Critiques of the Radical Left on Gay Marriage

For days now I’ve considered posting to Facebook: “Since the Obergefell decision came down, my Facebook feed has been filled with more critiques of gay marriage from the radical left than from the right. And I have to say: critiques from the left are just as personally hurtful and shaming as those from the right.”

But I’m hesitant to post this because I know I’ll get more critiques of gay marriage, only this time they’ll be on my wall instead of in my feed.

But I can’t keep this in any longer, so, here’s my rant against the radical leftist critiques of gay marriage.

There is a profound privilege that comes with the left saying “marriage is the wrong objective.” First, let’s be clear: marriage has never been the ONLY objective, as a lot of radicals seem to think. There’s a concern that the LGBT movement will stop now that we’ve won marriage rights, and we’ll forget about workplace and housing discrimination, about violence against members (especially transgender members) of our community. I seriously doubt that HRC and NCLR and others are going to close up shop and go home now. Certainly grassroots movements won't stop fighting these battles. We all know there’s more work to be done. That doesn’t mean we can’t celebrate this victory.

Indeed, forgetting to celebrate our victories along the way is a big problem. Among other things, it makes us feel like we never win, if we can’t stop and smell the roses when we do. It feeds cynicism, which feeds inaction. So, I actually think not celebrating gay marriage has the potential to stop political movements more than celebrating it.

But here’s another reason leftists critiques are privileged: they forget that for a lot of people, the benefits of marriage are essential for hospital visitation, for adoption rights, for their financial situation. There are countless stories of people who saw spouses through terminal illnesses, giving up their job to do so, and had no money at the end of expensive medical treatments, no job prospects, and, without gay marriage, no survivor’s benefits. Edie Windsor was vaguely in this situation, only she had plenty of money so she didn’t NEED survivor’s benefits. That’s partly why she was a plaintiff—she was rich and eloquent. But she spoke on behalf of plenty of people who aren’t those things, and for whom marriage rights come with necessary financial relief. Failure to recognize this material reality of marriage rights is ironic, considering how many radical leftists are hyper-aware of class issues.

Leftist critiques often land on this: marriage is a problematic institution and we shouldn’t join it. Well, if you want to undo marriage, start a political movement to do that. I haven’t really heard of any organizations doing this—although I suspect now there might be right-leaning organizations trying to do exactly this. But, problematic as civil marriage might be, as long as it exists, we should want it to be available to everyone.

A lot of straight left radicals say that marriage was the wrong objective for gays—and god does this one gall me. Who are you to tell us what we should want? The right does that enough, thank you. The vast majority of gays want the option to marry—even if they themselves don’t want to marry. Get off your high horse and support what our movement has overwhelmingly said we want.

And finally, the personal . . . I wrote about this a bit in my novel Barring Complications, but marriage is profoundly personal. It inflicts tiny wounds to a person’s sense of self to have their relationship disparaged, whether from the right or the left. It’s incredibly frustrating that on a day when I wanted to celebrate, when I cried a lot more than I ever expected to because I suddenly felt more like a full citizen in my own country, I had to read from so many of my friends that this was nothing to celebrate, that there was better work to be done elsewhere, that gay marriage was not an appropriate achievement to be happy for. Well, gay marriage isn’t just an abstract political agenda; it’s my life. I live a gay marriage every day. And I am proud of it. I fought for it, and so did a lot of other people. We fought against the right shaming us—we don’t need to the left shaming us, too.

Okay. I feel a little bit better, having said all this. Now I'm going to look at more gifs of Ruth Bader Ginsburg on unicorns with rainbows. Happy Pride, everyone!

Emily Thorne’s Inner Ninja—and yours, too!

I’m almost embarrassed to admit how long ago a friend of mine recommended I watch Revenge—because it was pretty much yesterday and I just finished watching the last episode of the series. I’m truly skilled at binge watching. Suffice it to say, I devoured the series, which was a compelling combination of action-packed and soapy.

Reflecting on why Emily Thorne is such a fascinating character, I’ve landed on this: what woman doesn’t want to be fully embraced by her inner circle as both sophisticated 1%-er and bad-ass ninja? I completely want her wardrobe—both the couture and jewelry, and the hoodies and boots. Every woman has an inner ninja, a side of ourselves that we will bust out with ferocity if properly inspired to do so. But it’s a side of women we seldom get to see on television.

Along those lines, we don’t see a lot of anti-heroes that are women. We’ve got Dexter and Frank Underwood, and other male anti-heroes. So it’s delightful to encounter a female character who breaks the law and does awful things to people, and to root for her every step of the way. It’s also particularly gratifying to hear her say to Margeaux, to Ben, to Nolan, with no hubris whatsoever, that she’s a master at this and no one is going to beat her. It’s a kind of (male) confidence rarely seen in women on television.

And Victoria. What a riveting combination of ruthlessness and relatability. She’s an excellent foil for Emily for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is this: all Victoria wants is children as devoted to her as she is to them, and Emily is nothing if not a devoted daughter. If circumstances were different, they could be exactly what the other needs. But they’re like two magnets that can’t be flipped, doomed to repel each other for all time—for infinity times infinity. 

And so the central relationship in the series is between two women who aren’t mother/daughter, who aren’t lovers or besties, but who are mortal enemies. I’m hard pressed to think of another series that offers this relationship as its primary focus. Women can be just as ruthless as men, Revenge demonstrates, and I for one love it.

Having said all this, I confess I was disappointed in the ending for two reasons. (Spoilers for series finale follow!) First, David didn’t belong in that final showdown between Emily and Victoria—no one did. Their reckoning should have been reserved for the two of them alone. A big part of me wishes they would have killed each other—the series was set up as a Greek tragedy from the beginning, with the body count steadily climbing each season, so ultimately all the major players should have died save one who lives to tell the tale—probably Nolan. David’s presence in that final scene bothers me for another reason: I have a problem with Emily being one of the only characters (Nolan is the other) who doesn’t kill someone—and I mean directly kill, not indirectly like Conrad with Amanda. Reserving her “goodness” by ensuring that she never directly takes a life sets her up as too much of a Madonna/angel, a trope that the series managed to avoid in a lot of other arenas.

The other problem I have with the ending is that this wasn’t a pretty-pretty-princess show, and it shouldn’t have ended with a storybook wedding. I appreciated that the fourth season spent a lot of time on Amanda’s loss—not the loss of her childhood, but the loss of her revenge. Who is she post-revenge? Well, we know what she’s not, and that’s a tired/conventional woman who just wants to sail off into the sunset with her man.

The show had other weaknesses, the first among them being the choice to resurrect, well, almost everyone, but specifically David. Nevertheless, I did enjoy the way the show handled his reunion with his daughter. It wasn’t an overly-sentimentalized cry-fest; it was Amanda yelling at him, and the two of them being separated almost immediately after David figures out she’s his daughter. I had been thinking during Seasons One and Two that Emily had transformed her father into something of a saintly figure, and I love that the show undid that image when David returned to the land of the living.

All in all, a great show and a fun ride for feminist viewers who love watching a sophisticated woman be a ninja.

Revision, revision, revision. And chocolate.

Ylva Publishing asked me to write a post about what I'm working on these days, so I dished about revising a novel, neuroses, and chocolate. Enjoy!

http://www.ylva-publishing.com/blythe-rippon-revising-a-novel-and-how-chocolate-helps/#comment-9947

Gender, Power, and Stella Gibson’s Captivating Sexuality in The Fall

(Note: this post assumes you’ve seen the end of season two.)

There’s so much to say about The Fall that I’ve put three blog posts in one. Happy reading!

Part I: Sexy Stella, stroppy Stella, railing against a world of men.

One thing is certain about Stella Gibson’s brand of femininity, power, and sexuality in The Fall: we haven’t seen it before on television (and very few other places, for that matter). She’s so matter-of-fact in the way she dresses down the men around her who seem not to recognize the subtle misogyny in their comments. She’s so nonchalant about proposing trysts with people she decides she wants. She’s so facile with manipulating power dynamics whenever the situation calls for it.

The show’s strongest moments highlight the parallels between Stella and serial killer Paul Spector, even while those moments also demonstrate the stark contrasts between them. They both know who they want, but Paul’s brand of domination and possession and his methods of transforming women into dolls for his pleasure are a far cry from Stella’s consensual one-night stands with colleagues. They are both mirrors, of a sort, but Paul seeks to reflect his own superiority and Stella reflects back to people their sexist assumptions. They are both single-minded, driven, and controlling, and they both lie when it suits them. The fundamental difference between them, really, is their gender, and the power that gender either gives or takes from them.

Stella’s a fascinating character in large part because everyone—men and women—around her is so fascinated by her. Farrington clearly looks up to her; Reed Smith is drawn to her (more on that later); Annie Brawley feels such a connection with her that she not only takes her advice about the hairband on her wrist, but she seems on instinct to protect Stella’s identity by calling her “a friend” to Paul. Olson and Anderson jump in her bed without hesitation; Detective Martin makes a crack about Stella wanting him all to himself; even Jim Burns, her boss, can’t stop going on about how much he wants her. He shows up drunk at her hotel room and refuses to take no for an answer until she bloodies his nose. One of my favorite lines in the entire series was when, the next day, she compares his behavior to Spector’s, admitting that it’s not the same but nevertheless firmly pointing out: “I was saying no, Jim.” It’s so simple. But it’s so rarely said, and with such clarity: “I was saying no.” The sad fact is, one of the reasons we’re willing to say that Jim’s behavior is different from Paul’s is that Stella had the training and opportunity to fight him off. In Jim’s case, Stella’s strength (physical as well as emotional) is part of the allure, which probably on some level made her safe for him to attack: he had to know he wouldn’t actually succeed in overpowering her. So, we can view his attack as a desperate attempt to feel physically the way he feels emotionally: weak, bereft, and impotent.

The only glimpses we get into Stella’s personal life are essentially bedroom views, considering she lives temporarily in a hotel room and often sleeps in her office. Even when she’s working alone in either location, the specter of her bed haunts the image. The show subtly (and not so subtly) sexualizes her without allowing anyone to judge her. And this is perhaps what makes this show stand out in the universe of cop procedurals (besides the way it humanizes all its female victims): the female lead gets to bang whomever she wants, and no one gets to judge her. When Eastwood tries, she gives one of the best speeches in the show: “Man fucks woman. Subject: man. Verb: fucks. Object: woman. That’s okay. Woman fucks man. Woman: subject. Man: object. That's not so comfortable for you is it?” Eastwood becomes one of my favorite characters in the show when he recognizes Stella’s interest in Anderson, and then just smiles when it’s clear in the final episode that she slept with Anderson the night before. There’s no judgment from Eastwood in that moment—just self-congratulation that he saw it coming.

It seems a lot of lesbians out there have crushes on Stella Gibson. I’ve got to say, though, I’d rather be her than do her. Paul antagonizes her by suggesting during their interview that she’s got as much childhood trauma as he does, but I don’t buy it. Nevertheless, she remains the more mysterious character, and I hope she stays that way if The Fall gets a season three.

Part II: Paul, Raskolnikov, and god

Cop procedurals can be awfully predictable (which is why I don’t watch the episodic ones—the only two I’ve ever invested in are The Killing and The Fall). So when Jim Burns suggests that maybe Paul had been sexually molested as a child, I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. But I ended up liking where they took that storyline about the pedophilic priest. I believe Paul when he says to Stella that the priest in question never touched him. Still, this little addition of the pedophilic priest provides a brilliant source for Pauls’ god complex; he spent formative years of his life watching an egomaniacal man of the cloth molest little boys. The scene between the priest and Burns mirrors in many ways the interview between Paul and Stella; neither perpetrator demonstrated an iota of guilt, but both waxed philosophical about living beyond a mortal life. The priest rambles about doing god’s work on earth, and Paul babbles some nonsense about his senses being heightened during his kills, and it’s all very reminiscent of Dostoevsky.

In Crime and Punishment, Rodion Raskolnikov essentially wants to assume a higher status than ordinary men—he wants to become Nietzsche’s Übermench, and he believes he can achieve this superman status by killing an old woman. Guilt eventually overcomes him, as does his disappointment at not feeling manifestly different—not feeling his greatness—and he confesses and is sentenced to Siberia for his crimes.

Paul (who, naturally, has read his Nietzsche) believes himself superior to ordinary men (and women—of course, and always, women), and therefore not responsible to the laws of man. The reverence with which he speaks of his crimes demonstrates this superiority. So does his bizarre behavior when his actual superiors (at least as far as his employment is concerned) question him about visiting Liz at home. His parroting, or mirroring, shows his continued contempt for the guidelines by which society has agreed to conduct itself.

Assuming Paul, and the series, survive for a third season, it seems unlikely that he will experience the guilt that undoes Raskolnikov. What’s more interesting to me is the degree to which he might have created another monster in his own image. Katie already shows signs of separating herself from society. The slick ease with which she tells her best friend that the man she’s obsessed with has murdered multiple women, the breaking and entering, and the refusal to abandon the fictitious alibies she’s trying to give Paul—these behaviors look like precursors to another ordinary person seeking to transcend ordinary life through violence. Raskolnikov was saved through faith and love. Paul has no faith, and his love for his daughter couldn’t save him. Where does this leave Katie?

Part III: Paradise Lost (or, why are we quoting Milton in our episode titles?)

That ending. Of course any post about The Fall through the end of Season Two would be remiss if it didn’t delve into that troubling yet oh-so-understandable moment where Stella watches two men handcuffed to each other get shot: her one-time lover and the man she has obsessively hunted for the past however long. She runs to Paul, not Anderson. She struggles to stop his bleeding and cries out desperately, “we’re losing him.”

The easy interpretation here is that Stella does feel, as Anderson suggested that very morning, some kind of attraction to Paul. This knee-jerk response is born, I imagine, from the tired yet seemingly inescapable trope of sexually or romantically uniting the female and male leads in every story, and this response oversimplifies the connection between detective and murderer. She clearly has much more invested in Paul than the recipient of her latest invitation for a “sweet night.” Viewing the connection between Gibson and Spector as sexual or romantic conveys a limited view of the ways in which people can connect. Stella's undeniable fascination with Paul has its foundation in horror; to the extent that we might consider Paul similarly obsessed, his preoccupation derives from self-preservation and his sadistic desires toward all women. Point being: they’ve both voyeuristically invaded each other's privacy, and expended massive amounts of mental and emotional energy imagining the other. The fundamental difference is: the origins and endgames of these fascinations are starkly different.

Watching Stella manage the many team meetings about the killer, I'm surprised no one (particularly Burns) mentions to her that she speaks of him with a kind of awe that might make listeners uncomfortable. The trope of the obsessed cop works here in part because, given the universe of possible suspects (any fit man in his 30s in Balfast), the only path to success must be navigated with a willingness to try to get into the head of the murderer, to understand what drives and sustains him. So of course Stella is drawn to Paul—she’s been steadily drawing closer and closer to him throughout the entire time we’ve known her, given that her objective has been his capture. So, Stella runs to Paul. And let’s also note that I am referring to him as Paul, and I can’t even remember Anderson’s first name.

Also, let’s not sugarcoat this particular parallel between Stella and Paul: this is her crime scene, and she wants it the way she wants it. Just as Paul worked to perfect his crime scene with Sarah Kay’s murder.

There are so many threads that a potential Season Three can pursue—do Rose, Paul, and Anderson survive? How freaky does Katie become? What happens with Jim’s career? How does Sally cope with the fallout of having a serial killer for a husband? Assuming Paul survives, what does his trial look like? But, I suspect the thread viewers are anticipating most involves this final moment of Season Two, and the interactions between Stella and Paul. This anticipation speaks to broader problems about internalized patriarchy. Why is the question whether Stella is fascinated with Paul, not whether Paul is fascinated with Stella? Why must we always link female characters with desire for men? I also think that there’s a specter of wanting to see a strong woman taken down a peg in everyone’s fascination with this moment. Steely Stella has emotions after all, see? But no—the only person in the show suffering from that kind of obsession with Paul is Katie, and Katie alone. 

There’s so much more I want to say about this show. I could devote an entire blog post about the name Spector—what haunts, here? What lurks behind Paul, Stella, Burns, Smith, etc.? What ghosts Paul’s horrific actions, and Stella’s single-minded focus on finding justice for these four women, and Katie’s schoolgirl crush, and Jim’s inability to let go of his desire for Stella? How do these characters shadow each other? How does the “world of men” Stella rails against menace all women and implicate all men?

I also think I’ll spend an entire blog post on Reed Smith. Look for that one next. J