The Feminization of American Culture

[osprey_archer]

I've been reading Ann Douglas's The Feminization of American Culture, which is exceptionally frustrating in the way that only academic feminist-leaning books from the seventies can be. There is this sense - how do I explain it? - that Douglas has really bought into the valorization of the masculine: that she really believes that war and strength and rigorous logic are essentially masculine (and automatically interesting), and sentimentality and weakness are essentially feminine (and soppy and boring).

Rather than rejecting this binary as inherently unfair, she seems to think that the problem is solely that people see masculinity as a boys-only club. And thus, she mourns the descent of stringent Puritan theology into liberal religious sentimentality. The Puritan construction of God-as-Cthulhu might not be very attractive, but by God at least it was rigorous and manly.

It's not that I think she ought to enjoy sentimentalist literature. But there's a difference between saying "This kind of extravagant emotionality is not really to my taste, or to modern taste generally, but let's consider why people might have liked it in the context of their time" - you know, actually considering it historically - and saying, "This sentimentalism is so girly and icky and it valorizes, of all things, WEAKNESS. Weakness! I ask you! Most unforgivable character trait in the world. We should all be strength-worshipping Nietzscheans!"

This is still an implicit attitude I see a lot in feminist-leaning criticism of pop culture. No character trait is less excusable than weakness. We should all despise Fanny Price and her milquetoast sisters. No, we shouldn't sympathize with their suffering: they brought it on themselves by their own weakness, they basically deserve it for daring to be born shy and retiring and in a situation where there was no encouragement for them to work past that.

This isn't to say that we shouldn't criticize patterns of portraying women as weak. But there's a world of difference between saying "This pattern of character portrayal is bad, and we should change it," and "Weak people suck! They deserve to suffer for being so weak! How dare they let themselves be victimized???"

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I saw that kind of tension in the work of Hagio Moto, a Japanese manga-artist/writer who came to prominence in the late 1970s and early 1980s. There were all these things she liked that she associated with men (like the ability to take heroic action), and even though she was writing fantastical stories and science fiction, so there was no reason why she couldn't posit heroic women or gentle men, no. She was stuck. She'd do these elaborate things where men turned into women or women turned into men--as if that was the only way to deal with the sensibilities that differed from what the norms for the genders were.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

It's interesting (and rather sad sometimes) to see the traps that writers find themselves in: sometimes they just can't think themselves out of their socialization well enough to write what they really want to.

[carmarthen.livejournal.com]

I would like to draw sparkly hearts around this post.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

The lack of a sparkly hearts feature is one of the lamentable deficiencies of LJ.

[carmarthen.livejournal.com]

Truly, it is.

But seriously, nail on head here.