he is caught by Sarastro. Sarastro reveals to him the true patriarchal foundations of romantic love. Tamino cannot resist the allure of patriarchy and submits himself to Sarastro’s teaching, much like Anakin Skywalker in Revenge of the Sith submits himself to the teachings of Chancellor Palpatine. The Queen of the Night makes one desperate last attempt to ward off the forces of patriarchy. Even though Monostatos comes to her aid, her forces prove unable to overcome the full force of Sarastro’s patriarchy once it is unleashed and all is lost. As the opera ends, Pamina believes that she is going to enter wedded bliss. The audience is shown, though, throw the use of Papageno and Papageno what fate really awaits her; a life of putting out babies without the barest hint of family planning.

There is a serious issue to be confronted here. I once went to a production of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing and the program explained that Shakespeare used this play to attack traditional concepts of hierarchy and gender roles. While I do believe that much of Shakespeare’s work is quite subversive and that Shakespeare had a keen understanding as to the role of hierarchy and gender in society, his work is hardly twenty-first-century college campus liberalism. This is particularly ridiculous as, unlike plays such as Twelfth Night and Merchant of Venice, Much Ado about Nothing has nothing directly to do with gender; the play has no women dressing up as men or vice versa. The implication of this is that the only way Shakespeare can be performed is if we pretend that all the politically incorrect material is not there. If political correctness has come to this than the arts are in serious trouble.

While Ohio State’s production of Magic Flute changed Monostatos from a Moor to a white man in Gothic clothing (Why is there no Gothic Anti-Defamation League to sue people for this?), the production still kept Mozart’s sexism and allowed us to see it in all of its glory. I congratulate them for doing something honestly controversial. They are truly standing in the frontlines of artistic freedom.

We are Going to Do Feminism Like It Is 1895: A Review of the Gemma Doyle Trilogy (Part III)

(This is the conclusion of a series of earlier posts. See here and here.) 

While Libba Bray manages to treat the Victorian world fairly, there is an issue, that Bray jumps around, that I wish she had dealt with directly. While the Victorian world, which Gemma and her friends struggle against, might be highly patriarchal and demand absolute conformity, this same world is also offering them a life of luxury, the likes of which few in that time period could even dream about; this is a life that Gemma and her friends have not earned by any merit of theirs nor would they likely be able to gain it through their own efforts. As such they lack the moral ground with which to challenge the Victorian world. They have little in the way of marketable skills; if they had to earn their own way they would likely find themselves with the factory girls they so pity. While most of the men in these books, with a few exceptions, speak of women in ways that would make moderns blush, the men have a point. Most of the women are in fact little better than grown-up children, to be kept as pets, but not to be taken too seriously. Any attempt to argue for women’s equality in such a world would find itself up against a catch-22. Women, in this time period, are inferior. With some few exceptions, there are no female doctors and lawyers nor are there many women with more than a very elementary education. As such women are not in a position to position to demand access to power or even access to the means to gain power, such as higher education and professional careers. With nothing to bargain with, women have no choice but to submit to patriarchal power and must make do with whatever scraps men choose to throw at them. I would have loved it if Bray would have given a character like Mrs. Nightwing a speech like this to unload on Gemma with, challenging her to earn her ability to challenge the world around her. This would set the stage for what Gemma does at the end of the trilogy, providing her motivation. (Do not worry. I will not spoil the ending.) The books do have one weakness; they tend to wander quite a bit, without anything actually happening. Bray, in ways that are reminiscent of J.K Rowling, likes to have her characters wandering about Spence Academy and the Realms, trying to figure out what the larger story is. This becomes a particular problem with The Sweet Far Thing. It is 819 pages long, nearly double Great and Terrible Beauty’s 416 pages and still significantly longer than Rebel Angels’ 592 pages. The reader spends The Sweet Far Thing waiting for the final climactic battle with the forces of the Winterlands. While the climax has its share of interesting moments, along with a few tragic ones, the whole affair seems to go off as a whimper. Circe, the chief villain of series, proves to be an intriguing and nuanced character; it is a pity, though, that Bray does not do more with her. The Sweet Far Thing’s ability to go hundreds of pages without any important plot developments reminds me of the Order of the Phoenix. The difference, though, is that Rowling possessed a singular ability to keep a reader enthralled in her work; the world of Harry Potter was interesting in of itself. No matter what else may have been happening, I loved reading about Harry, Ron and Hermione. Bray, for all of her talent, lacks Rowling’s ability to be able to get away with having nothing happen. Even Rowling had difficulty keeping Order of the Phoenix afloat, Bray fails. I could happily read Rowling simply for the sake of reading Rowling, I do not love Bray to that extent. Ultimately the Sweet Far Thing should not have been more than six hundred pages; the story could have easily been told in four hundred pages. Despite the Sweet Far Thing's failings, the Gemma Doyle trilogy is a very worthwhile read. I believe that the Orthodox audience would particularly enjoy these books; they are in a unique situation to appreciate the struggles of living within a highly structured environment and the various nuances that come out of such a world.

We are Going to Do Feminism Like It Is 1895: A Review of the Gemma Doyle Trilogy (Part II)

(This is the continuation of an earlier post. See here.)

In my mind, these books are everything that feminist literature should be. Without a question, the issue underlying the series is female empowerment and Bray makes no apologies for it. Gemma and her friends, as women, live in a world in which they have few choices and little control over their lives. The Realms offer them a world in which they have power and the possibility of being able to change the course of their lives back home.

Bray is not defending the Victorian world nor is she trying to turn back the clock. She manages, though, to bring a level of nuance that one does not usually find in literature dealing with women’s issues. There is more to her feminism than pontificating about the plight of women struggling against the tyranny of patriarchy. Bray does not feel the need to preach or pass judgment against the Victorian world. In ways that are very reminiscent of Elizabeth Peters’ Amelia Peabody series, Bray is willing to accept the Victorian world for what it was, warts and all, and instead of mocking it, she has fun with it.

Bray has no interest in polemicizing against men; these books do not break down into intelligent and open-minded women going up against the men, who are all stupid and bigoted. Take for example Gemma’s older brother, Tom; he can be an idiot at times, but Bray manages to keep him genuinely likable. Gemma’s love interest, an Indian boy named Kartik, is a very interesting character. Bray is willing to allow him to be Gemma’s equal, instead of turning him into a male version of a damsel in distress. In truth, the main enforcers of patriarchy in these books are not the men but the women, particularly such characters as Spence’s headmistress, Mrs. Nightwing, Gemma’s grandmother, Mrs. William Doyle, and Lady Denby. Ultimately the message here to women is not that men have wronged them and they have the right to demand their due; instead the books ask women to look inward and ask themselves if they are the cause of their own oppression and, more importantly, how are they, as women, going to take the initiative and solve the problems that face them.

I think the reason for Bray’s success in this matter lies in the fact that she not only writes good fantasy but good historical fiction as well. She has created characters that are true to the time period. Her characters do not break down into the rational, intelligent, modern sounding characters and their bigoted intolerant opponents who are essentially straw-men of premodern modes of thought. Gemma does not come across as a modern feminist in a corset; she believably inhabits the world she lives in. She is not striving to prove that she is the equal of men or that she should be able to be a doctor, lawyer or even the Prime Minister just like a man. It is not that she even rejects her world; she is simply someone who finds herself desiring to have more options and struggles with the implications of this desire. One suspects that Gemma would not fit into the modern world. She still wants and needs the structure of the Victorian world, even if it is simply a moderated version of it.

The character who is closest to modern feminism is Felicity. In a Great and Terrible Beauty, she already has gotten involved with a gypsy youth. In Rebel Angels she experiments with going to a ball in a gown with a plunging neckline. By the time we reach The Far Sweet Thing, she is dreaming of going off to Paris, wearing breeches and working as a model. There is even a hint of a lesbian relationship between her and Pippa. Bray, though, conceives Felicity’s “feminism” not as an intellectual or moral struggle against the forces of oppression, but as Felicity being a brat. Felicity is the sort of character who does whatever she wants; damn the consequences to her or anyone else. This is one of the reasons why she is such a fun character and why we love her, but Bray never tries to imbue Felicity with any sort of moral authority. Instead, she ingeniously uses Felicity to turn tables on modern feminism and mock them in turn.

It does not take a whole lot of imagination to realize how the real-life equivalents of Gemma and her friends would lead to modern feminism. Even Ann, the Neville Longbottom of the group, is, by The Sweet Far Thing, working on becoming a professional actress. It is an interesting question to speculate whether the rise of modern feminism was the inevitable result of the women’s movements of the nineteenth century, but at best this could only have been seen in hindsight. The real-life equivalents of Gemma and her friends could not have conceived that they were a movement, where this movement was heading and if they did they would not have necessarily approved of it.

(To be continued …)

We are Going to Do Feminism Like It Is 1895: A Review of the Gemma Doyle Trilogy (Part I)

This past summer a girl, that I was going out with, recommended that, since I, like her, was a Twilight fan, I should try Libba Bray’s A Great and Terrible Beauty (GTB). The date proved to be lousy, but the book proved to be a wonderful suggestion. Captured by its sharp, tongue and cheek wit and its parade of references to classical literature and poetry, I quickly read A Great and Terrible Beauty along with its sequel, Rebel Angels, and waited until the end of December for the final book in the series, A Sweet Far Thing, to come out. The lesson from this, I think, is that a good book is worth a bad date. The Gemma Doyle Trilogy is a work of historical fiction/fantasy about a nineteenth century English girl who attends a girl’s finishing school near London called Spence Academy. Gemma grew up in India as the daughter of an English official but is sent to Spence soon after her mother, Virginia Doyle, dies under mysterious circumstances. While the official story, which is put out, is that she died of cholera, Gemma saw her, in a vision, stab herself in order not to be captured by a dark creature, sent by someone named Circe in order to capture her. (I do love a book that is not afraid to kill of characters.) Gemma has to balance her visions, her attempts to come to terms with them and their implications with life at Spence. At Spence girls are fashioned into young ladies fit to play their role in high society, which is to marry well, run a household and bear children who can carry on the glory of the British Empire. This is the world of upper class Victorian England; a place in which absolute conformity is demanded and even the slightest act of deviance can destroy one’s reputation. Not that everyone actually plays by the rules; what matters is the appearance of conformity. Gemma quickly befriends Ann Bradshaw, a poor scholarship student, who is an even bigger misfit in this school than Gemma. The two of them have to take on Felicity Worthington and her followers, Pippa Cross, Cecily Temple and Elizabeth Pool. One of the things that I really loved about this series though is that despite Felicity’s Draco Malfoy like character, Bray does not simply keep her as an antagonist. Felicity and Pippa actually end up, by the middle of GTB, becoming good friends with Gemma and Ann. Not that Felicity really reforms; she remains her arrogant, cruel manipulative self, but she is quite lovable in her own way. She may be a vicious snake, but she is our vicious snake. Pippa also is a great character. Not to give anything away, but Bray does some very interesting things with her. One of the weaknesses of the Harry Potter series was that, up until the Half-Blood Prince, Rowling never tried to make Draco Malfoy likable or particularly effective as an antagonist to Harry. There could have been something very attractive about Draco. He has Crabbe and Goyle to protect him from any of the students. He has Severus Snape to protect him from any of the teachers. And if he gets into some real trouble he always has his father, Lucius Malfoy, to protect him from the Ministry of Magic. This boy is untouchable and he can do whatever he wants; who would not want to be him. Gemma, Ann, Felicity and Pippa form a club centered on a diary, which Gemma discovered by following one of her visions. This diary was written by a former student at Spence named Mary Dowd. From the diary the girls learn about a magical world, the Realms, and a group of powerful women, the Order, which maintained order within the realms. Gemma soon discovers that, in addition to her visions, she also has the ability to enter the Realms and even bring people with her. Here Gemma and her friends experience a world unlike the Victorian England they know, a world in which they have power. Needless to say, with the discovery of the Realms Gemma and her friends have far more to worry about than tea and dances. Particularly once Circe and the forces of the Winterlands come after them. (To be continued …)

All the Worlds a Stage in Which the Men are Mere Puppets of the Women Around Them: A Book Review of the Constant Princess by Philippa Gregory

The Constant Princess tells the story of Catherine of Aragon, the youngest daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella and wify number one of Henry VIII. (This is the wife which Henry had to make his own church in order to divorce her.) Catherine definitely had an interesting life story and in the hands of a more capable writer, this could have been a worthwhile book. She was originally betrothed to Henry’s older brother Arthur. Soon after she arrived from Spain though, Arthur, one fine day, suddenly dropped dead. (This tended to happen a lot in premodern Europe.) So what to do with this sixteen-year-old Spanish princess sitting in your kingdom with a fat dowry attached to her? Well Henry VII, using impeccable medieval political logic, decided to not send her home and instead decided to have her marry Arthur’s little brother Henry, who was six years younger than her. This required special papal dispensation from the Pope. This becomes important later on because when Henry VIII tried to divorce her he argued that he should have never been given the dispensation to marry Catherine in the first place. (Henry VIII can serve as a wonderful model to us Jews as to how to shop for heterim. I ask my Rav for a heter to marry my brother’s wife. Then I ask the Rav to say that he never should have given me the heter in the first place and that I am free to marry my pregnant mistress. When the Rav refuses to give me the heter to annul his earlier heter, I simply form my own shul make myself my own Rav and give myself all the heterim I want.)
The problem with this book is that it is a feminist fruvel (frum novel). As with Jewish fruvels, all pretenses of plot, narrative, and character are sacrificed for one very noble goal, the declaration of the superiority of the given group over everyone else. In this case, the group in question are women. The whole book is premised on the notion that men are stupid, lecherous and easily manipulated, particularly if they are European, white and Christian. It is the women who are in control of everything. Isabella is the ruler of Castile and Aragon and the commander in chief of its armies. Ferdinand is that nice boy who helps out mainly by staying out of the way. Henry VII is a smelly, patriarchal barbarian who has to constantly fight to suppress the overwhelming desire to rape his daughter in law. The court is run by his mother Margaret, who we are told, placed Henry VII on the throne and for all intents and purposes is the ruler of England. Margaret is a villain of sorts in this story in that she is the primary adversary of Catherine through much of the book but this is also in keeping with the book’s ideology. In this matriarchal world in which men are in essence incapable of putting on their own trousers without some women’s help, it only makes sense that Catherine’s main adversary would be a woman; a man would not have the necessary control over his own circumstances to qualify as a decent villain. The most positive male character in the entire book is Arthur and his main virtues are that he agrees with Catherine that England is completely uncivilized and that he promises to implement all of Catherine’s proposed reforms and make England a more enlightened place. Even he is incapable of having an independent thought. Arthur and Catherine are lovers but when Arthur dies Catherine, acting upon Arthur's dying wish, claims that the marriage was never consummated and that she is still a virgin. Henry VIII is an arrogant clod whose only real talents seem to be jousting and archery. He is incapable of doing anything right and leaves the kingdom to Catherine's very capable hands.
The climax of the book is when Catherine saves England from Scotland. She does this by getting Henry VIII to participate in a campaign against the French. With Henry safely out of the way, Catherine personally leads the English army to war against the Scots and single-handedly crushes them at the battle of Flodden.
I have no objection to writings books with strong female characters that are in control over their own destiny. The moment one starts to write a book simply for the purpose of having strong female characters one has stopped writing literature and has started to write propaganda.