I read advice columns for the same reason I watch mediocre TV shows. I gain entertainment not only from the stories told, but also from the advice supplied by the columnist and, frequently, the commenters. Plus there's always the opportunity to castigate the TV show or the advice column for how good it could have been.
Before I go into critiquing the NYT's most recent Social Qs, let me just say that the only advice column I can currently take seriously is Captain Awkward. She's a person with no official credentials to tell other people how to live their lives, but she, along with the trenchant commentariat, manages to provide practical, straightforward, explicit, helpful advice to the questioners. Be warned, though; she does use sexist slurs ["bitch" and "dick"], as well as ableist adjectives ["crazy"]. Despite her failings, I approve of her generally open-minded approach.
Now back to my original subject. In the most recent Social Qs, a letter writer says that her daughter's future mother-in-law loves Fifty Shades of Grey, a BDSM romance novel. "As a feminist," the writer dislikes the books and wonders how to respond when the future MIL asks the writer what she thinks of the books.
Philip Galanes, author of Social Qs, advises the following:
Engage your future in-law, mother to mother. Steer clear of judgmental terms like “offensive,” but try to get to the bottom of her excitement. Say: “I’d hate for a man to treat me or my daughter that way. What do you think the big appeal is?” She couldn’t object, and it might start an interesting conversation.
Good advice. When someone asks you your opinion of something controversial with which you disagree, you can neutrally state that you have a different view and, if you're interested, attempt to start a more general discussion and go from there. Of course, you can react in other ways [for example, "I don't really feel comfortable talking about that" is also perfectly acceptable], but this is a polite option.
I agree with the advice, but I resent the snide tone in which it's delivered. Galanes spends one paragraph of four answering the writer's question and the other three making sneery judgments about BDSM. In effect, he undermines his advice to be respectful and tolerant about things you don't know anything about by being derisive and dismissive about a subject with which he is [clearly] unfamiliar. Wow, he's really shoring up his credibility.
Besides an anti-BDSM stance, I also detect some misogyny in Galanes' response. Romance novels are predominantly read by women and, for that reason, are frequently not taken seriously, especially by male critics. Galanes' incredulity that female readers could find romance novel tropes interesting seems to subserve his distaste with Fifty Shades of Grey.
P.S. We're not even getting into the letter writer's assumption that feminism is incompatible with BDSM.
3 Comments
it might start an interesting conversation.
Nearly every time someone has suggested that something I’m not keen to talk about will start an interesting conversation, it usually ends up being a frightfully boring and/or stressful conversation for me, and I’m wondering who exactly is supposed to find the conversation interesting. In this case, I think it’s really only supposed to be interesting for the person who wants to hold forth about their views on BDSM, and not for the person who a) might be exploring a budding interest in BDSM through a popular novel (imperfect though it may be, and hopefully ze will come to figure out the problematic bits in time but that’s another story), b) might not want to disclose their kink status to another person, or c) someone who is kinky and has to have this conversation with oh my god EVERY. SINGLE. PERSON. who is vanilla and has Opinions about kink. For the other person, it might be an interesting conversation. It might also be intensely stressful and offensive, especially since the conversation is with someone they’re about to be co-in-laws with.
(Other languages have words to describe the relationship two sets of in-laws have; English needs to get one quick, or I’m going to start importing the ones from Spanish and Hebrew.)
Ah, I figured out why the phrase “interesting conversation” bugs me so much: it reminds me of people who start off conversations about something very dear and personal to me (race, civil rights, etc), basically just for fun because they like arguing, and there’s a fundamental mismatch in how personal the issue at hand is to us. They think they’re having a friendly sparring match where nobody gets hurt over a neutral, abstract topic, while I’m fighting tooth and nail to defend something that’s a vital part of my identity and my life. I can’t even call it trolling, because trolls are aware that they’re winding you up for the fuck of it; these people actually think we’re having the same kind of conversation.
You know what it’s like? It’s like those arguments Liss wrote about in the Terrible Bargain piece:
These intellectual, clever, engaged men want to endlessly probe my argument for weaknesses, want to wrestle over details, want to argue just for fun—and they wonder, these intellectual, clever, engaged men, why my voice keeps raising and why my face is flushed and why, after an hour of fighting my corner, hot tears burn the corners of my eyes. Why do you have to take this stuff so personally? ask the intellectual, clever, and engaged men, who have never considered that the content of the abstract exercise that’s so much fun for them is the stuff of my life.
I didn’t even think of that. Now I see that this advice is problematic on EVEN MORE levels than I originally saw. Thanks!