Your Pretty Little Head

Because this is the internet, I already have up on this blog somewhere, as is required by the laws of both statistical probability and, I think, the United Nations Shadow Government, posts about videos of animals fighting other animals and about the HBO show Girls.

The former I'm not going to embed a link to because you can find them yourself without too much difficulty, either here, on YouTube or, oh yeah, everyfuckingwhere else. Go ahead, google away, any combination you want, I bet you can find it. Dog fighting opossum. Zebra vs. goat. Cobra vs. elephant. Wombat vs. barramundi. I'm not even sure if that last one is an animal, but you get the idea. It's all google at its finest: random strings of words yielding results for something you didn't know you needed to have in your life. Trust me, the time you saw an American black bear open-hand-slap an ocelot will straddle a bright line of existential demarcation separating the bleak before from the kaleidoscope after.

The other stuff though, the Girls stuff, is affecting me similarly: somewhat more subtly, although (if this is even rationally considerable) more profoundly. I'm learning a lot of stuff I did not know I needed to know.

I was raised around women almost exclusively, supported by them, informed by them, shaped by their influence both internally* and externally.**

Or internally so I thought. It's been dawning on me embarrassingly slowly how absolutely not only entrenched but celebrated, exalted and privileged maleness and the male point of view is in our culture, socially and artistically. Women reading this will likely now be responding with the same kind of patient, patronizing*** condescension usually reserved for female characters in American television shows or films. You know, right before they peel their dress off.

The Girls experience was just the beginning of me experiencing the shoe on other foot. And now I'm starting to see the shoe for what it is, stylish yet affordable and appropriately matched in color and style to the rest of ensemble as a whole, finished thought. I've talked already about the throwaway and/or expositionary nature of the male characters on that show and I think it's taken me about this long to really parse out how I feel about that. On the one hand, the obvious take-away is that gender-focus one way or the other as a zero-sum proposition is a dumb self-imposed dramatic or artistic limit, retarding the potential of the enterprise excluding ab initio the depth and complexity of polyphony in inexplicable favor of the monotone. Or to put it another way, having all the boys on the show be idiots gave me a sad.

On the other hand, maybe this is the necessary redress for... hang on, let me tally up the time here... ah yes, all prior years of completely disregarding female voices, including the ones written by men, in pretty much all forms of mass culture popular entertainment. It's an atmosphere that not only necessitates the existence of the Bechdel test but has almost no recourse to defend itself against it.

The other part of this is that my girlfriend has a daughter. She's young of course (the daughter I mean), so I've been doing a lot more projecting, temporally and experientially, looking forward and trying to do so from her point of view. I'm embarrassed a bit by how surprised I am at the shifts in my perception of what's been all around me all the time, always. It's not much of an excuse to say I was surrounded by my dude life of me and my three boys, especially since the divorce, because as I said, I spent a goodly portion of my formative years being the only XY chromosome set in the bunch.

I've decided that it's important to try to seek out female-made art when I can, and I say "seek out" not because I've taken it on as some kind of weird gender-rescuing vision-quest, but because it's so fucking inexcusably hard to find. It was a couple hours driving in one day to find Jill Soloway's Afternoon Delight last weekend.

And don't get the wrong idea: it's not like I'm sitting there, rapturously drinking in every image, every syllable spoken with uncritical eyes, thinking only of securing my place in the post-2016 Hillary Clinton gynocracy where men are hunted for their pelts and their sperm. It wasn't a perfect movie. It was about the problems of white people who live in lovely places and have a lot of money. But the acting was great (hooray Kathryn Hahn, truly revelatory and brave), the women were people and the men were pretty forgettable.

I won't see everything women produce, surely. And maybe this is just an wafting inspirational phase that hits me, like that time I decided I was going to read a bunch of novels by 19th century Russian people and got through one. But the only real way I have to support the idea of opportunity for women in a shockingly male-dominated media culture is with the money in my pocket. Partially to hope to participate in a transformation leading to a robust wealth of opportunities for this girl I'm watching grow up surrounded by the social fabric I am, like it or not, helping to weave. But more also for my own three sons, nascent white men who will not, despite all the remarkable changes over the last 50 years, want for opportunity or reinforcement. The goal is to get out in front to make sure it won't be necessary--or, ideally, even possible--for them to have to have the same sort of realization of inequality when they're half-fossilized old dads like myself.

So it's all been a bit of a panic, although not a frantic one. It's more like watching a firework happen in really slow motion, with all the violent action of a long yawn and stretch as one finally, genuinely wakes up.


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*I guess literally in the fact that my yucky innards all formed while I was in utero. And in my mom's utero, which is a girl one, in case that wasn't clear.

**Like when one of them would buy me shoes.

***Does that still work? Is it "matronizing" here?