The Pass

How some people get a pass through life and what that means for the rest of us.

Screenshot from photograph in One Sings the Other Doesn’t” by Agnes Varda.

There’s been a theme in recent posts of mine concerning different kinds of harms to women—thoughts about the male narrators of Bob Dylan’s songs, and thoughts about Rachel Aviv’s piece in The New Yorker, concerning Andrea Skinner, the daughter of Alice Munro, who was for years, starting at age nine, sexually preyed on by Gerry Fremlin, her mother’s husband. Today, in addition, I’m going to talk about a piece by Ian Frazier, about rereading Lolita, published in The New Yorker in 2020, and a new book by Edmund White, The Loves of My Life, a chronicle of his sex life, starting as a boy.

In all these conversations, I’m looking not at individual male humans saying and doing things that harm women. I’m looking not at individual dudes as a way to isolate them as aberrant and restrict them from further circulation. I’m looking not at sex acts because they are sex acts and therefore arouse a separate category of aversion. Sex acts do not arouse a separate category of aversion. Harm is harm wherever it occurs.

I’m looking at the large and loving social embrace that has given harming women a long and healthy pass. I’m looking at the way male writers excite themselves with stories of men learning to be men, stories addressed to other men, and the way these narrators, if they even consider women as readers, are saying to women, I am the thing you should be looking at, me, me me, you should always have your attention focused squarely on my thoughts, my problems with dad, my woes, my joys.

A social trend that does no favors for women.

Sensitivity harassment and sensitivity policing, as in: this thing you are saying offends me, this thing you are saying triggers an emotional condition in me, this thing you are saying hurts my feelings, this thing you are saying you must not say because it makes me feel bad—all this has helped shift the public conversation about harms to women to the realm of the personal and away from the realm of the broadly social and political. It's devolved to personal offense and individual wrongdoing with an emphasis on weeding out and punishing wrong doers.

It has been a disastrous shift. It’s part of why the pass that allows harm to continue in systemic ways goes quietly about its business. And if you identify the harm as harm, it will say to you, “I'm sorry if I hurt your feelings.” Or it will say to you, “You are a girl and so of course you are prudish and easily grossed out by what really goes on in sex. Grow up. And grow a pair! It's the way of the world. It will never change.”

Neil Gaiman

With regard to Neil Gaiman and his long lurid history of non-consensual sexual aggression, the only story worth contemplating is the pass. There is no news in his actions. We know what humans are capable of. By humans, I mean their religions. I mean their philosophers and psychotheorists who have sworn oaths on SCIENCE that women are by nature servile sub-humans who are basically asking for it. Anyway, my point is, everyone already knows this is the broad social image of women. Read Nietzsche, Aristotle, Freud, and all the other fuckheads I am referring to. Everyone knows this already and yet the pass continues. Western culture is the pass. You want fewer Neil Gaimans? Work out how the pass operates and the power sources that apply lube.

From the department of: But I love women! What did I do wrong? I don't understand!

Or: When male writers address other men and do not imagine a reader who is female as an actual human being. They do not imagine a female reader at all, it appears. And the publications that love the writing of these men.

Ian Frazier’s piece “Nabokov, Steinberg, and Me”—on rereading Lolita—in the December 7 2020 New Yorker, is about nothing you can put your finger on in a way I admire, so I read every word, as it meandered from Frazier’s memories of driving with his family as a boy from the Midwest to the southwest and stopping in the same motels with shellacked pine walls that maybe Nabokov and Vera stayed in on their flights from Ithaca—motels chronicled in loving and maniacal detail in the novel.

Frazier's mother hated Lolita when it was published in 1955, and Frazier finds himself dutifully appalled by many aspects of it now, on what must be his umpteen rereading. I can't remember when I last read the book, but much of it remains, or I think it remains, like a brilliant sheen vibrating over blacktop. I didn't remember the cruelty of the book's end with Lolita dying at 17 in childbirth, having given birth to a dead baby girl in an Alaska backwater. Since Humbert (in prison) is going to be dead soon, Lolita must be tossed into the volcano as well—with no one to imagine her—I guess?

Something of the distaste of this dawns on Frazier, although not in the way I am putting it here. He knows he's supposed to think things in the book are disgusting, but he's not sure what they are. He thinks it has something to do with the revelations of the #Me-Too movement. The casual way rape is treated in the book, possibly, and that in actuality there is no such thing as a nymphette.

Before that Frazier writes about the effect on him of reading Lolita and the way it instructed him to rhapsodize about the girls who were turning him on. He starts to sound like Nabokov, and it's creepy and off because he thinks it's a compliment to a female human to be looked at as an instrument of male desire and only as that. He doesn't say this is the way he used to feel. He luxuriates again now in the way he used to feel and thanks Nabokov for giving him the syntax.

He writes passages like this: “Tony had a younger sister, Rosa, who was as rosaceous as all girls and women of that name deserve to be. She had long, dark hair and dark eyes, and at an early age she grew into the plum-tinted look so admired by the old-time painters of her ancestresses.”

Frazier doesn't notice he has no interest in Rosa and what Rosa might be thinking about anything. In thinking about Rosa, the writer goes back to the way she made him feel about himself as a boy and about how she is making him feel as the old man writing the passage. She was an instrument in the past, and she remains an instrument to Frazier.

He’s addressing readers who are male. It doesn't occur to him a reader who is female isn't going to care about the way Rosa made the boy feel in the past or the man feel now. The reader who is female is going to feel like an inert slab of meat in a musty raincoat has fallen on her and she has to push it off as quickly as possible.

Who Gets to Decide the Worth of a Topic?

The other day, I received a press release sent by a publisher. He was hoping to interest me in a forthcoming memoir. It was the story of a man, driving across the country, in search of information about his father’s life. Something along these lines. A man and his father. Two men and their whatever. I thought, Jesus (as it were), another book about men excitedly wanting to know about being men—about being sons or being fathers or some such topic.

I thought of Jesus, himself, and Abraham and God, and I thought for fuck’s sake enough with these men and their sons and their fathers dominating our thoughts and lathering themselves up, as if their experience is important or dramatic or interesting, just because they insist it is.

The book described in the press release might be a wonderful piece of writing, sentence by sentence. It might be a thrilling literary narrative. I don’t know, and I will never know, because I am all topped up with stories written by men about being men that are excitedly addressed to other men. Like in all bibles and most literature that has ever been written in any language.

If women are imagined reading narratives written by men about what it means to be a man and that are excitedly addressed to male readers, then women readers are basically in the same position as the women in the hotel rooms of Louis CK, asked to watch him masturbate. Can I masturbate in front of you? ask most books written by men about the excitement of being men, including the story of Jesus and his father and the story of Abraham and his father, and, you know, all the rest.

The Loves of My Life, a Sex Memoir, by Edmund White (Bloomsbury)

A few months ago, I was asked to review a book for a national newspaper. I said sure. It was Edmund White’s memoir of a lifetime of gay sex. I started reading it and liked it very much. White is a great and detailed stylist. He can spot a dramatic moment in a memory from a mile away and not only pounce on it but show you, with a skillful layering of memories within memories, the social and political backdrop of a scene’s time and place.

About a third of the way through, I came to a chapter crafted with language about women’s bodies and women’s lives so stunningly arresting it had to be the focus of what I’d write. The language had received a pass from the book’s editor and publisher and for all I know from the editor who assigned the book, although I doubt it because most editors don’t have time to read the books they assign.

In this case, what I mean by the pass is that no one seems to have pointed out to White what a female reader would experience reading his words. I don’t think his words should have been deleted or edited. I think an editor might have raised the issue with White of what he was expressing, how it contributes to larger harms done to women, and that maybe White’s narrator would contemplate some of this, to at least register for the reader that the writer observes what he is saying.

If White’s erotic fantasy life involved imagining himself debased in the body of a person of color, let’s say, or a person understood to be poor and underclass, White’s editor would have spoken up. Of this I have no doubt. No one wants their author to be seen as a racist or a social imperialist. Describing the female body as a putrid biological condition, well okay then, no harm done to White’s reputation there.

I knew the piece I wrote would be rejected. I sent it in anyway, because I thought what I had written was important. The editor said he couldn’t publish the piece as I’d written it. He said he couldn’t publish the passages from White’s book I quoted in order to make my points because they would offend the paper’s readers. So are you digging this? The paper can’t quote writing in a book it assigned that would throw light on the pass because throwing light on the pass is the offense.

This is the review I wrote.

Pretend you are a woman. Pretend you are me. It’s a thought experiment. It won’t take long, and I promise you can return to being whatever you are, or think you are, or want to be. Pretend you are me, and you are reading The Loves of My Life, a Sex Memoir, by the renowned prose stylist Edmund White, who actually is a great prose stylist, there’s no argument with that, or else how could I have read an entire book that is basically a list of fondly recalled fucks he had with men.

About a third of the way through, you come to a chapter called “Pedro” and you read these passages: “We decided it was exciting to call my ass my ‘pussy’. There's something so low, so dirty and humiliating, about that word if applied to a man, something so smelly and endocrinal, so soppy with animal secretions, that repulses and shames at the same time. I have no idea whether coño has the same impact in Spanish, but after a few drinks Pedro liked pussy and cunt talk. It felt a bit less abjectly menstrual in another language . . ..

“Sometimes he [Pedro] seemed disgusted with . . . my insatiable need for cock . . ... His certainty that I was voracious reminded me of the nineteenth-century male fantasy of the devouring woman who destroyed man. She was a lioness licking her paws, presenting her inflamed cunt to the poor, bewildered males, despoiling them of their family and fortune by revealing a glimpse of the hairy clam under whitecaps of the lace. Her bed an altar to demeaning, insatiable lust—a huge silver Sicilian raft decorated with pairs of lovebirds and blinded cupids, but capable of witnessing a young man destroy his ambition, fortune, and health, the length of his shaft sunk into the greedy, putrescent origin of the world, bubbling sulphurously amid the overgrown underbrush.”

So, you’re me, an actual female human with the body parts referred to in White’s text, and although it isn’t lost on you the author is showing off the playful leaps of his imagination, it’s not lost on you because you have spent you life seeing your body and the life lived in that body misidentified by male writers to such an exaggerated degree it’s comical if you are in a certain mood. You have spent your life in this situation, and you can feel loathing and admiration at the same time.

What you loathe is not the comparison of an asshole to a cunt. They are two orifices you can penetrate sexually. What angers you is the way the male person happily slums in your sexuality, knowing that whatever disgust he may feel about his own body and sexual acts, he can console himself that at least he doesn’t actually go through life in the smelly, menstrual body of a woman.

If you are not in the mood to find White’s words comical, you take it for granted that men, gay and straight, do not tax themselves imaginatively to wonder how their words about women will land on actual women. You are so familiar with this experience, you continue reading, because what are you going to do, throw nearly every piece of writing by a man across the room and watch the bindings of their books break into dust and their pages scatter?

Sure, go ahead. You are free to. I pleasurably read on, finding much to enjoy in White’s often brilliantly detailed scenes of sex before AIDS, before even herpes. White, who is 85, began having sex in his early teens and kept going for decades with boyfriends, tricks, and paid partners until relatively recently when he tells us he became impotent. Here, he’s conjuring an apartment shared by men he was close to “at the foot of Christopher Street overflowing with greasy wrappers from ordered-in fast food, jockstraps dangling from the shower curtain rod, pink plastic bongs over a reservoir of water, the smell of poppers and vomit, a room full of a couch in many sections, a shag rug with cigarette holes burnt into it, an empty fridge with just a frosty jar of pickles and a Coke can laboring under Pleistocene layers of ice. A toaster oven that no longer worked; a roasted fly was sitting on top of it like a symbol.”

This apartment is every apartment in a certain time and place that doesn’t exist in reality but in the memories you write now. As White flips through the index cards of his adventures, you can go with him, back to when sex was separate in our minds from dying of a disease. You thought about sex with people you knew, people you loved, people you would never speak to—a man I can still see standing in the door of a subway car. I wanted to know what people were talking about when they talked about sex. So did Edmund White.

My correspondence with the editor at the newspaper.

In turning down my piece, the editor was polite and respectful. He suggested I might want to rewrite the piece so it didn’t center on what he called my “reflection on how the book taps into a vein of writing that disturbs you.”

This is what I wrote back:

Thanks very much for inviting me to write for you and offering me the assignment. I’m going to turn down your suggestion to rewrite the piece, although I appreciate your willingness to spend time with me and my work. I hope I can write something for you in the future that will satisfy both of us.

I do want to address a comment you made in your email about the White book: “your reflection on how the book taps into a vein of writing that disturbs you.” You characterize my commentary as some form of personal aversion and maybe a set of ruffled feelings, as if my thinking reflects, perhaps, a prudish reaction to graphic writing about sex or is asking the writer for some kind of reform. I couldn’t care less about teaching White or any male anything.

The reason I wrote what I wrote, in hopes (very dim, admittedly) the paper would want to publish it is that White is expressing an understanding of femaleness as degraded and disgusting, a thing you can and should defile and revile, that’s no different from the way religions and other powerful forces in cultures and societies have for centuries justified controlling the bodies of women and the lives lived in those bodies. I’m writing about a gigantically important social and political reality.

It’s a longstanding form of flicking away the political insights of feminism to consign them to the private and idiosyncratic spheres of life. The other day I posted an anecdote on social media that’s, in it’s own way, another example of the point I’m making to you here. The post prompted a great amount (for me) of positive reaction. Your paper might be missing a chance to feed a hunger for the insights I’m making. Here’s the post:

In 2006, I went to a dinner party, and a woman named Julia told the group she’d spent the evening before with two prominent male writers, one gay, the other straight. They’d turned the pages of a book of portraits of Susan Sontag and made no comment except to snicker about the aging in her hands. It had been one thing for Sontag to charge around the world as a public intellectual when she was beautiful and young. The men might have been forced to pay attention to her then. No matter how accomplished and famous she’d become, though, she had still done it in the body of a woman. A body, the men were saying, that was universally considered fair game for ridicule—and ridicule that could be used to discredit her overall. Her mind hadn’t grown wrinkled and shriveled, so they could take her down with her hands.

I always wonder, in the case of an ugly and demeaning characterization of women—one that gets a public pass—how a publication or individuals would react if instead of the words “woman” and “women,” the writer was projecting a hateful fantasy onto a “black person” or “a poor person.” In the case of White, though, the comparison would be empty because it wouldn’t be conceivable. His point is there is nothing so degraded and disgusting in existence he can happily imagine himself to be, no place lower to demean himself than placing himself mentally in the body of a woman. A body he knows he doesn’t really have to live in.

Screenshot from One Sings the Other Doesn’t by Agnes Varda

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