Room and Bored

Second Thoughts

This is about halfway a rewrite; I had the time to jot some stuff down earlier, and thought I might not get to come back to this, but I stewed on it, and ended up getting a chance later on in the night.

This was a dense chapter, and I'm sure I'm missing a ton of what's going on here. I really respect what Alyson Greaves did here so far. But onward to the somewhat inscrutable but incredibly engaging "Room and Bored". Where my Road Dawgs at, woof woof, I guess?

Recap

I'm really glad that we get to have some more Christine-as-narrator in this chapter. On the surface she's a bit of a Lisbeth Salander type, but I think she's a bit of a puzzle in a more personal way.

Anyway, this chapter centers on:

• Some kind of military-school inspection of Christine's room, person, wardrobe.
• Stef's getting out of the cell to see the other inmates.

We get some great insight into Christine, and we get the reveal that Stefan is a friend of Melissa's, who has a pretty sterling reputation as a gentleman.

Again, much respect to Alyson Greaves, who is great at drawing me into this story!

The cliffs, I hang on them.

Outmoded

I think what's most uncanny about Dorley House as an institutionis how outdated the strictness of its gender norms are. I think it was last chapter that Christine was wearing sneakers and a hoodie and leggings. And in this chapter of course, a vest and shorts.

And those are both insufficiently feminine outfits for her role in Dorley, the strangeness of which Greaves seems to highlight with this inspection. The feminine costume is Christine's imposed uniform, at least at this point in her life.

But, pulling on that thread, leggings and a sweat-shirt are a feminine costume I think. It's, I guess androgynous, and maybe that's the problem, but there are only a very few contexts where it's not unusual to see a man in leggings (sometimes runners in the cold, for instance, honestly that's the only one that comes to mind), or where it is unusual to see a woman dressed that way.

I really wanted to be able to frame an "externally stringent femininity"/"internally strict masculinity" contrast or something, but I don't think that's being very truthful. I think it's true that, for a large swathe of men, this kind of hyper-macho Nick Adams stuff is abject nonsense. But just last paragraph I was being cagey about men wearing leggings.

And it's just flat out true that men do the lion's share of the violence. Plus, speaking for myself, it's basically impossible to get any of the guys I think of as "good" (the carpenter whose kid is friends with mine, the farmer who lives nearby and plays D&D, another remote-work guy who is extremely funny) to go for a hike or a drink or whatever. Being what I'd call a "healthy" man seems to entail a semi-exile from social life after a certain age. I'm going far afield, but there are a lot of good men who are kind of shut-ins. That might be an Upper New England thing, though.

Anyway though, I think Pippa's wrong to point to masculinity as the source of that violence though. That kind of obliterates the actual men doing the crimes and is almost just another phrasing of "boys will be boys." Because, many boys act badly, but each of them chooses to do so (inasmuch as "choosing to do something" even makes any sense.)

I don't think it's the case that I'm either:

• "Low T"
• Some kind of Saint

just because I'm not a violent person. Because, it's not that I have some extreme aversion to violence, I enjoy boxing (it's fun), I've slaughtered livestock (it's not fun), and I think those things are basically unrelated to cruelty to animals or people.

Or, actually to being a man, for that matter, I suppose.

There's choices here outside the masculinity and femininity, and you can kind of see them repeated even in Christine, who is quickly becoming my favorite character. Christine is, ostensibly, healing through femininity, but is now directly responsible for hijacking Stef's life (although that might still turn out very well for Stef; I'll be curious to see.) And, that's remarkably violent. Christine's theft of Stef's life is objectifying and coercive, of course. I wonder if that cruelty is part of why Christine is early in the Programme within the scope of the novel, but I'm not sure, given Aunt Bea's actions.

Sportsball

This might be incredibly stupid or incredibly stupidly obvious, we'll see where the narrative goes. But I really dislike Aunt Bea. I suspect that she's more than The Villain, and I wonder how I'll feel about her later on.

Kind of a non-sequitur, but by way of an analogy, I love sports. I am a sports person.

• I'm not big on football, because I partially grew up in Texas as more of an Indie Rock kid.
• I am a near-religious fan of Effectively Wild.
• I love boxing and Manny Pacquiao's defeat at the hands of Floyd Mayweather (one of the few humans worse than Joe Lieberman) broke my heart

I think sport is art. It's the meeting of human expression and human will and human sinew, and I find it to be the kind of great works that stave off what Georges Battaille called "La Part Maudite"/"The Accursed Share." And, the thing about sports is that they aren't for everyone, and what I've just typed looks like a lunatic speaking in tongues to a big chunk of folks.

And some parents definitely "do sports" to their kids:

• They make them participate from age 3.
• They make them watch games that they do not care about and never will.
• They make them go tailgating, they make them be in "pee-wee" and shit.

And any part of that, from "the whole family wearing jerseys and yelling", to "having to do a sport every season", really fucks those kids up about sports. Because then they're like "Oh you like sportsball, maybe you should take that back to X, formerly known as Twitter." And that seems like what Bea is doing with these women?

Maybe it's different for trans women, but I have to think it's supposed to be sinister how on-the-rails the femininity Bea demands is.

Aunt Bea is "doing sports" to Christine, it seems like, and that isn't right. Now, Christine might turn out to have been, like, I'm gonna say "making revenge porn"? Because she does machines?

And in that case, maybe I'll eat my words.

I'm certain that whatever horrors Pippa got up to feel like they justify this kind of hard line.

An Abstract Rage to Protect

Hedgehog Review has a pretty good article on the phenomenology of being a man, "What is it Like to Be a Man?".

And, the phrase that sticks with me is "an abstract rage to protect". The piece is in large part dealing with the semi-to-counter-productive instincts of fathers etc. (read it yourself, it's prett good.) But some of the farce that that piece sketches, I think, misses what masculinity is when done to good ends?

I don't mean the inconvenient fact that I have a knack for the kind of algebraic reasoning that gets well paid today, or the fact that my wife has a knack for fundraising for disability advocacy. And, I don't mean the dumb nonsense that I do instead of a machine like splitting firewood (listen.) Earlier I had written that "just, it's nice to be able to move the heavy thing."

But that's not really it. Tonight was one of the nights when I do a solo-bedtime with my daughter. Normally we're both there for the whole thing, but my wife has a weekly social commitment on Monday nights so that's a "me" night.

And, I really like that I can fly her and she can ride around on my back and stuff like that. Some moms probably can do all that just as well, this is all in big sweeping aggregates, but in my family, I'm the one who wears the hiking backpack she rides in, and who carries her on my shoulders, and swings her around in very-slightly-risky ways.

There's a kind of cavilear silliness about being a father sometimes that is almost the exact inverse of "the abstract rage to protect." The "hysterical drive to goof", call it?

Doesn't matter particularly - this was a really thought-provoking chapter of fiction for me, and I think the value I'm getting from this book is basically twofold:

• Being lucky enough to hear from people about how different their own experiences are in a way that I couldn't without it
• Getting to think about the soup of gender stuff that Greaves is writing about from a different vantage point

I think more straight cis-men should be reading this, it's a lot to chew on.

Stray Thoughts

Beasts of No Nation

The other source I'm reminded of is Beasts of No Nation. Agu, can't let go of his culpability until he's re-socialized into being a child, not a "beast".

And I begin to wonder if what strikes me as so hostile about Bea is the seeming insistence that femininity is a safeguard against masculinity? Like, these women, when they were men, did horrors, it sounds like.

Vests

I think I have worn a vest maybe twice in the last fifteen years. They seem kind of ska-coded to me?