MIKAMI MEDITATIONS PT. 3

 The other day I finished reading the last of Takashi Shiina's 1991-99 manga GHOST SWEEPER MIKAMI. The series is very much like several serials by Rumiko Takahashi, whom Shiina considers a symbolic "sensei" (though he never apprenticed under her) -- by which I mean that MIKAMI is a combination of utterly wacky comedy antics and of moments of sentimental insight into the complexities of the human heart. Anything I will write about this shonen series must take into account how Shiina chose to sell his unique heroine to his readers.

When I wrote the first part of MIKAMI MEDITATIONS in early March, I was probably a little over half through the series. I raised the question as to whether the domineering Mikami would ever reveal a deeper "I-thou" relationship to her bumbling assistant Yokoshima, as opposed to just using him as a tool, an "I-it" relationship. I was fairly sure, though, that Shiina meant to tease the readers on the subject for most if not all of the series, much as Takahashi did with the relationship of Ataru to Lum in URUSEI YATSURA. He threw in lots of little moments-- Mikami being jealous whenever Yokoshima received attention from another attractive female, obviously-- but he could have brought the relationship to a close, as Takahashi did with another series that Shiina probably encountered, MAISON IKKOKU. I can now say without doubt that Shiina chose to emulate URUSEI rather than MAISON, but also that all Mikami's protests, in which she claims not to need or want Yokoshima as anything but a tool, prove empty. She's more or less the "Ataru" of the series, managing to confess without confessing, as occured in the final URUSEI manga-tale, BOY MEETS GIRL.

In the first MEDITATIONS, I also wondered if Shiina was building to some big revelation as to what psychological attitudes led Mikami to become so extraordinarily greedy. However, to the very end Shiina kept that set of cards to himself. He does, in the arc "Message from Mother," demonstrate that neither of Mikami's parents knows how this attitude came about, and an even later arc, "GS Mikami '78," provides evidence that greed was not a major feature of either Mikami's mother Michie in her youth, or of her father, whose backstory is for the first time expanded for the reader's delectation. She's like neither of them in that regard, but I don't think Shiina had no opinion on the matter. He just wanted to keep readers guessing, which I'll explore in another post.

Also, though I've not mentioned it here, I was hoping to get at least two mythcomics posts out of the MIKAMI series, since March is "Women's History Month," an event I sometimes like to celebrate-- though often not in a way any ultra-feminist would recognize. And to my immense pleasure, Shiina provided a second concrescent work in this serial-- though it required an earthquake to bring it forth.   

            

I SENPAI AND THOU NAGATORO PT. 2

 By the time of installments 22 and 23-- which I'll give the collective title of "Senpai, Let's Go to the Beach"-- the Naoto-Nagatoro relationship has settled into a rough routine. Naoto tries to remain aloof, and Nagatoro tries to pull him out of his shell. In this project she receives some ambivalent help from her girl-buddies Gamo and Yoshi, who also find Naoto amusing, though they're also entertained by Nagatoro's increasingly evident affection for her "victim."

So the foursome's trek to the beach to escape summer heat begins with the three girls mocking Naoto as usual. 

But being at the beach also highlights some sexual aspects overshadowed at high school, which involve Nagatoro seeking to get her share of "the male gaze" from Naoto.

Despite this exposure to nubile female flesh, Naoto refuses to gambol in the waves with the girls, remaining on shore. However, after a while Nagatoro can't resist ringing his chimes again. And in truth, Naoto hasn't totally distanced himself from the possibility of innocent fun, for Nagatoro soon learns that he's wearing swim trunks despite having claimed no desire to go swimming. 

Up to this point, despite having teased Naoto as an "it" (specifically, a sea louse), she's clearly trying to relate to him as a "thou" (a fellow being who needs to get out of his own way). But Naoto still plays hard to get. Nagatoro wants to apply sunscreen to his pale skin so he'll have no excuse to stay on the beach, and Naoto comes up with the excuse that only "lovers" rub lotion on each other's bodies.

This results in an extraordinary sequence. Since Naoto rejects her "thou" offer, Nagatoro rather easily slips back into "it" mode. Since the young student claims that he doesn't want to get lotion administered via her hands, she squirts some on him and then begins rubbing it in with her foot. Author Nanashi does not stint on showing that Nagatoro is clearly stimulated by making Naoto her footstool, and he doesn't show any desire to resist her rough ministrations. However, when her two friends try to join in, rationality asserts itself, and she tries to make them desist. 

Despite this display of teenage hormones, Naoto is fully slicked down with SPF, and he allows himself to join the girls at their seaside games. And the episode ends with Naoto admitting to himself that he enjoyed the idyll at the beach, even with all the teasing involved. With episode 24, Naoto will begin thinking that he shouldn't let Nagatoro take the initiative in their strange relationship all the time-- which becomes an important trope for the remainder of the series.

I SENPAI AND THOU NAGATORO PT. 1

I AND THOU, first published in 1923 (though it became a college favorite in the 1960s), was written by a philosopher who had renounced the practice of the Rabbinic tradition but nevertheless incorporated that tradition into his philosophy.  I AND THOU, rather than offering a series of reasoned arguments, puts forth a concatenation of incantatory meditations, centered upon Buber’s two schemas of human relationship: the “I-thou” and the “I-it”... Buber calls his two schemas “word pairs.”  By this he meant that even though he was well aware that all three words—“I,” “thou,” and “it”—were independent words, he believed that in terms of human relation it was impossible that any “I” could exist apart from its relationship to other phenomena.  Only two relationships were conceivable to Buber: either one's "I" related to a "thou" or an "it."   Thus he regards his two schemas as “word pairs” that are existentially insoluble. -- PERSONAS OF GRATIFICATION.

I should get some sort of points for originality, for I hypothesize that I'm the only NAGATORO fan who would seek to gloss the appeal of a 21st century Japanese teen humor comic by referencing a 1920s Jewish philosopher. Yet for me, the key to NAGATORO's uniqueness lies in the process by which the character of Naoto, or "Senpai," goes from being an "it" to a "thou" in the eyes of the titular girl-bully.

For many if not all translations, the full title of the manga is PLEASE DON'T BULLY ME, NAGATORO, and I strongly suspect that the commercial translation ditched the word "bully" lest anyone think that the publishers were advocating the practice of bullying, particularly in the context of high-school student interaction. Yet understanding the dynamic of bully and victim is important to seeing how the relationship of the two main characters evolves.

In the first installment of the series proper, the reader knows little about either Naoto or Nagatoro except that he's a bookish-looking second-year high schooler, while she is a mischievous first-year student who's seen doing one athletic feat, doing a kung-fu high kick. But despite being younger than Naoto, Nagatoro instantly assumes a dominant attitude. Not for over a hundred episodes will readers learn what caused Nagatoro to pick on Naoto, whose name she never uses in the entirety of the series. But in the first episodes, the reader is given to understand that "Senpai" is an "it" to the young girl, a subject for inordinate mockery. 

Not much changes in the second installment. Nagatoro, having tormented Naoto so much that he breaks down in tears for the first time in his experience, beards him in the young fellow's lair: a school "art club" of which Naoto is the only active member. On the pretext of apologizing for the previous day, Nagatoro insists on providing the artist with a model, though he expresses no desire for one. Because Naoto has been so cut off from interactions with his peers, he can't draw an attractive female sitting right in front of him, and so she mocks his lack of sexual experience (though technically Nagatoro is no more experienced; she just talks a good game). Naoto breaks up again, and to add to his humiliation, he can't even shield his face because she's able to pry his arms apart.

The third installment, however, shows the first movement away from Nagatoro being in an "I-it" relationship with Naoto. A genuine bully is only too happy to continue treating his or her victim as a thing to suffer torment, and jock-bullies are notorious for believing that it's their privilege to dominate those who are weaker. Nagatoro's jock-credentials will be more firmly established in later stories, but after her third foray against Naoto's ego, she's genuinely surprised that he refuses to get angry at her taunts.

Up to this point, the reader also doesn't know why the young artist is so reserved. He then mentally reflects on all the bullies he's known before, and on how he simply kept his head down and refused to interact. In a sense, all previous bullies were also "its" to Naoto, as signified by the fact that he doesn't even recall the faces of his foes. However, he isn't able to distance himself from Nagatoro-- and because he's too reserved to even show obvious sexual stimulation, my conclusion is that he's fascinated by her being in most ways his utter opposite: extroverted where he's introverted, rash where he's hesitant. (One of his more significant observations later in the series is telling his girl-bully, "Everything's like a dare to you.")

In the rom-com genre there are countless stories in which two people start off in an acrimonious relationship ("I-it") and quickly progress to a mutually supportive one ("I-thou"). There are a smaller number of rom-coms in which it's a given that the contrary natures of the romantic pair will result in continuous off-and-on fights. But something about artist Nanashi's approach seems to suggest an attitude that I think compares with Buber's: the sense that both the "it" impulse and the "thou" impulse are integral to human beings generally, and remain so even when true romance blooms-- as I'll show with one more example from the early years of the series.

 

ADDICTED TO VICTIMAGE PT. 2

The It is the eternal chrysalis, the Thou the eternal butterfly — except that situations do not always follow one another in clear succession, but often there is a happening profoundly twofold, confusedly entangled.-- Martin Buber, I AND THOU.

You wanted money. Where was it all to come from? You have drained your sisters’ little hoard (all brothers sponge more or less on their sisters). Those fifteen hundred francs of yours (got together, God knows how! in a country where there are more chestnuts than five-franc pieces) will slip away like soldiers after pillage. And, then, what will you do? Shall you begin to work? Work, or what you understand by work at this moment, means, for a man of Poiret’s calibre, an old age in Mamma Vauquer’s lodging-house. There are fifty thousand young men in your position at this moment, all bent as you are on solving one and the same problem—how to acquire a fortune rapidly. You are but a unit in that aggregate. You can guess, therefore, what efforts you must make, how desperate the struggle is. There are not fifty thousand good positions for you; you must fight and devour one another like spiders in a pot. Do you know how a man makes his way here? By brilliant genius or by skilful corruption. You must either cut your way through these masses of men like a cannon ball, or steal among them like a plague. Honesty is nothing to the purpose. Men bow before the power of genius; they hate it, and try to slander it, because genius does not divide the spoil; but if genius persists, they bow before it. To sum it all up in a phrase, if they fail to smother genius in the mud, they fall on their knees and worship it. Corruption is a great power in the world, and talent is scarce. So corruption is the weapon of superfluous mediocrity; you will be made to feel the point of it everywhere.-- Vautrin to Rastignac, Honore de Balzac, PERE GORIOT. 

It's a hard world to get a break in,
All the good things have been taken-- "It's My Life," sung by the Animals. 

Here's yet another of my recycled titles, only loosely connected to this essay from 2015. Instead, I'm expounding further on my negative estimation of Jordan Peele's 2019 horror-film US, reviewed here. I wrote in part:

Even before listening to Peele's ruminations about "privilege" on the DVD, it was pretty evident that Peele wasn't telling a generic horror story in which the main characters just happened to be Black Americans. The Wilsons are clearly being punished for their affluence, while Peele's sympathies lie with the marginalized doppelgangers. Peele's politics... [assert] that everyone who possesses any level of privilege does so at the expense of some other person.

 During his DVD remarks, Peele maunders about the supposed moral underpinnings of his film, though he's absurdly fuzzy about what the moral is. This site transcribed said remarks:

 "One of the central themes in Us is that we can do a good job, collectively, of ignoring the ramifications of privilege," Peele continued. "I think it's the idea that what we feel like we deserve comes, you know, at the expense of someone's else's freedom or joy. And the biggest disservice we can do as a faction with a collective privilege, like the United States, is to presume that we deserve it, and that it isn't luck that has us born where we're born. For us to have our privilege, someone suffers. That's where the tethered connection, I think, resonates the most is that those who suffer and those who prosper are two sides of the same coin. You never forget that and we have to fight for the less fortunate."

This superficial screed speaks to my review-observation that Peele never feels it necessary to explore how the Wilsons became so well-off, or to say much, if anything, about what either Gabe, Adelaide, or both of them do in order to earn their daily bread. The insidious implication is that the Wilsons have wealth merely out of "luck," and that hard work plays absolutely no part in it. Indeed, though the Wilsons are black, by ascending to an upper middle-class position they become functional white people, who implicitly also have their superior wealth out of "luck." I suspect that people who think like this subscribe to an exaggerated idea of how much privilege white people have received as the result of "the good old white guy's network," as if one just signs one's name onto a sheet and starts collecting paychecks.

Though Peele is promoting a simple-minded racial myth, the example of Buber shows how such an opposition can have more profound ramifications. The relationship of "the haves" to "the have nots" would be something Buber would call an "I-it" relationship. Peele is almost certainly implying that the relationship of the Wilsons to their deprived doppelgangers is comparable to the relationship of slave-owners to their slaves. Clearly the Wilsons' ignorance that the doppelgangers even exist is no excuse, in the same way those damn white people can't be excused for not constantly acknowledging that the country was built upon the labor of slaves.

Now, had Peele actually made a film in which someone was "fighting for the less fortunate," one might agree with his ethical stance. However, US does nothing of the kind. It's all about the doppelgangers' violent, largely aimless revolution-- and even though they're faux black people attacking real black people, clearly the Wilsons, by having stuff, represent the status quo. Nothing shows this revolutionary attitude more than the way Peele orchestrates the "accidental" playing of a rap song, "Fuck Tha Police," which repeatedly expresses black anger at, and plans for black violence against, law-enforcement officers who also represent the status quo. I for one fail to see how Peele can claim he's telling people to fight for the less fortunate, and at the same time spotlights characters who want nothing but violent usurpation of persons more fortunate.

"It's a hard world to get a break in,' the Animals sang, but little did they know that it was possible to blame the status quo for how hard it is. Just as Buber is more subtle than Peele regarding the "I-It relationship," Balzac is many times the superior of Peele regarding the dynamics of good fortune. The speaker of the quote above is the sinister, possibly criminal manipulator Vautrin, who attempts, in Mephistophelean fashion, to convince the naive young law student Rastignac to participate in a conspiracy. Balzac does not, in the end, champion Vautrin's "I-it" point of view, and favors rather the "I-thou" interaction of Rastignac and the eternally suffering Father Goriot. Yet the French author constructs Vautrin's argument with a rigorous honesty that Peele may never be able to achieve. There are many other factors beyond "the old boys' network" that can keep some people from good fortune. Rather, it's too much supply and too little demand: Rastignac is just one of a potential fifty thousand young men who seek prosperity, and Vautrin urges him to follow the path of corruption, since obviously the young man is anything but a genius.

Could Peele have made a movie that discussed so-called "white privilege" in more realistic terms, rather than one that simplistically insisted that it was the source of all suffering for people of color--even causing suffering, in an indirect fashion, to those persons of color who actually grab the brass ring of prosperity? I suppose it's possible. But most film critics bend over backwards to accomodate filmmakers who practice Peele's brand of identity politics. So he will probably go on making more movies like US, endlessly wallowing in victimage and the blame game-- and never, ever being having a moment of artistic honesty.

THE CONFEDERACY AND THE DUNCES

Every Thou in the world is by its nature fated to become a thing, or continually re-enter into the condition of things. In objective speech it would be said that every thing in the world, either before or after becoming a thing, is able to appear to an I as its Thou. But objective speech snatches only at a fringe of real life.-- Martin Buber, I AND THOU.

Within the last week New Orleans removed its last Confederate statue, but the anti-Confederacy meme has been brewing at least since the 1990s. Because the Confederacy was based upon the "peculiar institution" of slavery, and because more than a few supporters of the southern states declared their absolute allegiance to that institution, many modern Americans have come to view any sympathy for the Confederacy as a similar allegiance to any and all forms of racism. Thus any modern displays of sympathy for the losing side of the American Civil War have been broadly interpreted as advocacy of racism. This might be logical if Rebel flags were largely being flown by members of the Klan or similar societies. However, the assumption of racism has become so endemic that it's caused retroactive condemnation of old TV shows like THE DUKES OF HAZZARD, simply for displaying the flag as a decoration on the car. Twice on the 2009-2013 animated TV show THE CLEVELAND SHOW, the title character was shown gaining minor victories over entrenched Confederate sympathies in the fictional city of Stoolbend, Virginia (allegedly patterned upon Richmond). Even though Cleveland was generally characterized as a fool, in this respect he was shown to be entirely justified in challenging this status quo. The scripts for both shows endorsed the idea that modern-day Confederate sympathies connoted modern-day anti-black prejudice.

If I were a black person, I suppose I too might take at face value all statements of historical Rebels, and thus conclude the principal question of the American Civil War was whether or not black people were foreordained by God to be slaves. But as a white person who may know a bit more about the way white people think than a lot of non-whites, I'd say that the Civil War was predominantly a war between two groups of white people, and the fate of black slaves was simply the "bone" over which the two dogs were fighting.

One can find innumerable justifications for slavery. often religious in nature, in the records of Confederacy advocates. But the primary justification, since slavery became an American institution around 1620, was economic. In addition to the perks of free labor for landowners, the 3/5 compromise of 1783 ensured that even a partial count of the slaves in southern states would result in a greater allotment of delegates in the federal government. While many reformers objected to slavery on moral grounds, it seems likely to me that the Republican legislators who introduced the ban on slavery in U.S. territories were more concerned with breaking the hold that Southerners had on the government. (Notably, seven presidents prior to the Civil War were born in the above-mentioned Virginia.) The fact that the northern states had few if any laws against slavery suggests that had it been economically advantageous for those states to harbor as many slaves as the south did, there might never have been a Civil War at all.

In another essay I applied Buber's above remarks to the "peculiar institution," noting that:

It would seem obvious to me that the real-world injustice of slavery is all about what Buber calls the "I-it" relationship, of an "I" (the slaver or slaveholder) reducing a sentient being (the slave) to the status of an object.

And yet, in the above quote Buber stipulates that every Thou is fated to "continually enter into the condition of things." Human beings have been enslaving other human beings for centuries, and while not all institutions of slavery are equally motivated by profit, it would be naive to assume no economic advantage, particularly in the case of African slaves. One online writer, whom I've not been able to locate again, remarked that sub-Saharan Africa was virtually a "one-stop shopping" for the slave trade. For whatever reason, black people were one of the favorite targets of the Arab slavers since the ninth century. African slaves were commonly employed throughout the Middle East and were even traded as far abroad as China.

The fact that "everybody did it" doesn't make it right, of course, and the making of people into things, no matter who does it-- is fundamentally immoral. However, it is also very nearly inevitable, given the tendency of human beings to judge the morality of their ingroups in terms of self-interest; and to efface the fact that said ingroups have usually attained their position by debasing or marginalizing other peoples. American Southerners were indubitably dishonest about not admitting that they wanted slaves because slaves were profitable. But I don't think that they were dishonest in interpreting the Civil War in terms of a battle between the interests of two groups of white people. This interpretation became encoded in culture and literature as the "brother against brother" trope, and this had made it possible for the re-united culture to tolerate the honoring of war heroes of the Confederacy, even in some northern states.

In modern times, however, Confederate monuments, and any and all paraphernalia associated with honoring the famed "Lost Cause" (Rebel flags, names on public schools) are charged with sending the wrong message. The mayor of New Orleans endorsed this interpretation, stating categorically that Civil War monuments contributed to the city's "exclusionary attitudes." He further stated that "now is the time to take stock of, and then move past, a painful part of our history."

Many defenses of the monuments assert that they want to see history preserved. This is not precisely my defense, for I'm quite aware that monuments and paraphernalia for any cause cannot present a sophisticated view of history. In my opinion the main reason that the descendants of the Confederacy insurrection want the monuments is one of ego-gratification. I can't say that none of them have any desire to use Southern memorabilia as a means, say, to rally against the supposed evils of multiculturalism. But I find it unlikely that all of them do, and to those that simply want the pleasant illusion of the "brother vs. brother" theme, the insistence that Black Americans' feelings should be honored above their own is not likely to lead to greater collegiality. Indeed, I suspect that these sort of demands only foster more "exclusionary attitudes," rather than supporting the cause of diversity.

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, "Our ancestors pay the price for who we are." If there are any people on this planet who possess absolutely no interest in validating their ancestors, I'm not aware of them, and I don't agree with the mayor that a given ingroup can simply "move past" their history. Ideally the ingroup should be cognizant of the ways in which their ancestors debased or marginalized other peoples, but the idea of defining any ingroup's heritage purely in terms of those acts is mere rhetoric that springs only from-- guess what-- self-interest. I suppose it might be empowering for Black Americans to imagine White Southerners going around, for the rest of their lives, wearing sackcloth and ashes for the sins of their ancestors.

But it's not going to happen. And any rhetoric that seeks that end is also-- a Lost Cause.

THOU ART THE WONDER WOMAN

Black people aren't too fond of bondage. We think that it's redundant.-- Anthony from DESIGNING WOMEN episode "Of Human Bondage."

After writing this essay and making a couple of posts on HU like this one, I quickly gave up debating the foam-mouthed Mr. Berlatsky on the subject of Marston's racism, so I have no idea what if any reply he made after my final post there. I think I can predict that it will fail utterly to address any of the points I brought up: as I've mentioned before, Bertlatsky and his fellow travelers can weave sprawling tapestries of victimization but they pay little or no attention to the details.Thus most if not all of them are thoroughly incapable of answering arguments on a point-by-point basis.

In the course of writing the aforesaid essay, I came across a year-old post from the still active Tumblr site HONORING THE ECCENTRIC DR, WILLIAM MOULTON MARSTON, posted by one "FyeahWilliamMoultonMarston." Fyeah, as I'll call him for short, was more liberal than Berlatsky in providing context for the Wonder Woman story that the latter excoriated in his usual hyperbolic style, without making any sort of apologies for the racist content of Marston's story. Only once did I disagree with Fyeah's argument, at this point:

All that being said, there are some things to appreciate in this issue. Marston’s chain and slavery kinks are still around in spite of the horrendously inappropriate setting, and they give us this bondage gem:

The obvious question comes to mind: Why is it "horrendously inappropriate" for Marston to bring his "chain and slavery kinks" into this setting? Fyeah does not enlarge upon this train of thought, but I have to assume the train departs from the station known as "the Great White Guilt." The poster obviously is not knocking the idea of Marston's "chain and slavery kinks" in themselves, if the other posts on the blog are any indication. The kinks are only objectionable in any context involving Black Africans and, presumably, their descendants in other lands as well. Hence, I surmise that while it would be OK with Fyeah if Wonder Woman asked for her dog collar in any setting that didn't involve Black Africans, even this largely non-serious reference to slave-tropes immediately activates the appropriate taboo of the Great White Guilt. Like the "Designing Women" character quoted above, one cannot imagine said tropes without calling to mind the real-life torments of Black African slaves and their descendants.

Though I don't believe in a form of guilt that has a color, I have encountered any number of online pundits, including Noah Berlatsky, who advocate White Guilt as a response to just about any depiction of Blacks by Whites. Possibly they believe that promoting such a race-specific taboo can be used to curb the excesses of Evil White Culture. Further, some such pundits try to promote the notion that no one but White People bore any responsibility for the organized slave trade, like this online essay,  which argues that the only times in which blacks sold blacks to whites came about because of some base deception. If so then it was a really long-term deception. This Wiki-essay asserts that "Historians John Thornton and Linda Heywood have provided an estimate that Africans captured and then sold to Europeans around 90% of those who were shipped in the Atlantic slave trade."

So, if it's true that Black Africans were somewhat less than starry-eyed innocents with regard to profiting from the Trans-Saharan slave trade, it's not clear what is "inappropriate" about mentioning chains and slavery in connection with a group of (completely fictional) Black Africans-- unless one believes in guilt that only comes in one color.

None of this exculpates the genuinely racist aspects of Marston's story. But the story has nothing to do with slavery-tropes relating to real-world injustice, and everything to do with tropes rooted in psychological mythology.

In my 2010 essay SLASHIN' MARX, I cited this quote from Martin Buber:

Every Thou in the world is by its nature fated to become a thing, or continually re-enter into the condition of things. In objective speech it would be said that every thing in the world, either before or after becoming a thing, is able to appear to an I as its Thou. But objective speech snatches only at a fringe of real life.

It would seem obvious to me that the real-world injustice of slavery is all about what Buber calls the "I-it" relationship, of an "I" (the slaver or slaveholder) reducing a sentient being (the slave) to the status of an object.

Now, does Marston make his fictional Africans into objects? Yes, he does-- but only in terms of resorting to stereotypical depictions, like having the tribesmen being subject to "voodoo" superstitions. If Wonder Woman really did engage in bondage-play with the African tribesmen, it would be to both restrain them and to liberate them, as I wrote here:

Bondage itself is a sexual practice which has nothing to do with actual sex as such.  Without eliding the "bodily" aspects of bondage, it should be evident that Marston, through his frequent emphases on the subject of "will," was aware that bondage also pertained to the "nonbody" aspect of the human entity, as bondage is paradoxically a restraint and a liberation of the will. 

In other words, in Marston's cosmology, to bind and otherwise overcome someone is to bring them into the circle of Amazon "loving-kindness,"which, as I read Buber, is the same as making the someone as a "thou." To be sure, Marston doesn't extend this privilege to the tribesmen; from the sections I've read, it would seem that he depicted them as simple savages who needed to be brought back into the protective aegis of European/American authority. But to follow the implications of the "chains and slavery kink" as Fyeah experessed them, she would have been honoring the tribesmen as "thous" had she bound them, or even transported them to Transformation Island, because in Marston's world this would have been tantamount to bringing them into the sphere of loving-kindness.

In closing I'll point out that unlike Berlatsky, I'm not excoriating Marston because he didn't follow my ideal imaginary scenario. In a practical sense, I can't imagine DC Comics publishing scenes of their foremost female franchise wrestling in quasi-erotic fashion with one or more black guys. So in that practical sense, I know-- as NB did not-- that it would have been unfair to critique Marston for not being as revolutionary as NB thought he ought to be. Marston should be critiqued for what he actually wrote, not for what he failed to write.

BREASTS, BLOOD AND JUSTICE PT. 2

Now, if the object of the humor was actually MacFarlane and his penchant for ribald attack humor, a simple 15-second cutaway—much like those on Family Guy—would have gotten across the point…and the humor. But no, it goes on for nearly two minutes—the point is to name and shame, say the word boobs and turn actresses into dehumanized objects yet again. I have a dream that someday women will be judged by the content of their character and not the content of their Maidenforms, but that day has not come for MacFarlane.-- Heidi MacDonald, "Why Seth MacFarlane is Not a Great Satirist."

I won't repeat my arguments against MacDonald and others who advocate her type of feminism, which I covered at length here  and here.  I will call attention to one phrase MacDonald used that has some irony now, when she claims that all MacFarlane had to do was to say the word "boobs" and that this would turn "actresses into dehumanized objects."

This trite assertion becomes ironic in light of the evolutionary theories outlined in JUG BOND.  Purely from the standpoint of distinguishing homo sapiens from all other animals, the genetic arrangement of adipose fat tissue within the female's breasts and buttocks is extraordinarily "humanizing." One can contrast the organs of a male human being with those of other male animals, but no one will find any single organic feature that compares in distinctiveness with the female breast. Further, the role of the breast has been that of promoting the human pair-bond, whether one wishes to conceive of that bond as having its roots in sexual deception or oxytocin-produced ecstasy.

Some feminist thinkers, however, do not take into account the role of the female tit in its evolutionary character; its ability both to encourage and to discourage sexual congress. For them the exposure of a boob is simply a means to make the (usually living) female to whom it is attached to an "it" rather than a "thou," to reference the terminology of Buber, discussed here.

I began the first part of this essay-series by noting that it was understandable that female viewers of an exploitation film-- such as 1993's ANGELFIST-- should experience a cognitive dissonance when seeing a female action-hero simultaneously fighting off nasty thugs but also exposing her tits to the implied male viewer of the movie. I understand the attitude so expressed, which I deem to be produced, at least in part, by a tendency for women to advocate societal modesty. It's a tendency that might prove to be universal-- or nearly so-- in human cultures in every time and clime, at least in comparison with a male tendency toward raunchiness and rule-breaking. But though the attitude is important for the maintenance of society in the real world, I still find it to be grossly out of place when assessing fictional constructs.

Though there are some heroic characters in fiction who may escape the limitation of being either "male" or "female"-- "Rebis" of Grant Morrison's DOOM PATROL is literally a transgendered being-- the great majority of heroes can be fairly defined as either male or female. In Part 1 of BBAJ, I demonstrated the prevalence of the "mostly unclothed hero" in a wide number of narratives starring male heroes, and observed that a lack of clothing did not carry the same taboo for males that it did for comparable female characters.

Nevertheless, because both male and female characters are fictional, one cannot accurately speak of either one being reduced to "dehumanized objects" simply by the lack of apparel. Fictional characters are objects only in comparison with living human beings. The most one can say is that in society some characters create more of an impression of being "it-objects," while others create more of an impression of being "thou-objects"-- though such judgments will always be rooted in the vagaries of taste.

But in terms of pure logic, there is no reason to assume that a female character's lack of clothing is any more "dehumanizing" than a man's. Characters like Tarzan and Hercules are seen as figures of power precisely because they can defy the norms of society, very nearly walking around in their birthday suits.  So it is within the bounds of possibility that one may view disrobed female characters in the same way.  Rather than seeing them as commodities divested of clothing to please male viewers, it's possible to see them as beings whose bodies are so awe-inspiring that the open display of those bodies gives them a godlike formidability.

One cannot decisively prove, of course, that male viewers view Lara Croft more as a figure of awe than as a dehumanized object. But the converse cannot be proven either; it's merely an assumption that has deeper roots in political ideology than in literary analysis. To neutralize either heroes and heroines of their sexual assets puts a new spin on the notion of "men without chests."

PERSONAS OF GRATIFICATION

Some time back I reread Saul Bellow’s rambling, kvetch-happy novel HERZOG.  Though I liked it, the book no longer seemed as profound to me as it did when I was in college.  Its titular protagonist makes various pronouncements on major philosophers like Nietzsche and Buber; pronouncements I now find muddled and meretricious.  Bellow gives Herzog a particular animus toward Buber but doesn’t adequately explain it.  The closest I can come is that Bellow, speaking through his protagonist, seems to think that Buber’s conception of the “I-it” relationship—on which I descanted in this essay —was some sort of license for any “I” to dick over anyone that person chose to regard as an “it.”

So I gave Buber’s I AND THOU a re-read.  I’d read it in college as well, but didn’t remember much about it beyond a basic favorable impression.  I AND THOU, first published in 1923 (though it became a college favorite in the 1960s), was written by a philosopher who had renounced the practice of the Rabbinic tradition but nevertheless incorporated that tradition into his philosophy.  I AND THOU, rather than offering a series of reasoned arguments, puts forth a concatenation of incantatory meditations, centered upon Buber’s two schemas of human relationship: the “I-thou” and the “I-it.” I found nothing in I AND THOU to substantiate Bellow’s weird take on Buber’s work. 

Technically, the word Buber uses in the original German is closer to the informal pronoun “you” than the more formal “thou."  However, the translator who used “thou” showed good marketing sense, for I AND THOU is certainly a more memorable title than the alternative.

Buber calls his two schemas “word pairs.”  By this he meant that even though he was well aware that all three words—“I,” “thou,” and “it”—were independent words, he believed that in terms of human relation it was impossible that any “I” could exist apart from its relationship to other phenomena.  Only two relationships were conceivable to Buber: either one's "I" related to a "thou" or an "it."   Thus he regards his two schemas as “word pairs” that are existentially insoluble.

It's occured to me that the four combinations of persona-types which I introduced here-- combinations I called "scenarios" and "metaphors" in Part 2-- are also "word pairs," in that I took the four proposed terms for the dominant personas-- "hero," "villain," "monster," and "victim"-- and combined each of them into symbols of the four Fryean mythoi.  I revised the application of these "persona-pairs" in Part 3, but the logic of the argument remained unchanged, as I did when I changed the term "victim" into the neologism "demihero" here.

Though I didn't say so in these 3 parts, the foundation of my argument about the "persona-pairs" is inseparable from the famous literary analysis of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, explored here.  To repeat a section therefrom:

the British literary critic Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch attempted to set down patterns as to what variety of entities or forces a story's protagonist might contend against. Quiller-Couch listes seven basic types of conflict, but many (including myself) tend to pare them down to less. My chosen four are as follows:

Man vs. Man
Man vs. Nature
Man vs. Society
Man vs. Himself

My "persona-pairs" can be adjusted to parallel any of these four oppositions.  Some permutation of Quiller-Couch's types of conflict is necessary to bring about a literary effect, whether one subscribes to Aristotle's idea of "complication/resolution,"  Frank Cioffi's concept of the anomaly, or Todorov's notion of equilibria.

The great failing of Quiller-Couch's breakdown is that its arrangement suggests that the "man" in the position of "protagonist" must be the main concern of the story, whereas I've detailed many examples in which the imaginative center can be the protagonist's villainous/monstrous opponent, whether it's a specific human threat (Fu Manchu), a natural phenomenon (Jules Verne's "Center of the Earth"), an unusual society, or a separate manifestation of one's own, as with Edward Hyde.  

SLASHIN' MARX

Assume man to be man and his relationship to the world to be a human one: then you can exchange love only for love, trust for trust, etc. If you want to enjoy art, you must be an artistically cultivated person; if you want to exercise influence over other people, you must be a person with a stimulating and encouraging effect on other people. Every one of your relations to man and to nature must be a specific expression, corresponding to the object of your will, of your real individual life. If you love without evoking love in return – that is, if your loving as loving does not produce reciprocal love; if through a living expression of yourself as a loving person you do not make yourself a beloved one, then your love is impotent – a misfortune.

I've already taken one Wolverine-sized chunk out of Brother Karl Marx in this post. Here's my second swipe, courtesy of Martin Buber and his conception of the two fundamental human relations: the "I-it" relation and the "I-thou" relation.

Every Thou in the world is by its nature fated to become a thing, or continually re-enter into the condition of things. In objective speech it would be said that every thing in the world, either before or after becoming a thing, is able to appear to an I as its Thou. But objective speech snatches only at a fringe of real life.

The It is the eternal chrysalis, the Thou the eternal butterfly — except that situations do not always follow one another in clear succession, but often there is a happening profoundly twofold, confusedly entangled.

I'm not nearly as much a Buberphile as I am a Cassirerphile, and I depart from Buber on an assortment of philosophical positions. Still, the above passage from I AND THOU strikes me as a cogent summation of the impossibility of altering human relations so that they are purely a matter of "love for love, trust for trust." I regard Marx's assertion as one grounded in naive idealism as to the nature of human relations. Further, even if human culture could be transformed so that all or even most people related to their fellow humans with Marx's "specific expression," I believe that it would take a lot more than a new economic system to effect such a transformation.

Buber's quote is the more profound of the two, for he admits that it's inevitable that humans will downgrade everything in their compass to the status of things. I believe that Marx and Buber would agree that every "I" possesses what Marx terms "a real individual life," but Marx does not perceive the fundamental dynamic that changes the "thou" to the "it." Rather, he implies in the passage above that to downgrade an item to the status of an "it" runs contrary to the nature of humanity. The "human relation" he describes above is a "Thou" relationship alone. What Buber would term the "it" relationship would therefore be in Marx less than fundamental, perhaps a manifestation of inhuman factors like "market forces" and "commodification," two of the ruling devils in Marx's Pandaemonium.

In the real world human interactions are not determined soley a matter of a given person's "specific expression" of his "real individual life" to another person. In terms of societal function it may be true that no man is an island, but experientially every man (and woman) must be so. Things like love and art break down the barriers between one human and another to some extent, but they can just as easily build up different barriers. Love can certainly go from chrysalis to butterfly and then back to chrysalis. That's why we have divorce lawyers. In the above passage Marx speaks of art as if one's experience of it were a one-way street navigable only once one has become an "artistically cultivated person." In truth "I" find in art what "I" seek or need to find. "I" cannot find it for "Thou," only for "I." "I" can appreciate intellectually that others have different priorities, but as that is merely an intellectual understanding, to some extent that appreciation is also an "I-it" relationship.

Relationships between artists of similar dispositions are not even capable of bridging the gap between "I" and "Thou." First comes what Herman Melville termed the "shock of recognition," as one recognizes that another cognitive being shares some of the same goals that "I" do. But after the shock wears off, one usually gets in its place "the anxiety of influence," as "I" recognize that the apparent "Thou" has separate thoughts or desires that may well reduce the "Thou" to an "It"-- which, if I recall correctly, was what basically happened with Melville and the fellow who inspired his recognition-shock, Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Nine times out of ten, when I hear a Marxist rail against the evils of commodification or the culture industry, what he's railing against has nothing to do with evils arising demonstrably from economic causes. What the Marxist rails against is the perception that he's not finding what his "I" wants in all the "Its" out there in, say, popular culture. But it's possible that in many cases the butterflies are really there, hidden in chrysali, and that your Marxist has stuffed his head so full of economics that he doesn't know from basic biology.