"That's not a very good thesis project for a sociology dissertation," the professor told me. "What you should do is select the group you study based on objective criteria, like whether they have a diagnosis of gender dysphoria or have petitioned to have their driver's license gender marker changed, and then interview them about their feelings and attitudes and intentions and beliefs and so on. But what you're trying to do, to study male subjects who identify as 'sissy' or 'feminine', there's no external marker for that so it's all intercranial, it's all inside your subjects' head, depending on self-identification, and then you want to interview them to see what ELSE they think and feel, and that's not very sociological".
* * *
Twenty five years later, defining "genderqueer" and "gender invert" appears to involve the same basic problem. Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people can be readily defined by something specific that they do, which sets them apart, but there's no obvious equivalent for genderqueer people (in general) or gender inverts (specifically) --
Gay and lesbian people: have sexual relations with people of the same sex
Bisexual people: have sexual relations with people of the same sex AND with the opposite sex
Transgender people: transition from the sex they were assigned at birth to the other sex
Genderqueer people: ??
Gender inverted people: ??
Well, admittedly, no, it isn't that simple when it comes to gay, lesbian, and bisexual people either. There are sexually inexperienced gay and lesbian people, they haven't had sexual relations with people of the same sex and yet they're still gay / lesbian, right? "Oh, but, well, they, umm, want to. I mean, they feel same-sex sexual desire", backtracks the hypothetical definer. But what do we mean by that, what exactly does one feel and think that constitues "wanting to"? Is it a specific concrete desire to engage in a specific activity, an activity that constitutes sex? What about the person who finds several same-sex people breathtakingly cute and becomes obsessed with the contours of their body shapes, but doesn't formulate a specific plan of action that takes the form "I want xxxxxx to happen, you and me" -- ?? Not to mention, what is that 'xxxxxx' anyhow, what precise activities count as 'sex'? Then there's "same" versus "opposite", when here we are in a world that includes both transgender and intersex people! Is a woman with erotic feelings towards an intersex individual a lesbian, or is she straight? If she also has the hots for a transgender man, is she bi? So if in addition to that she finds herself aroused by males who identify as girls, does that bring her up to trisexual or something? Obviously the clean clinical definitions used for the other LGBT identities don't withstand close scrutiny, either!
But that doesn't solve the problem, which involves perceptions and assumptions. However fuzzy and problematic our definitions for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender may be, the fact that there's a general acknowledgment of them as identities, a general belief in the categories and their usefulness, means that a coming-out story can be written with any degree of development of the identity itself ranging from an immersive soul-examining self-searching all the way down to a simple statement like "I knew I was that way from back in childhood", and then the rest of the book can be about the person and that person's experiences and only minimally about explaining, defining, and defending the identity itself as a relevant concept.
Borrowing from the same list I used in last week's post...
Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle, the prototypical lesbian coming-out story, starts off with the tale of Molly (presumably Rita herself) as a young girl with a slew of tomboyish characteristics. Then in chapter 5 she becomes romantically obsessed with Leota Bisland from her sixth grade class and proposes marriage to her. They don't get married but by the end of the chapter she and Leota have kissed and touched each other all over.
Andrew Tobias' book The Best Little Boy in the World begins with the author describing himself as a delicate child, somewhat sexually ignorant. He alludes to "hiding something" during the course of describing how he learned about masturbation from songs and jokes, and eventually on page 33 notes that his first wet dream "was about Tommy".
Mario Martino's Emergence gets to it much more quickly, with the first sentences in the author's preface stating "I am a transsexual. I have undergone sex change, crossing over from female to male".
Daphne Scholinski's The Last Time I Wore a Dress notes early on that Dad had wanted a "demure and obedient" daughter and within the first six pages explains that this "daughter" was subjected to psychiatric incarceration "as an inappropriate female" with "deep unease in my female nature" and makes reference to being harassed with lipstick, foundation, and eyeliner.
Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues opens with a letter to "Theresa" in which the author expresses "missing you... seeing you in every woman's face", then recounts a conversation in Greenwich Village with a woman who "hates society for what it's done to women like you", in other words causing them to "hate themselves so much they have to look and act like men". By page 7, she has used the term "butch" as a noun to refer to herself and the others she fits in with.
Jennifer Finney Boylan's She's Not There opens with the author picking up a pair of girls hitchhiking; they address her as "ma'am" as they get in. She thinks maybe she recognized one of them as someone "who'd been a student of mine back when I was a man".
Now, in The Story of Q I try to do that, too, to set the stage as it were, and in the first ten pages I've explained how, in childhood, I sought to emulate the girls, whom I admired, and to distance myself from being viewed as one of the boys; and I've also given early notice that I was physically attracted to girls from early on. But I'm at a disadvantage: I can't announce an identity the way Martino does, or count on readers immediately slotting me into one as Tobias, Brown, and Boylan all can when they describe their same-sex sexual attractions or refer to a time when they manifested as a different sex.
I have to build the identity for my readers before I can inhabit it. And it's somewhat subtle; there is no hallmark behavior where I can say "I did this" and that behavior conjures up a socially recognized identity (gay, lesbian, transgender) for most people immediately.
Leslie Feinberg's book is probably the closest in that regard. To be a butch lesbian is to inhabit a less common, less familiar identity. It's different from a generic lesbian coming-of-age story, with elements that are very similar to those of the stories written by transgender men, but it is its own tale, its own concept of self, including a culture and a community. And I suspect it's no coincidence that Feinberg's book is among the longer books that I've listed here.
This is the third installment of a three-part series specifically about coming out and writing the coming-out story as a genderqueer person. On April 23, I wrote Coming Out: Genderqueer Compared to Other LGBTQIA Identities and last week (May 22) I wrote The Art of the Coming Out Story: Seeking the Sweet Point .
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Tuesday, May 29, 2018
Tuesday, May 22, 2018
The Art of the Coming Out Story: Seeking the Sweet Point
A pair of somewhat-recent rejection slips:
-- from Black Rose, a small independent publisher
-- from Judith Weber of Sobol Weber, a literary agency
I'm not sure how I can do a better job of making the characters "come to life" and bringing the reader to the point of living events with my main character Derek while at the same time avoiding making it an even more "extreme narrative" that reads "like a diary" in which readers have to "slug through the pity".
Meanwhile, I'm continuing to participate in author's reading events at Amateur Writers of Long Island as described in this earlier blog post. I read a 1500-word excerpt from the 8th-grade chapter early in the book and the other authors gave me much more pleasant feedback than the publishers and lit agents:
Still, among the rejection letters I've received over the years, there have been two main themes (aside from form letters and short choppy "not for me" replies): that I don't have enough of a platform and that the story doesn't sufficiently grab the reader and draw them in.
Well, that kind of feedback tends to make me think of perhaps letting go of my self-imposed barriers on manuscript length. Because for any individual event, writing it as a vivid scene with dialog and main-character mental processes and feelings and sound and smells and colors and all that means taking up more words to do it. In a vintage-2014 blog post I explained why. I'm still sure that the story I'm telling is the story I want to tell (as opposed to trying to include less). So the price tag for punching it up further is, at a minimum, to stop worrying about manuscript length and just let it take as many pages (and words) as it takes, you know?
Many of the books I've enjoyed the most have been quite a bit longer than The Story of Q in its present incarnation: Marilyn French's The Women's Room at 135,700 words (526 pages), Marge Piercy's Small Changes at 171,400 words (562 pages), Wally Lamb's She's Come Undone which comes in at 116700 words (465 pages). Mine has hovered around 97,000 words which would probably take up somewhere between 320 and 375 pages. Hmm, I could include a lot more dialog in the scene where the girl from Boston comes to visit and she become the love interest I obsess about... and I could insert some scenes with Boy Scouts illustrating more about how I was sort of not fully merging and kind of holding myself back from them, maybe a scene where the other boys are telling dirty jokes or something, and maybe some scenes at pot parties where I get into philosophical conversations with some of the girls while we're stoned...
But I also looked at some of the classic coming-out stories, to compare for length within the same genre, and that's a bit scary.
Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle ("Bawdy and moving, the ultimate word-of-mouth bestseller, Rubyfruit Jungle is about growing up a lesbian in America--and living happily ever after") is only 246 pages (63,960 words).
The Best Little Boy in the World by Andrew Tobias ("The classic account of growing up gay in America. An autobiography in which he spoke of his experiences as a gay boy and young man. He published it under the pen name "John Reid" to avoid the repercussions of being openly gay") was 247 pages (64,220 words).
Jan Morris wrote Conundrum ("One of the earliest books to discuss transsexuality with honesty and without prurience, tells the story of James Morris’s hidden life and how he decided to bring it into the open, as he resolved first on a hormone treatment and, second, on risky experimental surgery that would turn him into the woman that he truly was.") in a mere 176 pages (45,760 words).
Mario Martino did Emergence ("The autobiography of a female-to-male transsexual, written as a cooperative effort by the author with a medical journalist. It is one individual's story of the transition from female to male") in 273 pages (70,890 words).
The Last Time I Wore a Dress ("At fifteen years old, Daphne Scholinski was committed to a mental institution and awarded the dubious diagnosis of "Gender Identity Disorder." She spent three years--and over a million dollars of insurance--"treating" the problem...with makeup lessons and instructions in how to walk like a girl.") was 224 pages (55,552 words).
Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg ("Woman or man? This internationally acclaimed novel looks at the world through the eyes of Jess Goldberg, a masculine girl growing up in the "Ozzie and Harriet" McCarthy era and coming out as a young butch lesbian in the pre-Stonewall gay drag bars of a blue-collar town") was 308 pages (77,000 words).
And Jennifer Finney Boylan's She's Not There ("The exuberant memoir of a man named James who became a woman named Jenny. She’s Not There is the story of a person changing genders, the story of a person bearing and finally revealing a complex secret; above all, it is a love story") ran to 352 pages (91,520 words).
None of those is quite as long as The Story of Q. Is that worrisome? Relevant? I don't know for sure, but it doesn't make me very comfortable with the notion of making my book yet longer in pursuit of more vivid scenes and paragraphs.
I had two publishers sign contracts to publish this book; I need to remember that and not blame my writing for the rejection slips I get.
I'm looking for the sweet point, where I've laid down the trajectory of experiences I went through that culminated in me deciding I had a different kind of identity than the people around me, and explained that in enough detail and enough emotional vividness to convey that.
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It is written in what I will refer to as an "extreme" narrative, i.e. it reads like a diary. The promise of an interesting read on the subject of a young man's struggle to determine his sexuality is never realized because the author lapses into a commentary on his being bullied by those who prey on the "undecided" identity seekers. One thing that makes this interesting is that although the author identifies more as a female, his orientation is clearly heterosexual. Readers may well be inclined to 'slug' through the pity in order to see how his obvious conflicts are resolved. Three stars because it is at best a 'possible."
-- from Black Rose, a small independent publisher
You’ve struck on relevancy with your premise. The story of coming-of-age trans during the 1970’s while battling a prejudice environment is compelling, but there still needs to be a gripping arc to carry the narrative. The characters didn’t come to life for me. I felt more like I was being told events, rather than living them with Derek.
-- from Judith Weber of Sobol Weber, a literary agency
I'm not sure how I can do a better job of making the characters "come to life" and bringing the reader to the point of living events with my main character Derek while at the same time avoiding making it an even more "extreme narrative" that reads "like a diary" in which readers have to "slug through the pity".
Meanwhile, I'm continuing to participate in author's reading events at Amateur Writers of Long Island as described in this earlier blog post. I read a 1500-word excerpt from the 8th-grade chapter early in the book and the other authors gave me much more pleasant feedback than the publishers and lit agents:
Your ability to express your vulnerability is amazing! It flows with ease.
Well-written, strong emotions. Sad, powerful.
Very well written and effective. Keep at it, it's near perfect.
Still, among the rejection letters I've received over the years, there have been two main themes (aside from form letters and short choppy "not for me" replies): that I don't have enough of a platform and that the story doesn't sufficiently grab the reader and draw them in.
-- Nora Long for / Susan Cohen at Writer's house
We were impressed by The Story of Q's holistic approach to the underwritten topic of growing up queer. However, we struggled to engage emotionally with Derek because of the lack of specificity in prose. For example, it was difficult to understand why, in middle school, Derek found boys' behavior to be "bad" (rather than merely displeasing or disruptive), when Derek had not expressed a desire to be "good" or why Derek was ostracized growing up without knowing how exactly he was teased in each school he attended.
I read you query with interest. Your premise is unique and definitely stands out! Unfortunately, the writing style did not draw me into your story's world as much as I would have liked.-- Johanna Hickle at Talcott Notch
Well, that kind of feedback tends to make me think of perhaps letting go of my self-imposed barriers on manuscript length. Because for any individual event, writing it as a vivid scene with dialog and main-character mental processes and feelings and sound and smells and colors and all that means taking up more words to do it. In a vintage-2014 blog post I explained why. I'm still sure that the story I'm telling is the story I want to tell (as opposed to trying to include less). So the price tag for punching it up further is, at a minimum, to stop worrying about manuscript length and just let it take as many pages (and words) as it takes, you know?
Many of the books I've enjoyed the most have been quite a bit longer than The Story of Q in its present incarnation: Marilyn French's The Women's Room at 135,700 words (526 pages), Marge Piercy's Small Changes at 171,400 words (562 pages), Wally Lamb's She's Come Undone which comes in at 116700 words (465 pages). Mine has hovered around 97,000 words which would probably take up somewhere between 320 and 375 pages. Hmm, I could include a lot more dialog in the scene where the girl from Boston comes to visit and she become the love interest I obsess about... and I could insert some scenes with Boy Scouts illustrating more about how I was sort of not fully merging and kind of holding myself back from them, maybe a scene where the other boys are telling dirty jokes or something, and maybe some scenes at pot parties where I get into philosophical conversations with some of the girls while we're stoned...
But I also looked at some of the classic coming-out stories, to compare for length within the same genre, and that's a bit scary.
Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle ("Bawdy and moving, the ultimate word-of-mouth bestseller, Rubyfruit Jungle is about growing up a lesbian in America--and living happily ever after") is only 246 pages (63,960 words).
The Best Little Boy in the World by Andrew Tobias ("The classic account of growing up gay in America. An autobiography in which he spoke of his experiences as a gay boy and young man. He published it under the pen name "John Reid" to avoid the repercussions of being openly gay") was 247 pages (64,220 words).
Jan Morris wrote Conundrum ("One of the earliest books to discuss transsexuality with honesty and without prurience, tells the story of James Morris’s hidden life and how he decided to bring it into the open, as he resolved first on a hormone treatment and, second, on risky experimental surgery that would turn him into the woman that he truly was.") in a mere 176 pages (45,760 words).
Mario Martino did Emergence ("The autobiography of a female-to-male transsexual, written as a cooperative effort by the author with a medical journalist. It is one individual's story of the transition from female to male") in 273 pages (70,890 words).
The Last Time I Wore a Dress ("At fifteen years old, Daphne Scholinski was committed to a mental institution and awarded the dubious diagnosis of "Gender Identity Disorder." She spent three years--and over a million dollars of insurance--"treating" the problem...with makeup lessons and instructions in how to walk like a girl.") was 224 pages (55,552 words).
Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg ("Woman or man? This internationally acclaimed novel looks at the world through the eyes of Jess Goldberg, a masculine girl growing up in the "Ozzie and Harriet" McCarthy era and coming out as a young butch lesbian in the pre-Stonewall gay drag bars of a blue-collar town") was 308 pages (77,000 words).
And Jennifer Finney Boylan's She's Not There ("The exuberant memoir of a man named James who became a woman named Jenny. She’s Not There is the story of a person changing genders, the story of a person bearing and finally revealing a complex secret; above all, it is a love story") ran to 352 pages (91,520 words).
None of those is quite as long as The Story of Q. Is that worrisome? Relevant? I don't know for sure, but it doesn't make me very comfortable with the notion of making my book yet longer in pursuit of more vivid scenes and paragraphs.
I had two publishers sign contracts to publish this book; I need to remember that and not blame my writing for the rejection slips I get.
I'm looking for the sweet point, where I've laid down the trajectory of experiences I went through that culminated in me deciding I had a different kind of identity than the people around me, and explained that in enough detail and enough emotional vividness to convey that.
————————
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Monday, May 14, 2018
The Complex Problem of Dealing With the Oppressors
Item: When rallying in protest against yet another incident in which the victims were blamed for their own victimization, one of the oppressed said, "I am so tired of people asking what the Victim could have done differently. It's not the Victim's behavior that caused this. It's the Perpetrator's behavior that has to change! It's the Perpetrators who are doing this, not their Victims!"
Item: When asked about a proposed support group to help privileged people realize the good that they would personally gain from ending inequality and oppression, one of the oppressed said, "I don't feel like We should be giving our energy to Them, supporting Them and nurturing Them in the changes They need to make. That's what We always do, that's always been Our role, devoting Our time and effort into helping Them cope and make Their lives better. We need to give Our energy to each other for a change instead!"
I've participated in both of those conversations, in various forms and at various different times, and I figure chances are good you have, too. In the case of the first item, it's pretty compelling that perpetrators or oppressors are ones whose behaviors are most in need of changing; they're the ones most directly perpetuating the status quo and least involved in doing things that would bring meaningful social change.
It's the second item where things get trickier. If you're like me, you're situated sometimes on the marginalized side and sometimes on the mainstream side of the various dividing lines. Maybe you're female and of a racial or ethnic minority but able-bodied and a US citizen. Or perhaps you're a diagnosed autistic-spectrum person living in an economically depressed and politically repressive nation but you're male and not of a minority sexual orientation or gender identity. So at some point in your life, because your own experiences with being marginalized and oppressed makes you personally sympathetic and politically committed to allying with other oppressed people, perhaps you too have found yourself trying to get feedback about what you should be doing and how you could be doing it better, how to be a better ally and supporter. Yeah, maybe you admit to yourself that you hope for some pats on the back or high-fives for being a relatively good person over here on your mainstream and privileged side of one of those dividing lines, as opposed to being one of the jackboot-wearing sneering oblivious ones who are mostly just part of the problem. But if that desire for approval is self-serving, the desire to check in and get some critical feedback is at least in large part motivated by wanting to do a better job at being a socially conscious and righteous person, trying to listen and stay informed, right?
But most likely you would not be here, reading this, if you had never also been on the less favored side of one of those dividing lines. So chances are good that you've been a participant in at least one or two conversations and discussions in which people on your side, the marginalized and oppressed side, have found it important, essential, and liberating to see the mainsteam established privileged folks as Them, as the Problem, as the Oppressors. Why? Because although they are largely oblivious to what they do, they do hurtful things, and they occupy positions of power that give those hurtful things destructive energy. And because you, you personally and all these other people here in the room with you, the others who share your definitional situation, you didn't start this, they othered you folks first. And so, as a group, you spent years, decades, lifetimes, feeling inferior in the face of a definition of Normal that was devised around Them. You felt apologetic and wrong and in need of changing yourself for not being like Them. Or you felt inappropriate and illegitimate any time you were caught behaving or expecting equal treatment as long as you had this Difference defining you as less than, as not entitled. How could you and your people ever rise up against that without starting off with a rebellious and self-assertive "It's us against them, and we are on our side instead of against ourselves from now on" --?
If they're treated or invoked as absolute rules, the two items are contradictory. They are mutually exclusive. If it is Their behavior that needs to change, and We are agents of social change, we can't focus our energies entirely on ourselves and expect to accomplish what we want to accomplish. We do have to affect Them. We do have to succeed in affecting Them. We do in fact have to succeed in transforming Them into people who are no longer on the opposite side of a meaningful dividing line. As no longer The Problem.
That's not to say that the most important method of having an effect on the privileged isn't, indeed, to become stronger and self-affirmed people. Nor is it to deny that oppressed people do need to turn to each other and devote their strengths to each other.
But once we have done so and have turned away, in large part, from blaming ourselves and embracing this external definition of ourselves as wrong, deviant, inferior, and undeserving of equality, we do need to affect them. And we do need to maintain a mindspace that has room for the concept of those people, the folks who are defined as Them, ceasing to be a Problem. We need to have in our heads the imagined possibility of ourselves winning, which means ceasing to be oppressed. Furthermore, we need to interact with individuals as individuals. Each person among them who is trying to detach from ongoing participation in the patterns that keep us down is a potential ally.
Each such person will continue to breathe air and walk the streets against the backdrop in which people in their majority / privileged / mainstream / oppressor category are still doing the damage, being the Problem. But that doesn't make them not allies, not at the individual level. It occasionally means that their best intentions fall short of being any kind of guarantee against egregiously wrongful individual behavior. They'll disappoint us. It will sometimes seem like a frustratingly bad return on our invested time and emotional energies.
Remember, though, that they represent the locus of change.
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Item: When asked about a proposed support group to help privileged people realize the good that they would personally gain from ending inequality and oppression, one of the oppressed said, "I don't feel like We should be giving our energy to Them, supporting Them and nurturing Them in the changes They need to make. That's what We always do, that's always been Our role, devoting Our time and effort into helping Them cope and make Their lives better. We need to give Our energy to each other for a change instead!"
I've participated in both of those conversations, in various forms and at various different times, and I figure chances are good you have, too. In the case of the first item, it's pretty compelling that perpetrators or oppressors are ones whose behaviors are most in need of changing; they're the ones most directly perpetuating the status quo and least involved in doing things that would bring meaningful social change.
It's the second item where things get trickier. If you're like me, you're situated sometimes on the marginalized side and sometimes on the mainstream side of the various dividing lines. Maybe you're female and of a racial or ethnic minority but able-bodied and a US citizen. Or perhaps you're a diagnosed autistic-spectrum person living in an economically depressed and politically repressive nation but you're male and not of a minority sexual orientation or gender identity. So at some point in your life, because your own experiences with being marginalized and oppressed makes you personally sympathetic and politically committed to allying with other oppressed people, perhaps you too have found yourself trying to get feedback about what you should be doing and how you could be doing it better, how to be a better ally and supporter. Yeah, maybe you admit to yourself that you hope for some pats on the back or high-fives for being a relatively good person over here on your mainstream and privileged side of one of those dividing lines, as opposed to being one of the jackboot-wearing sneering oblivious ones who are mostly just part of the problem. But if that desire for approval is self-serving, the desire to check in and get some critical feedback is at least in large part motivated by wanting to do a better job at being a socially conscious and righteous person, trying to listen and stay informed, right?
But most likely you would not be here, reading this, if you had never also been on the less favored side of one of those dividing lines. So chances are good that you've been a participant in at least one or two conversations and discussions in which people on your side, the marginalized and oppressed side, have found it important, essential, and liberating to see the mainsteam established privileged folks as Them, as the Problem, as the Oppressors. Why? Because although they are largely oblivious to what they do, they do hurtful things, and they occupy positions of power that give those hurtful things destructive energy. And because you, you personally and all these other people here in the room with you, the others who share your definitional situation, you didn't start this, they othered you folks first. And so, as a group, you spent years, decades, lifetimes, feeling inferior in the face of a definition of Normal that was devised around Them. You felt apologetic and wrong and in need of changing yourself for not being like Them. Or you felt inappropriate and illegitimate any time you were caught behaving or expecting equal treatment as long as you had this Difference defining you as less than, as not entitled. How could you and your people ever rise up against that without starting off with a rebellious and self-assertive "It's us against them, and we are on our side instead of against ourselves from now on" --?
If they're treated or invoked as absolute rules, the two items are contradictory. They are mutually exclusive. If it is Their behavior that needs to change, and We are agents of social change, we can't focus our energies entirely on ourselves and expect to accomplish what we want to accomplish. We do have to affect Them. We do have to succeed in affecting Them. We do in fact have to succeed in transforming Them into people who are no longer on the opposite side of a meaningful dividing line. As no longer The Problem.
That's not to say that the most important method of having an effect on the privileged isn't, indeed, to become stronger and self-affirmed people. Nor is it to deny that oppressed people do need to turn to each other and devote their strengths to each other.
But once we have done so and have turned away, in large part, from blaming ourselves and embracing this external definition of ourselves as wrong, deviant, inferior, and undeserving of equality, we do need to affect them. And we do need to maintain a mindspace that has room for the concept of those people, the folks who are defined as Them, ceasing to be a Problem. We need to have in our heads the imagined possibility of ourselves winning, which means ceasing to be oppressed. Furthermore, we need to interact with individuals as individuals. Each person among them who is trying to detach from ongoing participation in the patterns that keep us down is a potential ally.
Each such person will continue to breathe air and walk the streets against the backdrop in which people in their majority / privileged / mainstream / oppressor category are still doing the damage, being the Problem. But that doesn't make them not allies, not at the individual level. It occasionally means that their best intentions fall short of being any kind of guarantee against egregiously wrongful individual behavior. They'll disappoint us. It will sometimes seem like a frustratingly bad return on our invested time and emotional energies.
Remember, though, that they represent the locus of change.
————————
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Monday, May 7, 2018
MOVIE REVIEW — I Am Not an Easy Man
It's been done before, but rarely if ever so well: a guy deserving of a comeuppance about gender privileges gets his situation inverted and has to cope with what women have to deal with, and learns some lessons.
What makes Eléonore Pourriat's I Am Not an Easy Man outstanding is that it goes far beyond the thought-experiment level and delves into the subtle nuances of gender polarization and how we cope with them, and it includes that subtle treatment in its portrayal of how the main male character, Damien (portrayed by Pierre Benezit), copes with being dumped into the inverted world.
The 1991 movie Switch, featuring Ellen Barkin, is the kind of fare I'm more used to seeing in this genre: the chauvinist male wakes up abruptly transformed to female, freaks out, and spends the first half of the movie trying to wrench reality back to how it oughta be by force of sheer denial. A whole lot of sight gags to point out how funny and inappropriate it looks when a woman (or person who appears to everyone to be a woman) behaves the way men typically do. A main character whose initial horror gives way to some clever ideas about how this could actually work to his advantage, only to find that any beliefs he'd ever harbored about how this or that would be so much easier if he were a woman are actually all wrong or that it doesn't work the way he'd expected. Very binary and overstated gender expectations and behaviors abound, caricatured in order to be sure to drive the point home. And then — usually around the halfway mark in the movie — acceptance, with the main character getting with the program and adjusting to the situation by becoming a good girl and, whether it's because biology is destiny or because you can't fight city hall (or a universally gendered world), becoming obedient to the new set of expectations and demands.
That's admittedly not entirely fair to Switch but it's a good overview of how I felt about it when I saw it on the screen. Great premise, disappointing for all that it didn't attempt to do.
I Am Not an Easy Man starts off with what looks like the same trajectory. It uses the more difficult inversion of having the man remain a man but finding himself transferred abruptly into world where everyone else is gender inverted, making him the exceptional case. (This means that instead of one actor giving us inverted gender behavior, everyone else in the entire cast is doing so). But again, Damien starts off trying to be who he has always been, while staring around in disbelief and becoming shocked and dismayed.
But after awhile he gets it, just as we in the audience do, although he remains mystified (of course) about how this could have happened. And he begins to adjust.
Some of the adjustment is opportunistic: some things weren't available to him in his familiar world, or weren't possibilities he'd ever considered for himself, but we watch him consider and them avail himself of them and they generally work for him. He learns to dress attractively, develops closer and more intimate emotional-content-sharing same-sex friendships, and finds televised dramas (with gender patterns aligned with this new world he's in of course) to be moving and cathartic.
Some of the adjustment is merely expedient: if he wants to date, and the women find his unmodified hairy chest to be a dealbreaker, he's going to have to wax. Well, if that's the way it is, it isn't pleasant but it isn't worth the price tag to balk at it.
And there are ways in which he doesn't conform but decides to fight back. A world in which people of his gender are dismissed as non-serious people? That's a dealbreaker for him. The unfairness, the inequality, this is intolerable. So he joins the masculinists and attends support groups and marches and rallies with his brethren.
The core of the story revolves around his relationship with writer Alexandra (Marie-Sophie Ferdane). Damien has a lifetime history of approaching women with the sexually enthusiastic and forward behaviors that work for him in his native world. In this new world, obtaining access to sexual activity isn't difficult—he gets propositioned (not to mention catcalled on the street and stared at by random women as a visual treat when walking through the business office) and he does partake. When his parents (same people, now gender-inverted) express a bit too much concern about him ever finding a suitable relationship, he flings into their face the fact that he has sex with many women, as readily as they do, and scarcely remembers their name, it's as fleeting and transient a delight for him as for them, and not a reason to settle down.
But therein lies the problem. Once he does meet someone (Alexandra) with whom he wants more, wants the relationship he has with her to continue, now it starts to matter strategically that he's in a world where expressing that is going to be tricky. This is a world where the male folks pursue the ongoing relationships and it's the female ones who tend to fuck-and-discard, so trying to hold on to what he's got with her runs the risk of coming across as clingy and vulnerable. And so we watch as he discovers firsthand the careful balance of wanting passion and sex but needing to protect himself from being regarded and treated as a mere outlet. Of not being sufficiently respected and valued.
Alexandra has her own arc of understanding-growth. In a nod to a classic cliché (see Roman Holiday), she starts off pretending and manipulating, while keeping her real agenda, of cashing in on the experience by writing about it, hidden; but then gradually falls in love with her subject Damien, and bails on the planned betrayal but the clues to what she's done are available to Damien who discovers them and decides she's a horrid cad who never cared for him. So just as Alexandra is regretting any intention of hurting Damien, Damien comes to see her as a callous and cruel person and she's suddenly at risk of losing him just as she realizes she absolutely can't let that happen. It's been done before but seldom with the bad girl becoming undone this way.
Ferdane is suave and confident and walks a good balance between arrogant and sensitive, between tough and broodingly lonely. She's not butch in a Joe-the-plumber way (in fact, we get a painter complete with plumber's crack just for the juxtaposition) so much as she's Bogart or James Dean. We want to get to her, evoke her human side, care for her.
I Am Not an Easy Man is delightful in its exquisite attention to detail and the believability of its inverted depictions. It would be easy to stick in a male erotic dancer that would prompt a giggle and a nod about sexual visual objectification, but it takes more skill to present us with a believable male pole dancer that you could readily imagine as delicious eye candy to bar patrons. And comedians from Roseanne Barr to Amy Schumer have done up the belching, open-legged, stained-shirt unself-conscious leering men shtick. But in the poker scene in this movie it doesn't come across as caricature. You believe the women around the table are real. The nuances of posture and facial expression and gesture are spot-on. And as a result, it hits harder.
Having mentioned Switch, I'll make note of a couple other gender-inverty offerings to flesh out the backdrop. There have been pieces that are done with serious intent, as illustrations of gender polarization and not just for the burlesque value of inversion as entertainment. Ella Fields became a YouTube / Facebook sensation when she gave us this one last year, for instance. When our 13 year olds still feel that they are up against this kind of rigid sex role expectation system, it's powerful to see it expressed in this kind of thought experiment; six and a half minutes doesn't give one room to explore the complex nuances though, and unfortunately some people rejected its message because they considered it overstated and that it ignored how things aren't actually so rigid in the modern world.
Not all depictions of gender reversal contain a lot of sympathy for critics of existing gender polarization. If (as I implied) some of the plot trajectories seem to end up promoting gender conformity even after doing a sendup of pompous (male) privileged certainties, there are also tales of gender inversion that never move beyond dismay and a conveyed sense of male humiliation except when someone manages to revert things to their natural state. I remember plucking a copy of Regiment of Women from the paperback stand when I was in High School and giving myself a headache from so much eye-rolling.
I Am Not an Easy Man is available on Netflix as an original Netflix movie.
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What makes Eléonore Pourriat's I Am Not an Easy Man outstanding is that it goes far beyond the thought-experiment level and delves into the subtle nuances of gender polarization and how we cope with them, and it includes that subtle treatment in its portrayal of how the main male character, Damien (portrayed by Pierre Benezit), copes with being dumped into the inverted world.
The 1991 movie Switch, featuring Ellen Barkin, is the kind of fare I'm more used to seeing in this genre: the chauvinist male wakes up abruptly transformed to female, freaks out, and spends the first half of the movie trying to wrench reality back to how it oughta be by force of sheer denial. A whole lot of sight gags to point out how funny and inappropriate it looks when a woman (or person who appears to everyone to be a woman) behaves the way men typically do. A main character whose initial horror gives way to some clever ideas about how this could actually work to his advantage, only to find that any beliefs he'd ever harbored about how this or that would be so much easier if he were a woman are actually all wrong or that it doesn't work the way he'd expected. Very binary and overstated gender expectations and behaviors abound, caricatured in order to be sure to drive the point home. And then — usually around the halfway mark in the movie — acceptance, with the main character getting with the program and adjusting to the situation by becoming a good girl and, whether it's because biology is destiny or because you can't fight city hall (or a universally gendered world), becoming obedient to the new set of expectations and demands.
That's admittedly not entirely fair to Switch but it's a good overview of how I felt about it when I saw it on the screen. Great premise, disappointing for all that it didn't attempt to do.
I Am Not an Easy Man starts off with what looks like the same trajectory. It uses the more difficult inversion of having the man remain a man but finding himself transferred abruptly into world where everyone else is gender inverted, making him the exceptional case. (This means that instead of one actor giving us inverted gender behavior, everyone else in the entire cast is doing so). But again, Damien starts off trying to be who he has always been, while staring around in disbelief and becoming shocked and dismayed.
But after awhile he gets it, just as we in the audience do, although he remains mystified (of course) about how this could have happened. And he begins to adjust.
Some of the adjustment is opportunistic: some things weren't available to him in his familiar world, or weren't possibilities he'd ever considered for himself, but we watch him consider and them avail himself of them and they generally work for him. He learns to dress attractively, develops closer and more intimate emotional-content-sharing same-sex friendships, and finds televised dramas (with gender patterns aligned with this new world he's in of course) to be moving and cathartic.
Some of the adjustment is merely expedient: if he wants to date, and the women find his unmodified hairy chest to be a dealbreaker, he's going to have to wax. Well, if that's the way it is, it isn't pleasant but it isn't worth the price tag to balk at it.
And there are ways in which he doesn't conform but decides to fight back. A world in which people of his gender are dismissed as non-serious people? That's a dealbreaker for him. The unfairness, the inequality, this is intolerable. So he joins the masculinists and attends support groups and marches and rallies with his brethren.
The core of the story revolves around his relationship with writer Alexandra (Marie-Sophie Ferdane). Damien has a lifetime history of approaching women with the sexually enthusiastic and forward behaviors that work for him in his native world. In this new world, obtaining access to sexual activity isn't difficult—he gets propositioned (not to mention catcalled on the street and stared at by random women as a visual treat when walking through the business office) and he does partake. When his parents (same people, now gender-inverted) express a bit too much concern about him ever finding a suitable relationship, he flings into their face the fact that he has sex with many women, as readily as they do, and scarcely remembers their name, it's as fleeting and transient a delight for him as for them, and not a reason to settle down.
But therein lies the problem. Once he does meet someone (Alexandra) with whom he wants more, wants the relationship he has with her to continue, now it starts to matter strategically that he's in a world where expressing that is going to be tricky. This is a world where the male folks pursue the ongoing relationships and it's the female ones who tend to fuck-and-discard, so trying to hold on to what he's got with her runs the risk of coming across as clingy and vulnerable. And so we watch as he discovers firsthand the careful balance of wanting passion and sex but needing to protect himself from being regarded and treated as a mere outlet. Of not being sufficiently respected and valued.
Alexandra has her own arc of understanding-growth. In a nod to a classic cliché (see Roman Holiday), she starts off pretending and manipulating, while keeping her real agenda, of cashing in on the experience by writing about it, hidden; but then gradually falls in love with her subject Damien, and bails on the planned betrayal but the clues to what she's done are available to Damien who discovers them and decides she's a horrid cad who never cared for him. So just as Alexandra is regretting any intention of hurting Damien, Damien comes to see her as a callous and cruel person and she's suddenly at risk of losing him just as she realizes she absolutely can't let that happen. It's been done before but seldom with the bad girl becoming undone this way.
Ferdane is suave and confident and walks a good balance between arrogant and sensitive, between tough and broodingly lonely. She's not butch in a Joe-the-plumber way (in fact, we get a painter complete with plumber's crack just for the juxtaposition) so much as she's Bogart or James Dean. We want to get to her, evoke her human side, care for her.
I Am Not an Easy Man is delightful in its exquisite attention to detail and the believability of its inverted depictions. It would be easy to stick in a male erotic dancer that would prompt a giggle and a nod about sexual visual objectification, but it takes more skill to present us with a believable male pole dancer that you could readily imagine as delicious eye candy to bar patrons. And comedians from Roseanne Barr to Amy Schumer have done up the belching, open-legged, stained-shirt unself-conscious leering men shtick. But in the poker scene in this movie it doesn't come across as caricature. You believe the women around the table are real. The nuances of posture and facial expression and gesture are spot-on. And as a result, it hits harder.
Having mentioned Switch, I'll make note of a couple other gender-inverty offerings to flesh out the backdrop. There have been pieces that are done with serious intent, as illustrations of gender polarization and not just for the burlesque value of inversion as entertainment. Ella Fields became a YouTube / Facebook sensation when she gave us this one last year, for instance. When our 13 year olds still feel that they are up against this kind of rigid sex role expectation system, it's powerful to see it expressed in this kind of thought experiment; six and a half minutes doesn't give one room to explore the complex nuances though, and unfortunately some people rejected its message because they considered it overstated and that it ignored how things aren't actually so rigid in the modern world.
Not all depictions of gender reversal contain a lot of sympathy for critics of existing gender polarization. If (as I implied) some of the plot trajectories seem to end up promoting gender conformity even after doing a sendup of pompous (male) privileged certainties, there are also tales of gender inversion that never move beyond dismay and a conveyed sense of male humiliation except when someone manages to revert things to their natural state. I remember plucking a copy of Regiment of Women from the paperback stand when I was in High School and giving myself a headache from so much eye-rolling.
I Am Not an Easy Man is available on Netflix as an original Netflix movie.
————————
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
————————
Index of all Blog Posts
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