AmbivaBlog

Is "The Dangerous Book for Boys" Dangerous for Girls? [UPDATED AGAIN]

This book about reminding boys how to be boys has been much discussed lately at Instapundit, Althouse (where they're discussing the discussion), on Rush Limbaugh (where you'd need to be a card-carrying $59.95-a-year dittohead to access The Emasculating of America), etc. etc. etc.

Don't get me wrong -- I'm all for it.  All for boys being boys in the ancient and honorable way.  I think this book is a great thing.  It's #4 on Amazon right now, and a good thing too.

I'm just worried about its shadow companion volume: "The Harmless, Helpless, Demure Book for Girls."

People who acknowledge boys' need for rough-and-tumble, acted-out fantasy adventure, invention, skill, and physical risk have an alarming tendency to want to set up an opposite for girls -- necessary, it's implied, to help boys define what it is to be a boy -- that involves playing house, doll tea sets, frilly clothes, and a lot of domestic and social sitting around.   

Now, a lot of girls may well be into a lot of that, some of the time.  However, the ones I've known have also, without exception, been into running around like maniacs, riding bikes, climbing trees, getting dirty, sledding, hanging upside down from the jungle gym . . . even the odd acted-out fantasy adventure.  Unless, that is, they were taught that they mustn't. 

Like in the Fifties.  All the prohibitions that broke my tomboy friend "Missy's" heart (why'd they give her that nickname, anyway?).  And no, she wasn't masculinized by hormonal anomalies in the womb, nor is she gay.  She just wanted to play football.  Today she's an accomplished artist who works on a large scale, and the mother of a grown son.  (I'd love to link to her website, but I'm not sure she wants these childhood secrets out there.) (UPDATE:  She says OK!  Jo Ann Rothschild is a powerful abstract artist, and she has an excellent website -- very much worth a look, including a time-lapse view of the (re)making of a painting.)

When we were about 5, we used to play Roy Rogers and Dale Evans.  She was Roy Rogers, I was Dale Evans.  (She recently sent me a "Happy Trails to You" birthday card.)  A few years later, though, I wanted to be Robin Hood for Hallowe'en.  Maid Marian's life was way too boring, just sitting around in a skirt braiding her hair and waiting for Robin to get back from the woods.  I wanted to be in the woods.

Here's a comment I posted today on Sippican Cottage that pretty much says it:

The one thing that scares me about the "Dangerous Book for Boys" movement (much discussed on Instapundit, Althouse, etc.) is that they're going to put girls back in the opposite box with the dolls and the tea parties. They're always confusing activity with aggression.  Watch puppies or kittens:  they all play wildly.  The males just play-fight more.  Just because it may be easier for girls to sit still doesn't mean they want to, or should.

According to Amazon.com, the book has a "small but wise" chapter for girls.  Since I don't have the book and it isn't searchable, I don't know whether this chapter meets my objections.  It very well may.  I hope so.

UPDATE:  Someone's already coming out this fall with The Daring Book for Girls, and in the Amazon discussion forum there's already an absurd feminist objection to the different title. Anything but a straight-up duplicate is declared demeaning:

Why is the girls version titled The 'Daring' Book for Girls rather than 'Dangerous' like the boys? Is it because the authors are trying to instill an assumption about gender roles here.

The answer is-yes. [...]

Because if the book is supposed to be an equal copy of the boys edition it should be labeled the same, except with girls in the title rather than boy. [...]
No one has the right to title a book to demean the gender who buys it. 'Why,' would a girl ask, 'is the boys dangerous, and mine only danger?'
Would you rather be an active verb like dangerous, or only the possibility of action like danger. [sic]

'I'm a dangerous person.' (this is an active, possessive description)
'There could be danger,' or 'I'm in danger.' (passive, insinuating a possible outcome, but not stating it.)
Notice how this is gender indocrinative.

"Gender indocrinative"!  (Maybe she was trying to say something about hormones -- endocrinative?)  I always have trouble believing that these people really exist; I think they're really sock puppets for The Onion.  Oh well, I see that this one, govagabndgrl from Pueblo, Colorado, is either dyslexic or so blinded by rage that she can't read:  she has read "daring" as "danger," a near anagram.  Dangir.  Dangirl.  Go, Vagabond Girl, who just added to her wish list One of the Guys:  Women as Aggressors and Torturers!

In the user forum for The Dangerous Book for Boys, meanwhile, male readers are complaining that this book gets criticized by feminists while books exclusively for girls are approved of. 

If there has to be a copycat book for girls, "daring" is fine with me; in fact, just about perfect.  But why does there have to be a copycat book at all?  Leave this phenomenon alone, let boys enjoy it and thrive on it, as long as pushing girls back to the other extreme is not part of the program.  I note that a number of people are cheerfully buying The Dangerous Book for Boys for their daughters, and why not?  Girls will pick out from it the stuff that interests them. 

I'm from the martial-arts world, where the difference between men and women is very clear, and what they share is also stripped bare.  Most men, even slight ones, are built for fighting in a way most women are not.  They're heavier-boned and -muscled, more explosively strong, have chests as smooth as shields.  And they're interested in fighting in a visceral, instinctual way women are not.   

A lot of women want to fight full-contact these days, like they want to box.  But it means something different to them than it means to guys. 

1. It means fighting for equality -- in the wrong arena, if you ask me, but what the hell.  They're not competing directly with men.
2. It means learning to be able to protect yourself if you have to, and not to be afraid.  (In that regard, getting hit was as important to me as learning to hit.  If you think getting hit is the end of the world, you're going to freeze with terror if someone attacks you.)
3. And it means demonstrating equality in spiritual virtues such as courage and perseverance, which are ultimately genderless, but which had become (pre-1970) so exclusively claimed by men and so entwined with men's physical challenges that women want to test and prove their spirit by the same standard.

But those are all secondary motivations, less rooted in biology.  (I'm not sure about #2.  Fierce self-defense might actually be an aspect of female biology that has been sexually selected and trained out of women by men, because it would make us less dependent and harder to control.)  Combat and risk -- physical, political, intellectual -- are primary for men, because their mission is to protect, to put themselves in the way of danger.  Allure and maternity are primary for women.  That still leaves an enormous amount of human forebrain territory -- including exploration and inquiry and challenge and creation -- that is of great interest to both.

UPDATE II:  In the Comments, Danny Miller made the interesting suggestion that I actually write "The Harmless, Helpless, Demure Book for Girls."  It seems as if James Thurber beat me to it:

Thurber and White (Is Sex Necessary? ""Claustrophobia, or What Every Young Wife Should Know'', 1929) [...] write :

"Freedom is as essential and as primary an urge with a man as the loss of it is with a woman. A man grows up with the desire to be free and unfettered. The boy of six wants to play outside the house all the time. He doesn't even want to come into the house for his meals. On the other hand, little girls like to be in the house as much as they can. When dusk falls, the little boys are restless and under the urge to be several blocks away, playing Go, Sheepy, Go, but the little girls want to be home putting their dolls to bed. Usually at least one of the dolls is ill and needs constant attention. Often it is necessary to force little girls to go outside and get some air and exercise, just as it is frequently necessary to use force to get little boys _into_ the house. And even when girls go outdoors, they have to be watched like a hawk or they will be playing house in the dog box or under the cellar door."

From a comment by rh hardin at Althouse.  And in another comment by the same:

The difference in what sustains the interests of men and women respectively [...] is more interesting, and has all sorts of effects.

Exactly the kind of creeping assumption I'm afraid of.  I'm not saying there is no difference.  I'm saying the assumptions about what the difference is, at the girl end, are insidious and noxious. And, on some semiconscious level, aimed at getting women back under control and stuffing us back inside an exclusive support-and-nurture function.

Tapas for Shoppas.

Free samples.

It's a gracious Southern custom, I've discovered.  Every supermarket here, including Whole Foods, features (has to, to stay competitive with whoever started it) little plastic domes protecting sliced strawberries, or cubes of cheese, or tufts of muffin in little paper cups, or a tub of guacamole ringed by tortilla chips.   Harris Teeter has free cookies  ("One per person, please") and baskets of cut-up breads with crocks of butter or black olive tapenade to smear on them.  Whole Foods always has an open container of hummus with a bowl of pita chips and an assortment of cheeses that must have been minced by obsessive-compulsive midgets.  [Don't worry, I'll give to little-people and OCD organizations to buy my politically-incorrect offsets.] Toothpicks to sample them sanitarily with, a wastebasket for the toothpicks (I just stick mine jauntily in my teeth), cherry pits, and tiny paper cups from the occasional wine-tasting.

It's one of my furtive pleasures, on my brief trips out of the house, to roam around and sample everything.  And I'm obviously not the only one.  Everybody enjoys this little freebie, which feels simultaneously like getting away with something and being acknowledged and cherished for your  service.  You can literally make a meal of it, and there are plainly poor people in the store for whom this is not just a luxury but a necessity.  Some days I'm almost one of them.  It's the only way I allow myself to eat cherries, which are $8 a pound now.

It's an excellent marketing technique.  I've bought flatbread pizza and yellow Mexican mangoes and a cheese called Parrano ("a Gouda that tastes like Parmesan") because I tasted them and was hooked.  But it's also a shrewdly placed pleasure in the midst of drudgery.  I don't get out to restaurants, and so, I realized today, this is my tapas.

"Obama the Hawk?"

Kevin Sullivan weighs the evidence.

Hate to say I told you so.

"Every Movie Marketer's Worst Nightmare"

Ouch!

Michael Moore's "Sicko," scheduled for theatrical release June 29, has been pirated onto the Web, and is readily available for free download "on sites like BitTorrent, as well as peer to peer content sites like www.thepiratebay.org and blogspot."  From Advertising Age:

If the breach is as wide as it appears -- and this reporter downloaded a copy and watched it late Thursday night with ease -- Moore, and his distributor, The Weinstein Company, have a every film maker's worst marketing nightmare on their hands -- how to persuade people to go to the theater to see a show that's available free on the Internet. (Officials at the Weinstein Company were unavailable for comment late Thursday evening.)

Some bloggers who might be defenders of almost any other creator's intellectual-property rights are apparently taking a gleeful "live by the anti-corporate sword, die by the anti-corporate sword" attitude in Moore's case:

[T]he blogosphere isn't reacting to the leak with anything approaching apolitical neutrality: One pirate link encouraged potential downloaders to view the film online saying,"Watch this free copy and keep $ out of that fat f-cks hands."

A poster on Digg wrote:

One has to even wonder if Michael Moore cares. Something tells me he'd rather see change in the health care system, however, his distributor might not be too happy.

Especially since

This is the second pre-release leak in a month of a film from Lionsgate Studios.

WWMMS?  MooreWatch, which boasts on its masthead Moore's own description of it as "the biggesttanti-Michael Moore website on the internet," boasted three years ago of being a major enabler of the downloading of "Fahrenheit 9/11," and says it's just taking Moore at his own word:

In an interview, Mr. Moore compared file-sharing of copyright movies to friends lending one another purchased DVDs.

“I don’t agree with copyright laws,” he said, “and I don’t have a problem with people downloading the movie and sharing it ... as long as they’re not trying to make a profit off my labor.”

Shades of Abbie Hoffman's Steal This Book?!

That was all his political enemies at MooreWatch.com needed to hear. In hopes of denting Mr. Moore’s box office profits, the Web site’s manager decided to help people download free copies.

But rather than simply posting one huge pirated version of the movie for everyone to fight over, MooreWatch.com’s backers used the power of BitTorrent to distribute tens of thousands of Fahrenheits in a faster, more efficient manner. All they had to do was link to a tiny .torrent file to get the whole thing started.

Three years being an eternity in tech time, I can only imagine that the procedure has been greatly streamlined.  It will be interesting to hear Moore's reaction.

"It's probably a smart idea to wear dark pants, and bring a change of clothes with you to work."

The things we do for loss.  Weight loss, that is.

Not to put too fine a point on it, gas, loose stools, and anal leakage of an "oily discharge" are among the lovely side effects of the hot new over-the-counter diet drug, alli, that's flying off the shelves in L.A.  A counter-commercial  by a diet supplement maker, which did not make it onto the air, capitalized on the nasty:

The manufacturers of a fat-burner called Laptopril [?? sounds like it weans you off your computer], one of the many products that you probably do not want to take, have produced a funny commercial that they undoubtedly knew would be rejected by the television networks but which is rapidly making its way around the internet.

The "alli accident" . . . depicts someone soiling her pants . . . [YouTube describes the video as "disgusting but hilarious."  Now that I know how to post YouTube videos, I won't.]

I saw a display of alli (evidently pronounced "ally," as in wartime) yesterday in the grocery store -- "Are you ready?" as if it was Cialis or something.  I had no idea what it was.

What it is:  just a lower dose of the drug orlistat, marketed a few years ago as prescription Xenical, which blocks absorption of about 25% of the fat you eat.  You can lessen the noxious side effects by eating less fat -- but then why would you need the drug, which does nothing for people who gorge on carbohydrates?  The dream of a magic pill that will make you thin without discipline or deprivation just never dies.

J had a neurologist's appointment today, so we went over to UNC Hospitals.  As always on the rare occasions when I get out in the world, I was amazed at how normal gross obesity has become.  It is now more the rule than the exception, and it includes men and kids.  (My last experience of this was going to Ross Dress for Less on Monday in search of a bathing suit.  I also went to Target, and in both stores I had the distinct impression that it is now easier to find clothing in your size if you're obese than if you're not.)

But then, when you think about it, the fast food and snacks, racks of seemingly hundreds of different kinds of chips, the creamy salad dressings, fried coatings, buns and bread, super chunk cookies, milkshakes and ice creams with every kind of candy and cookie smashed into them -- all of it relentlessly shoved in our faces every waking hour of the day -- it's no wonder at all that people get fat.  It's the path of least resistance, the default state.  In order not to gain weight you have to be constantly saying No, no, no, no, no, no, no.  That's what a trip to the supermarket is for me:  No, no, no, no, no, no, no.   Not because I'm anorexic or dieting -- I haven't even weighed myself in years -- but because I can't get out of my head Joyce Maynard's long-ago skewering of snack food as a form of entertainment, "more pastime than sustenance."  A lot of supermarket aisles are more like a video store (a porn video store) for the palate than anything to do with nourishment.

In that respect we seem to me a sorry nation, stuffing ourselves with "empty calories," our girth a converse measure of how starved we are for attention, affection, peace and pleasure, not to mention beautifully prepared fresh food.

In Yet Another Setting.

You've already read my take on the last "Sopranos" episode, but here it is transplanted to Blogcritics. You know Blogcritics?  Check it out. There are lots of other "Sopranos" postmortems, for starters.

"So good it is almost not American."

Leon Wieseltier writes "The Sopranos" a hell of an epitaph, in TNR (free reg req'd):

The subtle ramifications of plot and character; the absence of vulgarity (I mean vulgarity in the bad sense) from this painstaking investigation of the most vulgar people on earth; the close braiding of comedy and tragedy, so that neither optimism nor pessimism is ever the last word; the unrelenting maturity of attention that it demands of its viewers: the thing is so good it is almost not American. The Sopranos stands as a lasting chastisement of its medium, in that it accomplishes what American television most abhors: an improvement, by means of art, of the American sense of reality. In America, there is no higher service.

Yee-hah.  And it goes on.  Here he waxes eloquent on the "hobbled and true language" of the characters:

These people speak the way people actually speak: they lie, and lie again; they hide; they repair gladly to banalities, and to borrowed words; they struggle for adequacy in communication; they say nothing at all. [...] Their obscenities are their tribute to the power of their feelings [...] Their metaphors are awkward and homely [...] Yet all this inarticulateness is peculiarly lyrical, and deeply moving. [...] Words should be fought for.

Wieseltier absolutely hits the nail on the head about the way the show frustrates moralism:

The Sopranos allows for judgments, but not for simple ones. [... Other than Livia Soprano] there are no heroes and no villains: there are good people who sometimes do bad things and bad people who sometimes do good things. Everybody loves, everybody hates; everybody has something to lose; everybody has reasons, everybody has wounds. Chase brilliantly captures the mystery of human motivation, the way in which human action is multiply determined, even antithetically determined, by strengths and by weaknesses, which cannot ever be disentangled. [...]  In this way he forces you into long spells of sympathy for morons and murderers.

It's worth the trouble to register to read the whole thing.

The Talmud On the Ending of "The Sopranos""

There's a Talmudic story about a rabbi who went to 24 different dream interpreters, and who got 24 different interpretations for his dream -- and all 24 of them came true. For the rabbis of the Talmud, speaking a dream's interpretation made that interpretation true ...

~ Rodger Kamenetz via The Velveteen Rabbi.

 

Oh Noooo, Another Song I Like (and All the Cool Kids Hate) . . .

. . . unmasked as a drug song.  And I hate drug songs.

Except this one.

I have such terrible taste in music.  Except when I don't.

Jack Whelan on "Second Naïveté"

To me, these are important ideas -- excerpted from two essays by Jack Whelan at After the Future.  You should go read them in full, because I've left out a lot.  I hope this whets your appetite.  And if I've posted some of it before, well, it' s the kind of thing I feel a fresh need to post every time I reread it.

From Second Naïveté:

[F]or me the most important cultural divide is not between east and west or north and south, but between premodern and modern. And the essential thing that distinguishes the one from the other lies in that in premodern cultures people live for the most part in a 'given' world and in modern cultures in a chosen world--or at least in a world where choices are available in a way they are not in a classic premodern society. The zombie traditionalist [...] who haunts modern societies is in effect a premodern wannabe. Such a one longs to live in a time when the world would once again be delivered to him as a given with a universally accepted order accepted as a given across the entire culture. No choices, no confusion, no fuss, no muss.  There is only what is right and wrong according to what it culturally defined as normative. [...]

There [is a] basic dynamic working in history for the past five hundred years that promotes the indvidual and his freedom and rights over against the society and its traditional norms, rituals and obligations. The dynamic that characterized the conflict between Catholics and Protestants 500 years ago is the same dynamic that characterizes the conflict between Islamist radicals and the West now. And it's at work in yet another way in the conflict between traditionalist red-state mentality and the cosmopolitan blue-state mentality. The first group in each of these pairings in relation to the second is more group, authority, and ritual oriented. The second group is, relative to the first, more individual and choice oriented. [...]

Sure, there are still lots of people with traditional values, but they are disembodied traditional values. They no longer have a lived context that makes them sustainable and life-giving. I consider myself to be a traditionalist, but when I am with zombie traditionalists, I feel suffocated and depressed. There's no life there. There's no wisdom, just this dead-wooden formalism.  It's all cellulose and no sap. [...]

I think that creating new rituals is really what needs to be done. We need rituals that will en-soul our life together again. But if a ritual is eventually to become a culture-wide tradition, it cannot be arbitrary. It has to resonate deeply. It has to have a kind of “authority,” or it’s just cast to the side as soon as people tire of it or some other behavior presents itself as more compelling.

In other words effective rituals arise in response to deeply felt needs, and they have to work. They have to satisfy the need, and they have to be more satisfying than the “unhealthy” behaviors people are inclined to embrace without them. So the question for me is whether the creation of such “new traditions” is even remotely possible in this fragmented social environment at this time in our history.

I don't know for sure, but for me the idea of retrieval/second naiveté offers a clue as to how it might happen. Both words come from Paul Ricoeur, a French philosopher of religion that I read years ago as an undergraduate. I’m not sure I’m using these terms precisely in the way he does, but the idea is that in premodern societies where everything is a given, you have “first naiveté.” You simply accept uncritically the world as the ancestors have passed it on to you. With the coming of critical consciousness, you start questioning the assumptions on which naive consciousness is based, and inevitably you lose your naive faith that the way things are defined as “given” really has much to do with the way things are. [...]

[W]hile critical consciousness is good at saying No—at debunking and irony—it’s not very good at saying Yes--it accomplishes nothing postive. And so in order for it to be possible to to say a deeply resounding Yes, one possibility lies in going back to revisit the world as it was presented to naive consciousness, but now with “second naiveté.” This does not mean 'going native', i.e., reverting to first naiveté, but opening up to or becoming vulnerable to the reality that was self-evident to the premodern consciousness with first-naivete--but without losing critical consciousness.

From From Outer to Inner; From Given to Chosen:

[Owen] Barfield [...] understood the problem of modern cultural decadence in much the sa[me] way as Nietzsche did, but he frames it as a necessary, if risk-fraught, middle phase in the unfolding of the larger historical drama.  This drama extends from what he calls Original Participation to Final Participation, from the metaphorical Garden of the beginning times to the metaphorical New Jerusalem of the far-distant end times.  From something passively given to something actively made. [...]

As humans emerged gradually out of original participation, their capacity for freedom grew.  In Barfield’s view, the modern period marks a profoundly significant turning point in human history, because the human being has come into possession of his freedom in a way unprecedented in the history of the world. Everything depends on how he uses it in shaping what is to a remarkable extent an open-ended future.  And everything depends on whether humans envision that future as shaped by the values of the Last Man or if he is able to develop a new possibility for a nobler kind of human being.  There are three choices (with different variations) before us: the Last Man, the Superman, or the Logos bearer. [...]

The re-sacralizing [of] the world is not something that will be given to us. It is a work that we must choose to undertake.  We are no longer passively evolving.  The entire future of the earth and its evolution is now in human hands and its future will be a future that humans choose for it.  Everything therefore depends on how we imagine the possibilities. [...]

The exile model--the heaven as final destination model--still plays too powerful a role in the Christian imagination of history. The idea that the goal and purpose of human existence is to get off the planet and into some spiritual pleroma can no longer be embraced; too much is at stake, and it makes too easy a blindness to our responsibility for future generations. [...]

This is a big, big task, and we are only at the beginning of our understanding how to do it, because we are only at the beginning of understanding how radically things have changed in the last five hundred years.  We are only beginning to fathom the massive unprecedented responsibility that human beings have now assumed for the future of the earth.

I believe this wandering in the wilderness, this cultural winter through which we are now living, is a transitional experience, and that sooner or later we will either move back into Egypt or forward into Canaan (figuratively speaking--moving forward is always a movement toward Canaan).  Nazism was Germany's neo-pagan regression toward Egypt, and that tendency is an ever present temptation for all decadent western cultures.  When you don't see a clear way forward, there is always the inclination toward calcification (dogmatism/fundamentalism) or regression (primitivism/instinctualism). [...]

This will remain true so long as some figurative Canaan, some way forward, remains something we cannot plausibly frame in our imaginations of the future.

~Jack Whelan, After the Future