Feminisn'tm; or, La Dumb Nikita

"What would a post-masculinist military look like?" Oh, well, hmm, lemme think about that, let me just considerate on that question. I guess I think that it would look something like this:



Although you might want to rewind to the shower scene instead.

When academy-captured seminar feminism meets American liberalism, heavily hyphenated incoherence is bound to ensue. The linked post is such a series of howlers and misapprehensions that I can hardly decide where to begin, although the phrase, "De-Masculinized War System", certainly pops up--in an entirely non-phallic, non-cisgendered-heteromasculinized sorta way, uv coors. But, though the jargon is funny and the arguments utterly dense, it is the author's most, you'll pardon the expression, straightforward thesis that is the most offensively, viciously stupid:

Since at least the early 1990s, the US military has been intimately involved in a variety of humanitarian and stability operations worldwide, where the vulnerable being protected are “theirs” not “ours”; where the enemy are not “bad guys” so much as disease, starvation or natural disaster; where the goal is not to kill but to “peace-keep”; where the tactics involve very “feminine” traits such as listening, intercultural dialogue, and the provision of comfort; and where the “good” and “bad” “guys” (when there is killing to be done) may just as easily be children or women. All of this, for better or for worse, is already destabilizing the conventional gendered war narrative that IR feminists use as a foil.

You have to love the locution: "intimately involved." Oh, yaaaayeesss. As everyone but Charli Carpenter is intimately aware, "humanitarian" and "stability" and their many equally euphemistic synonyms are much older than Bill Clinton and Dick Holbrooke mucking about in the Balkans (the plain referent of those "early 1990s"). They date back to the ancient world; they exist wherever an age of empire arrives; the British protect poor Indian widows from suttee; America strips, ahem, off the Burqa. Hitler offered humanitarian assistance to the repressed German-speakers of Europe in the 30s. America tried to bring stability to Vietnam. "We had to murder all the men in the village in order to post-masculinize it," in the immortal words of the last century's most notable feminist, some anonymous military guy talking to Peter Arnett.

And let me just, ahem, dilate on this point for a moment. I want you consider the titanic, self-satiated self-regard of the proposition that the principle tool of deadly external aggression can, or should, be used as a tool of gender equity and integration in America. For every drone-delivered wedding-party casualty, an extra dollar for Title IX sports at our public universities! The military is an institution dedicated to the task of killing people to achieve political ends. It is a vast metaphoric rape machine, a big hard thing shoving itself in where it isn't wanted. To waste time pondering how "feminine traits" like "intercultural dialogue" (and by the way, tell that to a Pashtun) can be further incorporated to help "stabilize" the world's Afghanistans, so that we can teach their backward cultures what it would be like if they "privileged, remunerated and valorized the care and feeding of functional future citizens in the same way that [they] valorize soldiering," is to avoid the rather more pertinent question: what are we doing there in the first place?

I suppose there is some sort of inchoate sense here that you can begin to dismantle the institutions of dominance by infiltrating them, and although this is hopeless and foolish--you will either be coopted or discovered and destroyed--it has a foolhardy, childish charm. It is the unfortunate result of a very fundamental error, a confusion of the modifier for the modified, a mistaking of the descriptive for the essential. The problem with the military is not that it is "masculinist" or heteronormative, not that it is homophobic nor insufficiently inclusive regardless of your rankings of the included and excluded. No, the problem with the military is that it is the military. The qualities of inequity perceived as problematic are merely symptomatic and arise from its very nature. It's an evil institution. You do not reform hell with better daycare.

Everything Old

It would require more ecstatic whooshing than I am able to muster without depleting my Winter Classic reserves before the game, so I am going to respond to David Brooks with a picture:

Arbeit Macht Gay

Aw, this is sweet, albeit hilariously and absurdly naive. The notion that "the Ivies" are somehow at core principle opposed to American war-making, or war even in some general abstract sense, is bonkers. Obviously it is no coincidence that these fine establishment institutions keep perpetuatin' an establishment fanatically committed to waging war. "They can align themselves with colleges such as Hobart, Earlham, Goshen, Guilford, Hampshire, George Fox and a long list of others that teach alternatives to violence." Ahaha. Guilford? Hampshire? Even Obies laugh at Hampshire. Goshen? Earlham! Oh-ho! That'll convince the notable alums.

Défoncer la bourgeoisie

Two decades ago, the gay Left wanted to smash the bourgeois prisons of monogamy, capitalistic enterprise, and patriotic values and bask in the warm sun of bohemian “free love” and avant-garde values. In this, they were simply picking up the torch from the straight Left of the 1960s and 1970s, who had sought to throw off the sexual hang-ups of their parents’ generation along with their gray flannel suits.

-Jonah Goldberg

Goldberg was born, serendipitously enough, in '69, so I am at a bit of a loss regarding the source of this little Martian time-slip. Two decades ago it was 1990, which Goldberg seems to have confused with pre-AIDS San Francisco. The advent of that little bug shocked most of the remaining free-love types into line, or, you know, killed them. Bathhouse culture had long since become a cautionary tale, and in any case, the "gay Left", as Goldberg calls the gay rights movement, has pretty much always sought bourgeois respectability; it is, after all, bourgeois. This is neither a criticism nor an apology, but a plain statement of fact. This avant-garde movement contra capitalism and patriotism had been advocating gay military service for well over a decade already. DADT did not erupt fully formed from Bill Clinton's high forehead.

Indeed, the main advocates of gay military service and same-sex marriage have, for an entire generation now, been making explicitly the same case as Jonah Goldberg and using the Dionysian libertines of some kind of imaginary Attic, pederastic underground as their conspicuous foils. Extend to us the institutions of middle-class respectability, goes the argument, in order that we may domesticate ourselves.

Change the Momentum and Put Points on the Board

This sort of thing is hilarious. I have long been hoping to get Madden off my television, and I think a perfect place for him would be as a defense analyst for the Post.

The Smell of Burning Marijuana

After this uneasy coexistence, Mr. Chávez called on this city’s golf courses last month to “put their hand on their hearts” to assist or house flood evacuees. If not, he said in a not-so-veiled threat, “we’ll put their hand there for them.”

-"A Venezuelan Oasis of Elitism Counts Its Days"

In Venezuela, the local intelligence service turned the tables on the D.E.A., infiltrating its operations, sabotaging equipment and hiring a computer hacker to intercept American Embassy e-mails, the cables report.

-"Cables Portray Expanded Reach of Drug Agency"

Oh, Hugo! "Put their hand there for them"! How perfect is that? How perfect is that after moving evacuees into your office and moving yourself into a tent you got from Qaddafi? I'm sure that Hugo is a bastard; all powerful people are. But there's poetry in that there soul.

Anyway, it is to the latter link that I wish to draw your attention. I was actually in a post-holiday torpor when this graced the online pages of the Times, but one of my intrepid correspondents was good enough to forward it to me. Mostly it is an hilarious chronicle of ineptitude; the DEA, metastatizing like every "intelligence agency" into a Gilliamesque bureaucracy whose ubiquity is out-omnipresenced only by its formidable pointlessness, has got dozens of outposts in dozens of countries, and it seems that its agents spend the majority of their time either fending off native politician's demands for a little Brother Seamus action or else attending elaborately staged and patently fake narco-bonfires. The bald eagle is looking ever more like Franklin's turkey these days, isn't it?

When Men Were Men and Women Were Chattel

But, for all those inequities, economic equality seemed within reach in 1956, at least for the vast middle class. (Michael Harrington’s exposé of American poverty, “The Other America,” would not rock this complacency until 1962.) The sense that the American promise of social and economic mobility was attainable to anyone who sought it permeates “Disneyland Dream” from start to finish.

-Frank Rich

I think this is a charming conceit. America was not more equal in the past, indeed it was less so, and yet the fact that to some it seemed more so means that, in a sense, it was. If Glenn Beck had uttered the same sentiment, Frank Rich would've devoted a column mile of rubble-strewn outrage to it, and yet here he is, in his own rich flesh, telling us that within the story of some suburban white folks winning a sweepstakes in 1956 is a parable about a lost egalitarianism that our own rough age dispensed with sometime around the invention of the hedge fund. On behalf of the women of America, let me just say, Fuck You, Frank Rich.

America in 1956 was, I'm sure, awesome, as long as you weren't black, female, a migrant agricultural worker, Appalachian, Jewish, Catholic, gay, a socialist, a divorcée, and cetera. I do not point this out to show that America has become better, more equal. The mechanisms for maintaining poverty and segregation have evolved; the relative positions of some groups has improved; others have declined or stagnated. The point, rather, is that you cannot condemn contemporary life by comparing it to a lost paradise. There was no paradise to lose.

I think it is a shame that some shithead securities slicer-and-dicer can make a bazillion dollars these days, or that the CEO makes a million times what the janitor makes, and yet I want to suggest to you that all this boiling resentment about the "inequality" of executive pay currently roiling our progressive friends is a moral sham to cover their own bourgeois affinity for and dedication to the very system that creates those vast "disparities in wealth." "The poor," such as they are, will not be much affected one way or other by some congressional statute to punatively tax at the upper margins of the income of the very, very rich. The poor will only ever be helped by things like the devaluation of the education commodity, the destruction of the penal system, the end of "credit"--in other words, truly radical upheaval of a sort that would send Frank Rich and the estate of his good friend Dick Holbrooke reeling. I am sorry that the lower upper class is envious of the super rich. Envy and jealousy are the most crippling of human emotions. But please, let's not pretend this has a thing to do with equality. For whom does Frank Rich imagine his friend Mr. Holbrooke bore "the crushing burden of Afghanistan and Pakistan"? (And by the way, just ponder that characterization for a moment, and then imagine something similar spoken in an English accent in about 1879.) For the poor? The American poor? For the advance of American equality? And how, by the way, did Frank Rich's friend Mr. Holbrooke get so very rich? Surely not on a diplomat's salary, was it?

Requiem for a Swan

Darren Aronofsky's black-swan ballet flick bears about as much resemblance to real ballet as Speed Racer to the Daytona 500, Tron to the inner workings of Microsoft Office. This alone isn't damning. There are plenty of sports dramas that get the details wrong but still manage to entertain. I'm lookin' at you, Rocky. Of course, in the hands of Sly Stallone, The Black Swan would've featured Natalie Portman as a plucky upstart from Scranton. Her mother was a short-order cook and her dad was a bowling ball. She wanted to be a Sugar Plum fairy in The Nutcracker, but instead she got cast as Clara's slipper. It doesn't matter. She meets the boy of her dreams, a television repairman named Enzio. They move to Seacacus and open a dance school. The end.

Instead, we are subjected to a load of hack-job, gussied-up torture porn by one of Hollywood's most egregious misogynists. Despite it's grand guignol drag, it is really a dowdy, ten-million-times-before-told tale of art and madness that proposes itself as a psychological thriller even though its psychology is about as insightful as the Saw franchise. Art is interesting, and the real physical rigor of ballet would make an appealingly concrete metaphor for the pain, repetition, dedication, commitment, and struggle behind great art and great performance. As a vehicle for trite mad scenes and a lot of bogus crap about how performers must immolate themselves in order to achieve transcendence, how genius is insanity, it falls, you'll pardon me, flat on its skinny ass. Maybe he should've a movie about a mad opera singer turning into a real Walkyrie, although, I don't know, I guess when you're dedicated to setting Natalie Portman writhing around with her hand in her panties or whatever the notion of some fleshy Brunhilde jumping into the orchestra pit loses some appeal.

It's certainly true that dancers' bodies are subject to brutal conditioning that would put the toughest guys in the NFL on the inactive list, and it's also true, although the extent is exaggerated, that female dancers in particular are prone to eating problems in the obsessive pursuit of physical perfection, and yet as compared to other performers and artists I have known, I find dancers to be generally the least nutso. A lot of them frankly have the zoned-out bliss of a yoga teacher. Well, fuck, a lot of them become yoga teachers, or they get a job selling subscriptions for the non-profit down the road. Like professional athletes, their careers are short; the human body hits its physical peak early, and that's simply that. It is a competitive business. Some people do flame out, unable to take the pressure or live up to their potential, but those who make it into a professional company, an elite company, are very often happy. They are, after all, living their dream.

This is what Aronofsky misses most and why his portait of an artist, even a crazy one, is so unconvincing and frankly boring. I presume that our friend Darren really likes making movies, even if raising money is a grind and production an administrative nightmare, a series of sleepless nights and too-long days eating lousy food and living in hotels. There is a joy in achievement after struggle. Yet not once do we see Natalie Portman's Nina Sayers enjoy herself. Nowhere are we permitted some brief glimpse of the joy of great performance. Oh, what, is she doing it because of her central-casting stage mother? Um, Darren, what's my motivation? You're crazy, Natalie. That's your motivation. Now, hold still while we apply this blood to your naked body. Look, even Peter Shaffer, a playwright with the emotional insight of a goldfish whose owner left a book of Freud case studies open on the credenza beside the tank, figured out that Doomed-Genius Composer© Mozart really fucking liked music, was transported by it, was an instrument of a sort of divinity, whose own soul resonated with the notes. Prima ballerina Natalie Portman is an instrument, all right, like a fleshlight. There is a scene meant, I don't know, to imply her burgeoning sexual seductiveness, in which an old perv masturbates through his pants while making kissy noises at her on the subway. Darren Aronofsky, that man is you.

Vincent Cassel is the Artistic Director (which Aronofsky has confused with a choreographer, which he has in turn confused for a stage director), and he spends the first half of the movie reading the program notes from the student matinee and the second half telling Natalie that she'll never be Odile unless she throws her vag all over the stage and "lets go." He is French, so needless to say he is a Lothario. "That was me seducing you when it should've been the other way around." Oh, brother. Fabio wasn't available? The whole thing reads like Nora Roberts adapted for the screen by John Carpenter. It's as gross as Japanese porno and dull as your daughter's dance recital.