Identity & Privilege: A Few Thoughts

A book I recently finished and some loosely related thoughts.

Genuine Fraud by E. Lockhart

The author's website gives the following introduction to the book:

Imogen is a runaway heiress, an orphan, a cook, and a cheat.

Jule is a fighter, a social chameleon, and an athlete.

An intense friendship. A disappearance. A murder, or maybe two.

A bad romance, or maybe three.

Blunt objects, disguises, blood, and chocolate. The American dream, superheroes, spies, and villains.

A girl who refuses to give people what they want from her.

A girl who refuses to be the person she once was.

My brief review:

In a small way, I think it's unfortunate that Lockhart is so well known for We Were Liars, to which this will inevitably be compared, because I think it has more in common with her earlier (and superior, in my mind) The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks. Of course, this has a reverse chronology to set it apart from either and is more of a psychological suspense thriller than they are. It reads fast. It keeps offering reveals that add layers to the characters, especially main character (heroic protagonist? that's up to the reader to decide) Jule. And, along the way, it offers commentary on gender roles, class differences, and society. This book is both highly entertaining and thoughtful.

The dedication:

For anyone who has been taught that good equals small and silent, here is my heart with all its ugly tangles and splendid fury.

And a couple of other passages that grabbed me:

"I think you're wrong about the American Dream," said Jule.

"No, I'm not. Why?"

"The American dream is to be an action hero."

"Seriously?"

"Americans like to fight wars," said Jule. "We want to change laws or break them. We like vigilantes. We're crazy about them, right? Superheroes and the Taken movies and whatever. We're all about heading out west and grabbing land from people who had it before. Slaughtering the so-called bad guys and fighting the system. That's the American dream."

---

"Every place has rules. What you do when you come into a new place is, you figure them out. Like when you're a guest, you learn the codes of behavior and adapt. Yes?"

"Maybe that's what you do."

"That's what everyone does. You work out how loud you can talk, how you can sit, what things are okay to say and what's rude. It's called being a human in society."

"Nah." Forrest crossed his legs in a leisurely fashion. "I'm not that fake. I just do what feels right to me. And you know what? It's never been a problem, until now."

"Because you're you."

"What does that mean?"

"You're a guy. You come from money, you're white, you have really good teeth, you graduated from Yale, the list goes on."

"So?"

"Other people adapt to you, asshole. You think there's no adapting going on, but you're fucking blind, Forrest. It's all around you, all the time."

I think last quote is a wonderful description of privilege, particularly white, male privilege in the U.S. Loosely related to that privilege is the idea of male identity and what's been called toxic masculinity. While much gets (and needs to be) said about the female side of that issue, I love what the article below has to say about the male side of it.

Today’s Masculinity Is Stifling

To embrace anything feminine, if you’re not biologically female, causes discomfort and confusion, because throughout most of history and in most parts of the world, being a woman has been a disadvantage. Why would a boy, born into all the power of maleness, reach outside his privileged domain? It doesn’t compute. . . .

While society is chipping away at giving girls broader access to life’s possibilities, it isn’t presenting boys with a full continuum of how they can be in the world. To carve out a masculine identity requires whittling away everything that falls outside the norms of boyhood. At the earliest ages, it’s about external signifiers like favorite colors, TV shows, and clothes. But later, the paring knife cuts away intimate friendships, emotional range, and open communication. . . .

There are so few positive variations on what a “real man” can look like, that when the youngest generations show signs of reshaping masculinity, the only word that exists for them is “non-conforming.” The term highlights that nobody knows what to call these variations on maleness. Instead of understanding that children can resist or challenge traditional masculinity from within the bounds of boyhood, it’s assumed that they’re in a phase, that they need guidance, or that they don’t want to be boys. . . .

Boyhood, as it is popularly imagined, is so narrow and confining that to press against its boundaries is to end up in a different identity altogether. . . .

There’s a word for what’s happening here: misogyny. When school officials and parents send a message to children that “boyish” girls are badass but “girlish” boys are embarrassing, they are telling kids that society values and rewards masculinity, but not femininity. They are not just keeping individual boys from free self-expression, but they are keeping women down too.

The article has includes an illustration that looks quite similar to one I shared this morning with friends on Facebook.

Here's what I wrote about it.

Our four-and-a-half-year-old son has always been rough-and-tumble and rambunctious. Since he started learning to crawl, and then walk, I’ve been saying he leads with his head—particularly for his frequent falls. He runs more than he walks, and throws caution to the wind. It was only when his younger brother came along that we realized some kids come with a sense of self-preservation.

We have no idea where it came from (not us), but he has had a life-long obsession with trains. And trucks. And dirt. He likes big, noisy, tough machines. He likes to get messy. He constantly climbs. More often than not, he’s wild and loud and hyper. He’s made us believe there might really be something innate about “boy” behavior.

At the same time, he’s highly emotional and sensitive. He can be very nitpicky about cleanliness (in some things). He’s constantly doing arts and crafts and creating things. He’s always said his favorite color is blue, but when given a choice he more often than not picks pink. He loves rainbows. He loves “beautiful” things.

And he’s always said he wants to be pretty. He’s picked “girl” shoes since he’s been old enough to be part of the process; we have to struggle to get him to pick something rugged enough for his lifestyle in pink and sparkly styles instead of the dainty heels and sandals he goes for initially.

Last week he was along for a shopping trip to replenish his summer clothes supply. He picked out a dress and a purse. Today he chose to wear the dress for the first time. When he looked at himself in the mirror, he said that with it and his rainbow face paint (from an event last night) he just needed long hair to look like a girl—which is what he wanted.

I happened to be the special guest presenter (storytime) at his preschool today. We warned him in advance he might get comments from others and my wife said his teachers were quite surprised when they saw him at drop-off. By the time I got there mid-morning, though, all seemed well.

Gender isn't and doesn't have to be limited to the dichotomous categories society so often tries to require.

Of the quote about the American dream. A couple of years ago I wrote a post--American Heroes Don't Need Magic--about an article comparing children's books from Britain and the U.S. A relevant excerpt from the article:

America is peculiar in its lack of indigenous folklore, Harvard’s Tatar says. Though African slaves brought folktales to Southern plantations, and Native Americans had a long tradition of mythology, little remains today of these rich worlds other than in small collections of Native American stories or the devalued vernacular of Uncle Remus, Uncle Tom, and the slave Jim in Huckleberry Finn.

Popular storytelling in the New World instead tended to celebrate in words and song the larger-than-life exploits of ordinary men and women: Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Calamity Jane, even a mule named Sal on the Erie Canal. Out of bragging contests in logging and mining camps came even greater exaggerations—Tall Tales—about the giant lumberjack Paul Bunyan, the twister-riding cowboy Pecos Bill, and that steel-driving man John Henry, who, born a slave, died with a hammer in his hand. All of these characters embodied the American promise: They earned their fame.

Here's what I wrote about it:

As an American I particularly appreciate the way the article looks at the influence of U.S. folklore. All of our heroes are larger-than-life individuals accomplishing things alone that joint efforts and cooperative societies can't. It's that idea of the American Dream, that through hard work each single person can achieve anything. It's been our narrative from the earliest stories referenced below--Daniel Boone, etc.--to current politics--Donald Trump is going to single-handedly "make America great again." It's the underlying structure of so many of our movies and entertainment offerings. My favorite example, because it came at a formative time for me and from the much romanticized Reagan era, is the movie Die Hard. A lone cowboy type operating alone--the police, FBI, and other formal "heroes" of the system are not only incompetent, they actually get in his way and help the bad guys--is able to overcome overwhelming odds, insurmountable numbers, careful planning, and loads of technology, all through his inherent wits and grit (he's the only one tough enough to run barefoot across broken glass, for instance). The same idea lies behind the narrative catchphrased as "The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."

I think that attitude is clearly at play in what this article calls "the Trump Doctrine."

A Senior White House Official Defines the Trump Doctrine: ‘We’re America, Bitch’

Trumpian chaos is, in fact, undergirded by a comprehensible worldview, a number of experts have insisted. The Brookings Institution scholar (and frequent Atlantic contributor) Thomas Wright argued in a January 2016 essay that Trump’s views are both discernible and explicable. Wright, who published his analysis at a time when most everyone in the foreign-policy establishment considered Trump’s candidacy to be a farce, wrote that Trump loathes the liberal international order and would work against it as president; he wrote that Trump also dislikes America’s military alliances, and would work against them; he argued that Trump believes in his bones that the global economy is unfair to the U.S.; and, finally, he wrote that Trump has an innate sympathy for “authoritarian strongmen.” . . .

The third-best encapsulation of the Trump Doctrine, as outlined by a senior administration official over lunch a few weeks ago, is this: “No Friends, No Enemies.” This official explained that he was not describing a variant of the realpolitik notion that the U.S. has only shifting alliances, not permanent friends. Trump, this official said, doesn’t believe that the U.S. should be part of any alliance at all. “We have to explain to him that countries that have worked with us together in the past expect a level of loyalty from us, but he doesn’t believe that this should factor into the equation,” the official said.

The second-best self-description of the Trump Doctrine I heard was this, from a senior national-security official: “Permanent destabilization creates American advantage.” The official who described this to me said Trump believes that keeping allies and adversaries alike perpetually off-balance necessarily benefits the United States, which is still the most powerful country on Earth. When I noted that America’s adversaries seem far less destabilized by Trump than do America’s allies, this official argued for strategic patience. “They’ll see over time that it doesn’t pay to argue with us.”

The best distillation of the Trump Doctrine I heard, though, came from a senior White House official with direct access to the president and his thinking. I was talking to this person several weeks ago, and I said, by way of introduction, that I thought it might perhaps be too early to discern a definitive Trump Doctrine.

“No,” the official said. “There’s definitely a Trump Doctrine.”

What is it?, I asked. Here is the answer I received:

“The Trump Doctrine is ‘We’re America, Bitch.’ That’s the Trump Doctrine.” . . .

The administration officials, and friends of Trump, I’ve spoken with in recent days believe the opposite: that Trump is rebuilding American power after an eight-year period of willful dissipation. “People criticize [Trump] for being opposed to everything Obama did, but we’re justified in canceling out his policies,” one friend of Trump’s told me. This friend described the Trump Doctrine in the simplest way possible. “There’s the Obama Doctrine, and the ‘Fuck Obama’ Doctrine,” he said. “We’re the ‘Fuck Obama’ Doctrine.”

Hmm. Speaking of toxic masculinity . . .